collegegirl....When I heard that elder use that "tire" example, I recognized it almost immediately as coming from an old Watchtower article from the 1970s, a time when the Society had a more lenient disfellowshipping policy. This policy was abandoned in 1981 (cf. 15 September 1981 Watchtower, pp. 25-29) in the wake of the Bethel "apostasy" scare, and is not current policy. Here is what the elder said:
Cross-examining Attorney: Okay, so don't associate with them [disfellowshipped people] at all? Elder: Well, if you are out in the middle of the country and you drove by and they had a flat tire, uh, what would you do? Cross-examining Attorney: I would stop and help them but what would you do? Elder: A Jehovah's Witness would stop and help that person. The main thing to do is if they're stuck in a storm, their tire's flat, put them in the car and take them down. But you wouldn't talk about the latest article in the Awake! magazine. That's disfellowshipped. That's what we define as disfellowshipped.
And here is the relevant passage in the 1 August 1974 Watchtower:
*** w74 8/1 p. 467 Maintaining a Balanced Viewpoint Toward Disfellowshiped Ones ***
But consider a less extreme situation. What if a woman who had been disfellowshiped were to attend a congregational meeting and upon leaving the hall found that her car, parked nearby, had developed a flat tire? Should the male members of the congregation, seeing her plight, refuse to aid her, perhaps leaving it up to some worldly person to come along and do so? This too would be needlessly unkind and inhumane. Yet situations just like this have developed, perhaps in all good conscience, yet due to a lack of balance in viewpoint.
That same article also talked about disfellowshipping as not breaking family bonds, that "one has a natural right to visit his blood relatives and his offspring", and that it would not be "spiritual fellowshipping" to call relatives to see how they are doing, how their health is, etc. The elder's description of JW disfellowshipping policy is circa 1974-1980. This is not practiced anymore and he knows that. But he almost certainly consulted an older view (before "new light") in preparing for his appearance on the stand, and tried to foist that old view onto the judge as "current" policy. The "tire" example is not found in any Watchtower literature since, as a search through the WT CD-ROM shows.