The Feast and Community Gathering
Monthly gatherings for worship, consultation, and fellowship build the bonds of community and sustain spiritual vitality.
The nineteen-day Feast — held at the beginning of each Bahá'í month — combines three components: devotional (prayer and scripture reading), administrative (consultation on community affairs), and social (fellowship and sharing). This three-part structure ensures that Bahá'í communities attend to all dimensions of community life.
The Nineteen Day Feast is a means of fostering unity and love among the friends.
The nineteen-day Feast is among the most sophisticated institutional designs in religious history, balancing worship, governance, and community simultaneously.
Selections from the Writings of Abdu'l-Bahá
Written about in
- What the Bahá'í Faith says about community
A gathering every nineteen days that combines worship, consultation and food. Fixing it to the calendar means it still happens in the months when nobody feels like organising anything.
- What the Bahá'í Faith says about habit and discipline
At the start of each Bahá'í month the community meets for a gathering with three fixed parts: devotional, administrative consultation, and social. Discipline here is collective — the meeting recurs whether or not any one person feels committed that month.