by BluesBrother 307 Replies latest watchtower bible
Just noticed something else.. pioneer pubs down from 10,576 to 7,183!!!That surely is almost a third of the pioneers in one year???
And somehow 652 into 121,166 is no where near 1% Thank goodness for rounding up eh!!
And during the year spending on missionaries went up over 11 million... hmmmmm.
Poppy xx
sorry for the constant posts but someone said 300, 000?? That maybe a baptised figure, check out average publishers which is much more telling.
81,675, so again, out of the 247,631 baptised, they lost... nearly 166,000..
Total worldwide hours were down by.. wait for it. 4,032,902
Bible studies down by 23,841
Memorial attendance down by 377,274
Much more telling statistics.
Poppy xx
Shameless nerd reference. It reminds me of the Sabbat clan in Vampire the Masquerade. They turn out "shock troops" by making converts as fast as they can. The watchtower seems to be taking a dunk 'em fast and hard approach to shoring up those hemorrhaging statistics.
Memorial attendance is a sham. I remember counting and me, even as a teenager got to choose who was old enough to count. If a kid is around five and looks alert you count them, if they look doppy you don't. Anyone younger doesnt get counted. With hall attendance you count the same way. So when they say we have 100 publishers but 110 attendees what people dont realise is the attendees includes kids who are not publishers, another sham.
The only figure of any significance is publishers. That too is a sham, as now people can be counted if they report only 15min a month, a false way to increase the numbers.
Pioneers are down, despite only having to do 70 hours a month. A few years it was 83 hours, and before that it was 100.
Whatever the WTS does to try to cook the books it can not hide the obvious truth, the growth and activity is starting to grind to a halt.
The WTS is very good at hiding the truth. They use partial, misleading quotes in their literature. They tell people not to report the sexual abuse of children so that the congo is kept "clean," They encourage people to engage in phantom service in order to post huge numbers (1.3 billion hours of "public education work" -- we all know how phony those are).
So when these annual reports come out, I am skeptical. The dubs claim to carefully account for all activity and every single body, but I'm aware of many crowd counts that were estimates and I know there is peer pressure to keep those numbers up. So the numbers coming into the society are, in some cases, just estimates. And the numbers coming in as regards field service reports are pure fantasy in many cases and exagerrated by a factor of as much as 10! (I speak as a former congo secretary who compiled these reports). And everybody knows it!
So why wouldn't the WTS cooks these figures after they get them? They have no qualms about cooking quotes from outside sources to support their doctrines in their literature.
Here's what I do know: In my own experience, I have seen the growth slow down dramatically. Where I live, population growth has been explosive, doubling and in some communities tripling in a little more than a decade. Yet there are no more dubs here than there were 10 years ago. There are two new KHs that were built but they replaced older ones in need of repair. The number of people at meetings is virtually the same as it was back then. The number of folks at the local circuit assembly each year is down by several hundred. At those assemblies, the number of baptisms keeps going down and they are almost exclusively young kids being baptized by their parents. You rarely see a JW in the neighborhood going d-to-d.
For the dubs, the news is not good. And they know it.
For those of us who aren't as regular as we used to be (and therefore don't have the data yet) can someone please please post a scan or at least the US figures and world figures?
One thing to keep in mind regarding the stats, particularly in the wealthier and/or Western nations, the ones with a -1% to +1% growth rate:
Virtually all the baptisms are via children of established publishers, or from immigrants. For example, in the US, fully 1/4 (over 250,000) of the publishers are in Spanish-speaking congregations. In areas where there is a large immigration rate, it is not uncommon for some pioneers to have (literally) 8 or 10 studies, and to have 1 or 2 of those studies progress to baptism per year. In some larger metropolitan areas with a large Spanish-speaking immigration rate, new Spanish-speaking congregations are formed every 18-24 months. Based on my observations, I would not be surprised if the Spanish-speaking publisher growth rate in the US is 10% or more per year.
If the Spanish-speakers are growing so rapidly, and the overall growth rate in the US is flat, what does that mean about the 750,000 English-speaking JWs in the US? The number is dropping precipitously, perhaps more like -2% or -3%.
And, any success in other Western/wealthy countries is, I strongly suspect, due to large increases in the immigrant population and success in witnessing to them. In Western Europe, there are numerous immigrants from Africa, Turkey, the Far East...etc. And in Spain, there are numerous immigrants from Latin America.
Immigrants to a wealthier nation are going to be on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder. They likely moved due to horrific economic or political pressures, and perhaps arrived with literally no more than the clothes on their backs. They live in hovels, or 12 to an one-bedroom apartment, and whatever meager money they earn is sent back to family left behind.
Now here comes Joe and Susie Pioneer to their door, with glossy brochures promising them (comparitive) mansions and good health and freedom from all problems. "Great, where do I sign up?"
If not for the massive amounts of immigration in the past decade or 2, you'd see even bigger growth in 3rd world countries, and rates of -2% to -5% in Western countries.
Please, does anyone have the Feb 1st 2006 Watchtower and a scanner?
I'd like to know the details for New Zealand: I suspect its growth trend is on a par with Australia.
Also, has Japan continued to show a decline in publishers? Japan used to be the "golden girl" of JW growth (The overwhelming majority of Japanese JWs are women - a higher ratio to males than even other countries) - but in recent years, there's been an inexorable slump in new publishers in that country.
I do have the WT and a scanner, but not sure on the uploading it onto a website so you can view it thing, if you PM me I can email it to you, or if someone can tell me a website I can upload it to (free of course, I'm tight!) then I'm happy to oblige!! But in UK, so going to bed shortly, sorry!
Poppy xxxx
