Continental Counsellor

The Continental Counsellors exist because a previous office could not be refilled. When the appointment of Hands of the Cause became permanently impossible in 1957, the work those individuals had done, teaching, protecting the Faith and advising its elected bodies, still had to be done. In 1968 the Universal House of Justice created this office to carry it forward.

The design differs from what it replaced in two ways. A Counsellor is appointed for a renewable term rather than for life, so the office is refillable by construction and cannot be closed by an accident of succession. And a Counsellor serves a defined region of several countries rather than the world, which distributes globally what had been an unbounded personal charge.

The advisory character was retained exactly. Counsellors advise National and Local Spiritual Assemblies and hold no administrative authority over them; they cannot direct an Assembly, overrule a decision or govern a community. What they can do is appoint and direct the members of the Auxiliary Boards operating within their region, so the appointed arm has its own internal structure while remaining outside the chain of governance. The number of Counsellors and the boundaries of their regions have been adjusted repeatedly as Baha'i communities have grown.

Baha'i administration runs on two arms that are deliberately kept apart. One is elected: Local Spiritual Assemblies, National Spiritual Assemblies and the Universal House of Justice, which govern, legislate and decide. The other is appointed, and Baha'i writing calls it the Institution of the Learned: the Counsellors, the Auxiliary Board members and their assistants, who teach, encourage, protect and advise.

The separation is the point. The appointed arm has influence and no authority; the elected arm has authority and is bound to consult. Neither can absorb the other, because appointment runs downward from the Universal House of Justice through the Counsellors while election runs upward from the believers through the delegates, and the two lines meet only at the top.

Baha'i thought presents this as its answer to a problem it identifies in earlier religious history, in which learning and government fused into a clergy that could not be corrected. The Faith has no clergy, and the appointed arm is designed to supply what a learned class supplies without the power such a class ordinarily accumulates. Whether the design holds up over the long run is a question about a religion barely two centuries old, and the atlas records the structure and its stated rationale rather than assessing it. An International Teaching Centre, established at the Baha'i World Centre in 1973, coordinates the appointed arm globally.