Baháʼí Faith in Papua New Guinea
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Baháʼí Faith in Papua New Guinea begins after 1916 with a mention by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, then head of the religion, that Baháʼís should take the religion there. The first Baháʼís moved there (what Baháʼís mean by "pioneering") in Papua New Guinea arrived there in 1954. With local converts the first Baháʼí Local Spiritual Assembly was elected in 1958. The first National Spiritual Assembly was then elected in 1969. According to the census of 2000 showed that the number of Baháʼís does not exceed 21,000. But the Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on World Christian Encyclopedia) estimated three times more Baháʼís at 200,000 or 6% of the nation were Baháʼís in 2015. Either way, it is the largest minority religion in Papua New Guinea.
Early days
ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's Tablets of the Divine Plan
The first mention by the religion of the region happened during its rule by Australia, while it was known as the Territory of Papua. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, head of the religion from 1892 to 1921, mentioned it among the places Baháʼís should take the religion to when he wrote a series of letters, or tablets, to the followers of the religion in the United States in 1916–1917; these letters were compiled together in the book titled Tablets of the Divine Plan. The seventh of the tablets mentioned taking the Baha'i Faith to Papua New Guinea and was written on April 11, 1916, but was delayed in being presented in the United States until 1919—after the end of World War I and the Spanish flu.
“Baháʼí Faith in Papua New Guinea” enters the record as open-knowledge reference entry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Baháʼí, Faith and Papua can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baháʼí Faith in Papua New Guinea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.