Posted by:
Eric K
(
)
Date: December 10, 2023 09:07AM
https://onlysky.media/ccassidy/jehovahs-witnesses-changing-course-on-reporting-evangelism-hours/This is a long article on the Watchtower. IMHO it is a good read. I used to tell new ex-Mormons to read up on the antics of the Watchtower as there are so many similarities to Mormonism and it can be studied somewhat dispassionately. Apparently the Evangelism hours reported by JWs have been falling fast so the leaders decided to stop the reporting. It is a parallel to the LDS church reducing requirements for stake and wards in terms of the number of active members. It is a way of hiding bad news. Some excerpts below:
Back in the good ol’ days, Jehovah’s Witnesses had to spend a lot of time, well, witnessing. That’s Christianese for trying to recruit people to their religion through hard-sales techniques and emotional manipulation. Their leaders didn’t set a formal quota, but they expected the flocks to at least meet the national average.
Laypeople in the religion submitted their witnessing timesheets to their church leaders and everything. If they didn’t do enough witnessing or submit reports at all that month, then their standing in the church suffered dramatically.
Most of the leaders had to do even more of this stuff, and their rise through church ranks depended mightily on their timesheets…
Jehovah’s Witnesses laypeople have been well-trained by now to leap onto whatever their Dear Leaders call “new light.” This stuff has been around almost from the very beginning of their group, which was founded in 1870…
Meanwhile, the mother ship maintained strict rules about how publishers had to count their time spent on evangelism. They even had rules for those who were too sick or infirm to do the job. Evangelism, for Jehovah’s Witnesses, was literally a job—just one that didn’t pay them anything and never set concrete expectations of them.
This past October at one of their big meetings, the Governing Body (GB) of the religion announced the change. Now, instead of having human beings observing their tracking sheets, Jehovah’s Witnesses should be accountable only to Jehovah himself. They should still do the same stuff, just without formal tracking…
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2023 09:23AM by Eric K.