by Dogpatch 29 Replies latest jw friends
Mr. Jenks response to my email regarding the increase/decrease discrepancy.
My typo – and sincere apologies. I’ll make the correction on our Web page and subsequent stories.
Philip E. Jenks
Director of Interpretation
National Council of Churches USA
212-870-2252
Justitia
So many people here who have witnessed assemblies say that baptisms have sharply declined over the last few years and of those that get baptised most are youngsters from JW families.
Joker10,
While there appears to be increase, the numbers can be quite misleading the way the WTS presents them.
In recent years the baptism numbers show that there really is a decrease in retention of members.
As an example:
I can't remember exact figures right now, but lets just say the Watchtower baptizes 300,000 people in a particuliar year but that same year the average active publisher peak is only at 100,000. What happened to the other 200,000?
This is what is going on right now. Pull up the real numbers and you will see that when peak publishers are compared to the previous years numbers as well as the number of newly baptized ones it becomes clear that they are loosing tons of members. The org is very much in decline.
Dear Mr. Sagan:
I agree with you that JWs are "bleeding-out," but Joker10 was appropriate in pointing out a gross error. Raw data, which it appears this Yearbook is comparing, shows an increase. What I think is interesting is that we are now # 25; last year we were #24, and as you note, the net increase is paltry because of so many people leaving.
Here are last years numbers: http://www.ncccusa.org/news/050330yearbook.html
Justitia
I spotted the same mistake, and was just about to post the same thing.
That is a huge embarassment and puts the rest of the data into question. It's not just a "typo".
Thanks for taking the time to email the guy Justicia,
It's always great to post things and have yuo guys go over it like a fine-toothed comb! :-))
Hey Farkel, same ol' crazy dude, aren't ya! Good to hear from you.
Randy
moggy lover,
A local elder became an SDA, and evidently took much of the local congrgation with him. He subsequently wrote a booklet and edited a magazine that compared growth figures for the two groups.
Assurances were conveyed to us by the country COs that we were in reality having attendances higher than them. It really became competitive at that time.
I'm interested in this. From as far back as I can remember -- going back to the 1950s -- I never heard mention at Brooklyn Bethel of any competition between JWs and SDAs. SDAs have always outnumbered JWs worldwide. In fact, SDA membership has always been more than JW Memorial attendance. Do you happen to remember the name of the local elder? Or the name of his booklet or magazine? I'd like to do some checking into this.
Frank
Hiya Randy!
Your topic reminded me of some observations from a book I read some years ago (part of my snail-paced exit from JWism)(please pardon the long quote, from Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, Dean M. Kelley, 1972, Harper & Row):
WHO RESPONDS TO A HIGH DEMAND?
We have noted that the strong religious organization makes very high demands on its members. They must give it absolute and unswerving allegiance; be willing to work, suffer, and die for it; abandon all competing activities, allegiances, and responsibilities in its favor; tell its Good News tirelessly and unselfconsciously to strangers; wear its stigmata of humiliation on their bodies; submit to its strictures, conformities, and disciplines; go where they are sent and do what they are told. Not everyone responds favorably to such demands, some are in fact repelled by them. What are the causes and consequences of this differential appeal?
Max Weber in his Sociology of Religion refers to those who are willing to give religious interests such an exceptional proportion of their energies as "virtuosi of religion." Apparently he felt that some people will excell [sic] at that sort of thing and others won't. He did not attempt to explain why some are virtuosi and others not, since that would have led him astray into individual rather than collective traits, and he was writing a sociology rather than a psychology of religion.
Eric Hoffer has suggested that the "true believer"--the candidate for fanatical (high-demand) religious movements--is the person who, for one reason or another, feels that his life is "irremediably spoiled" and therefore clings obsessively to a movement that can supply significance and purpose for his life which it lacks in itself.
...
It is neither necessary not appropriate here to evaluate the psychological soundness of Hoffer's diagnosis. Although sweepingly aphoristic, it is a magnificent contribution to the sociology of mass movements. As another effort to make a sociological contribution, this work cannot try to determine the psychological motivations of individuals--whether they seek significance in total allegiance to a high-demand movement solely because they feel they have no significance within themselves. For our purposes we can disregard the final clause--let those affirm it who prefer--and simply say there are many kinds of conditions which can lead or drive individuals to sacrifice themselves to a source of significance outside themselves. Thus we do not prejudge or denigrate any of them. The fact remains that there are such people; what their motivations may be we need not now determine. History and experience suggest that they are not numerous: those persons who, for whatever reason, are potentially receptive to high-demand movements. Perhaps one in a hundred or one in a thousand.
JWs are one in 10,000.
Hoffer's The True Believer and Weber's Sociology of Religion are two books which I have read, cover to cover, and, imvho, should be placed right alongside the Bible (or whatever "sacred text" one chooses).
