Member of a Local Spiritual Assembly

A Local Spiritual Assembly is the nine member elected body governing the Baha'i community of a city, town or district. It is elected each year at the community's Naw-Ruz gathering, by secret ballot, with no nominations and no campaigning: every adult believer in the locality is eligible, every adult believer votes, and the nine receiving the most votes are elected.

The procedure was fixed by Shoghi Effendi as standard practice and it is unusually strict. Discussing candidates in advance, indicating a preference, or seeking a position are all excluded. What remains is each voter's own judgement about who in the community is best suited, formed without solicitation. The design assumes a community small enough that its members know one another, which is generally the case at local level.

An Assembly forms once nine or more adult believers are resident in a given area, and its formation is treated as a significant step in a community's development rather than as an administrative registration. Before that point the believers of a locality are a group; afterwards they are a community with a body that can act for them, hold funds and be addressed by the institutions above it.

Naw-Ruz, the Baha'i new year at the spring equinox, is also a holy day, so the election is embedded in an act of worship rather than held as a separate civic occasion. Baha'i teaching treats voting in it as a spiritual obligation carried out prayerfully, which is the reasoning behind the prohibition on canvassing: a ballot approached as an act of devotion is not one that a campaign could properly influence.

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.