Houses of Worship to be established in three new localities 

On October 16, the international governing council of the Baha’i Faith, the Universal House of Justice, released a message to the Baha’is of the world announcing that with “praise and gratitude”, two more national Houses of Worship are to be erected in Brasília, Brazil and Lilongwe, Malawi, as well as a local one in Batouri, Cameroon.

Following the recent inauguration of the national Temple in Papua New Guinea, and progress being made towards the Temples in Bihar Sharif, India; Toronto, Canada; Kanchanpur, Nepal; and Mwinilunga, Zambia, the Universal House of Justice hopes that “the initiation of plans to build three additional Temples fill your hearts with joy and serve as a source of inspiration in your sustained efforts to advance everywhere the processes of community building and engagement with society.” 

In a message dated 1 August 2014 to the Baha’is of the world, the Universal House of Justice stated that: 

The spiritual forces released through the application of the “critical work” of community-building is finding its material manifestation through the establishment of these Houses of Worship, which ‘Abdu’l-Baha describes as “the first visible and manifest establishment of the Lord”¹, “the dawning-place of lights and the gathering place of the righteous”², in which “noble souls … offer supplications, intone divine verses, and chant prayers with wondrous melodies” such that “the inmates of the Concourse on high hearken and call out, crying, ‘Happy are we; let all the world rejoice!’”³

1. The Institution of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár, A Statement and Compilation Prepared by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, September 2017, extract 66[↩]
2. ‘Abdu’l-Baha, From a Tablet translated from the Persian[↩]
3. The Institution of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár, A Statement and Compilation Prepared by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, September 2017, extract 9[↩]