‘Abdu’l-Baha to “the entire community of the believers of the United States and Canada”: - “I fervently hope that in the near future the whole earth may be stirred and shaken by the results of your achievements”

Let anyone inclined to doubt the course which this enviable community is destined to follow, turn to and meditate upon these words of ‘Abdu’l Bahá, enshrined, for all time, in the Tablets of the Divine Plan, and addressed to the entire community of the believers of the United States and Canada: “The full measure of your success,” He informs them, “is as yet unrevealed, its significance still unapprehended. Erelong, ye will, with your own eyes, witness how brilliantly every one of you, even as a shining star, will radiate, in the firmament of your country, the light of Divine Guidance, and will bestow upon its people the glory of an everlasting life.… The range of your future achievements still remains undisclosed. I fervently hope that in the near future the whole earth may be stirred and shaken by the results of your achievements. The hope, therefore, which ‘Abdu’l Bahá cherishes for you is that the same success which has attended your efforts in America may crown your endeavors in other parts of the world, that through you the fame of the Cause of God may be diffused throughout the East and the West, and the advent of the Kingdom of the Lord of Hosts be proclaimed in all the five continents of the globe.” 

- Shoghi Effendi (‘The Advent of Divine Justice’)

“The Seven Year Plan” 1937-1944: - “the initial stage, a stepping-stone to the unfoldment of the implications of this Charter”, “delineated…by the pen of ‘Abdu’l Bahá”

The Seven Year Plan, as already stated, is but the initial stage, a stepping-stone to the unfoldment of the implications of this Charter. The impulse, originally generated through the movement of that pen, and which is now driving forward, with increasing momentum, the machinery of the Seven Year Plan, must, in the opening years of the next century, be further accelerated, and impel the American Bahá’í community to launch further stages in the unfoldment of the Divine Plan, stages that will carry it far beyond the shores of the Northern Hemisphere, into lands and among peoples where that community’s noblest acts of heroism are to be performed. 

- Shoghi Effendi (‘The Advent of Divine Justice’)