New Awake! magazine is about homelessness. Has the Society ever promoted preaching to homeless people? Has it ever even mentioned it? I rack my memory to try to think of them ever mentioning preaching to homeless people.
Homeless people might make bad converts I suppose:
1. No money to contribute.
2. Maybe only interested because they might get financial/material help from the congregation.
3. Gives a bad impression if tramps are seen going to Kingdom Hall.
4. Homeless people need to get their lives together first anyway before they are good enough to get the truth.
This is one of the very few occasions we actually do agree...you are spot on on this point...I have never heard of any effort being made in this area.
Hardly a Christian approach is it...another tack to use on this is how do the witnesses approach their ministry for those in retirement homes...or in prisons...does anyone have any further thoughts on this?
I dont recall the literature dealing with it...but its been a while since i was in or since i read any of their literature...why dont you run a search on the watchtower site and type in homeless...see what comes up?
In the last 6 months the WT study article showed 2 JW women showing a magazine to a homeless person sitting on the street.
This is just good PR. When I was in NYC, Bethelites told me not to be alarmed at the homeless in the subway station, on the benches between the top and the bottom of Columbia Heights, not to talk to them just to step over them carefully. Not once have I ever heard any counsel/suggestion to talk to the homeless, the prostitutes, the drug users. The WTS prefers for secular/non-JW organizations to clean this people up first before they will touch them with a 10-foot-pole.
Here in Sacramento, the JWs who do street witnessing regularly hand out WTs and Awake mags to the homeless folks down on the K Street mall and in front of the library. Don't know why, since it's mostly used for toilet paper. Oh, wait, that's probably the answer.
