Member of a National Spiritual Assembly

A National Spiritual Assembly is the nine member elected body governing the Baha'i community of an entire country, or in some cases a group of countries. It is elected annually by delegates, who are themselves chosen by the believers at regional conventions, so the national body is elected indirectly while the local ones are elected directly.

Its work is national in scale: coordinating the community across the country, administering national funds and properties, publishing, and representing the community to government, media and other religious bodies. Where a national Baha'i community has legal standing it is generally the Assembly that holds it.

Like every Baha'i administrative body it has no president or chairperson with authority outside its own consultative decisions, and it acts only as a body of nine. The first National Spiritual Assemblies were formed in the 1920s and 1930s, in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India and Egypt, as communities outside Iran grew large enough to need national coordination. They now exist in most countries of the world, and their formation in a country is a standard measure of a national Baha'i community's development.

The indirect method exists for a practical reason. A national community may be spread across a country too large for every believer to gather, so the electoral units send representatives instead, and the number of delegates a country returns is set by the Universal House of Justice in proportion to the size of its community. The principle of an election without nomination or campaigning is carried through unchanged at every level.

The National Assemblies have a second function that gives the whole structure its shape. Every five years each of them sends its full membership as delegates to the International Convention in Haifa, which elects the Universal House of Justice.

That makes the chain of authority continuous and traceable. A believer votes for delegates; the delegates elect a National Assembly; the National Assembly's members vote for the Universal House of Justice. Every level is elected, no level is appointed, and the highest institution in the Faith is reachable from an individual believer's ballot in three steps. Baha'i writing treats this as one of the distinguishing features of its administrative order, and it is the counterpart to the appointed arm of Counsellors and Auxiliary Board members, which runs the other way and holds no governing power.

The arrangement depends on National Assemblies being able to exist and to function, which has not been possible everywhere. In Iran, the Faith's country of origin, Baha'i administration was suppressed and the national institutions were disbanded, and the community there has been without them for decades. Recording that is part of describing the office honestly: a structure that assumes an elected national body in every country describes an aspiration as well as a practice.