The work is largely what a parish council and a registrar would divide between them elsewhere, carried out by a body with no clergy to defer to. A Local Spiritual Assembly administers Baha'i marriage in its area, arranges burial according to Baha'i law, organises the observance of the holy days and the Nineteen Day Feast, receives contributions to the fund, and deals with whatever the community brings to it.
Decisions are reached by consultation among the nine. There is no chair with independent authority, no casting vote of the kind that lets one member decide, and no member who can act for the Assembly alone. An Assembly speaks and acts only as a body, which means it does not exist between its meetings in the way an office with a permanent official does.
The absence of clergy is what makes the arrangement distinctive rather than merely congregational. In most religious communities of comparable size a trained professional carries the ritual and pastoral functions and a lay body handles the money and the building. Here there is no such person: nine people elected annually from the community, without training for the role and without seeking it, carry the whole of it. Peter Smith's reference work on the Faith describes both the procedure and the reasoning behind it.