If you are one of Jehovah's Witnesses, the Governing Body is your brain. They do all the thinking that is allowed within that organization, and expect you to go along with it.
What's up with the Governing Body?
by godsgurl 12 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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jgnat
Welcome, godsgurl. It sounds like you have a very unusual relationship with your dad. He's a JW wannabe, and you are a firm Christian. Does he ever talk about anything else other than religion? I'm wondering if he has learned to relate to you on any other level. Does he ever talk about your friends, career, goals, dreams, favorite movie?
Debating with a JW is about as fruitful as plucking pickles out of a cherry tree.
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drew sagan
The Governing Body is a teaching of theirs that developed over time.
For much of the Watchtowers history, everything was ruled and governed by one leader. The first leader was C.T. Russell who ran the Watchtower from 1879 to 1916. After his death their was supposed to be no successor, but J.F. Rutherford was able to win power and gain control. He ran the Watchtower from 1916 through 1942.
After Rutherford died the Watchtower was faced with the first time that it did not have a very charismatic leader at the front of the religion. J.F. Rutherford's successor was Nathan Knorr. Knorr didn't want to draw all the attention to himself like the two previous presidents of the Watchtower Society.
All during these men's oversight of the Watchtower there was a board of directors. In the early 70's Knorr began to give more oversight to the directors (i.e. governing body).
Eventually there was a bit of a power struggle between the governing body and the president. Fred Franz (Knorrs' successor) made a very important speech to a Gilead Class (a Watchtower missionary school) in 1975 that Biblically showed there was no basis for giving power over the the governing body. Franz did this because he was interested in keeping power in the office of the presidency.
Franz eventually lost and the governing body gained control of the organization.
So the 'governing body' of Jehovah's Witnesses really didn't appear in full force until the 1970s. JWs will state that the 'board of directors' present at the beginning of the first issue of the Watchtower was the governing body.
One important side note is that JWs believe that a woman should never take the lead. Yet there where two women who sat on the Watchtowers board of directors! Another point is that all one has to do is read the literature that was published from 1879 to 1940 to realize that C.T. Russell and J.F. Rutherford where in charge. There are many statements made about how both of them took full charge of the Society and took orders from nobody else.
Today the Watchtower makes it appear that they have always had a 'governing body' that has ruled the religion, but it really didn't appear until the 1970s.