In January 1995 the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States established the Wilmette Institute, to develop human resources in the Bahá'í community and thereby advance the process of expansion of the Bahá'í community. The Institute was established a year before the Universal House of Justice sent a series of messages to the Bahá'í world, starting in December 1995, calling on it to establish training institutes and centers of learning. As the “institute process” in the Bahá'í community has advanced, the Wilmette Institute has evolved to meet the needs of that process.

The Institute's first major decision (Feb. 1995) was to establish a four-year program to raise up diverse, knowledgeable, and articulate teachers and administrators of the Faith. This program—the Spiritual Foundations for a Global Civilization program—seeks to cover the Bahá'í Faith systematically and comprehensively. An important emphasis is its effort to relate the Bahá'í Faith, its community, and its teachings to the world at large and to such subjects as history, philosophy, theology, comparative religion, psychology, sociology, political theory, and economics. The approach was inspired by the following statement written on behalf of the Guardian: "an effort should be made to raise the standard of studies, so as to provide the Bahá’í student with a thorough knowledge of the Cause that would enable him to expound it befittingly to the educated public" (Compilation of Compilations, no. 486). Because of its emphasis on context, and its scholarly approach to Bahá'í topics, the Spiritual Foundations program provided its students with the opportunity to obtain undergraduate and graduate university credit through their local institutions of higher education. The Spiritual Foundations program remains the heart of the Wilmette Institute.

In the summer of 1997 the Wilmette Institute offered its first “minicourse,” a week-long residential course on the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh during the Baghdad period. In January 1998 it began a series of weekend minicourses at Bosch Bahá'í School on world religions and philosophies in Bahá'í perspective. Also that month it inaugurated its first distance- learning (“correspondence”) course—The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, 1853-68. The course used a listserver and the Institute’s new website. In September 1998 the Wilmette Institute Board decided to establish a “Distance-Learning Program” from its internet courses and minicourses. Unlike the Spiritual Foundations program, the distance-learning program does not have requirements or give a certificate of completion.

In January 2000, in conjunction with the deepening program advocated by the United States National Spiritual Assembly to American Baha'is, the Institute offered a series of courses on the writings of Shoghi Effendi, which were followed in 2001 by courses on the writings of `Abdu'l-Baha. From that time forward the Institute aligned many of its distance-learning courses according to educational priorities identified by Bahá'í institutions. By the end of 2002, the Distance-Learning program included almost forty courses, on topics such as Bahá'í history, world religions from a Bahá'í perspective, systematic introduction to the Bahá'í Faith, the lives and guidance of the Central Figures and Shoghi Effendi, and specific courses on individual Bahá'í books, such as the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Kitab-i-Íqán. Most are repeated every two to four years. The topics in the Spiritual Foundations program have been converted into distance-learning courses, making the Distance-Learning program comprehensive in its range of subjects.

In January 2003 the Distance-Learning program was expanded in two directions to meet the emerging needs of the institute process. First, its courses were divided into two groups: a “Basics of the Bahá'í Faith” group of four courses, to provide students with a foundation for studying the religion, its teachings, and scriptures; and “Beyond the Basics,” which include everything else. The change was made because the Universal House of Justice noted that one model of the institute process is a tree, with basic courses forming the trunk and diverse subsequent courses forming many divergent branches. Second, the Institute streamlined its fee structure to stimulate “local study groups” and reorganized and expanded its support for such groups, in order to foster Wilmette Institute versions of local study circles. Both changes have proved popular.

The Wilmette Institute seeks to be a trend-setter in Bahá'í education, both in non-credit “adult education” courses and in creating courses for Bahá'ís that are at a university level of rigor and are available for university credit. It fosters Bahá'í scholarship; develops new, innovative curricular materials; creates high-quality courses on teaching the Faith; and refines Bahá'í concepts of pedagogy. Its principal purpose is developing human resources in the Bahá'í community to advance the process of entry by troops. It aims to produce teachers and administrators of the Bahá'í Faith of great capacity, capable of demonstrating the Bahá'í truths in their lives as well as by their speech, able to teach Bahá'ís and their friends in classrooms, homes, and other settings. It invites collaboration and involvement by people of all backgrounds, residing in all countries of the globe.