Youth
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The term youth, used in the context of the Bahá'í community, refers to any individual of between fifteen and thirty years of age, or to the totality of the Bahá'ís within that age bracket. The Youth Conferences of the summer of 2013, originally planned to be 95 in number, but later increased, catered for young people between those ages.
Bahá'u'lláh fixed "the fifteenth year" as the age of maturity. In practice, the Bahá'í administration has assumed this means at the fifteenth birthday, although presumably maturation, like any natural process, cannot be fixed that absolutely. An individual must have reached that age before he or she can marry. The injunctions on "obligatory prayer" and on fasting apply from this age. At least for the present time, voting for, and membership of, Spiritual Assemblies apply from the age of twenty-one. Young people from the ages of eleven to fifteen are termed junior youth, and it would be fair to say that people in this age group often look up to the fifteen to twenty-ones as role models. Within the context of the developing programme of Core Activities, therefore, junior youth groups often benefit from having youth (i.e. over-fifteens) as animators.
Both the Guardian and the Universal House of Justice have written frequently about the pre-eminent position of youth in this dispensation, terming the youth the "spearhead" of Bahá'í activity. It could be considered that this analogy has been chosen carefully, as a spearhead by itself achieves little, without the solid support of the shaft, which is presumably the rest of the community. There was a tendency for National Spiritual Assemblies to appoint National Youth Committees, to try and focus and encourage the youth of the Bahá'í community, but the emphasis more often now seems to be on integrating the youth into the cluster - perhaps keeping their identity as youth, but conscious of their front-line role within the work of the cluster.
The youthful age of the Báb when He proclaimed Himself, and of Bahá'u'lláh when He accepted that claim, have been emphasised.
Relevant publications[edit]
A number of books or compilations on this subject have been issued, including:
- Unrestrained as the Wind
