If they are fudging the numbers to make the picture better than it is, how come, year-after-year they reveal the number of memorial partakers is increasing? That surely is as big an embarrassment as any decrease in numbers on other variables such as average publishers and baptisms.
Jdub Growth In USA?
by freein2004 24 Replies latest watchtower scandals
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OneEyedJoe
If they are fudging the numbers to make the picture better than it is, how come, year-after-year they reveal the number of memorial partakers is increasing? That surely is as big an embarrassment as any decrease in numbers on other variables such as average publishers and baptisms.
My take on it is that it's a little easier to fudge the publisher count numbers than the partakers, while still being able to explain it away to the believers that are involved in compiling the numbers. They don't have an official policy on it, but from what I've read here from elders and such it seems to be unofficially the case that elders get a good reaming from the CO if they get a new irregular/inactive publisher, so they hound everyone to submit time and if they don't have any they're asked things like "well surely you've had a few spiritual conversations at work that added up to an hour?" and people will usually just let 'em have it. So you get publishers that aren't doing anything but report time nonetheless. Then obviously there are those that don't want to be hounded at all, and knowingly report false time to stay off the radar.
Additionally, there's the issue with the "peak publishers" number that they essentially just count the number of timeslips that they get each month instead of what would be trivially easy (these days) to actually tally them by month according to what month the timeslip is for. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if they counted peak publishers individually in each country/branch/whatever and added them all up to get the reported peak (i.e. one country's peak might be from april while another's would be from july). This would significantly distort the figures, but to the simpleton JWs doing the stats it would seem harmless.
Also there's the issue of 3rd world growth making up for the loss in developed countries. They've clearly tried to disguise this, though, by combining branches and then reporting the total for the new (larger) branch and comparing it to the previous (smaller) branch. I think they recently did this by including some new territories in with the US branch to hide the decline or make the growth look better than it really was. Of course they don't mention this combining when they publish the numbers.
When it comes to the number partaking, though, it's a little more cut-and-dry. They already tell elders not to count "worldly" people who are just treating it like communion, and I think they usually talk to others before counting them if they partake. That's about all they can do. Once the numbers make it up to the branch, there's a lot less that they can do to spin them and be able to rationalize it away.
I wouldn't be surprised if they dropped the count of those partaking altogether very soon, though. And maybe they'll quietly push out a QFR article about it.
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OrphanCrow
If they are fudging the numbers to make the picture better than it is, how come, year-after-year they reveal the number of memorial partakers is increasing?
What Joe said.
Or....they could be gearing up for a doctrinal change.
After all, aren't there GB members who are way too young to really be classified as 'annointed'? Give it a few more years and the numbers going up will be a non-issue. At the least, it won't matter a single iota for the JWs who loyally swallow anything that comes from the gilded Tower.
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the comet
Very good points OneEyedJoe. To go along with your point of elders trying to pry an hour out of publishers so they're not irregular/inactive-when i stopped turning in time, the elder I was supposed to turn my time to, just put down an hour for me without even asking! He is a friend so he was basically just covering for me
I do think if the number of anointed keeps going up something has to be done. Choices are- stop counting them, make it so a co or somebody has to give the ok to officially count them, or fudge the numbers,which I don't think they could do. If/when the number gets to 20,000+ something has to be done
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OneEyedJoe
Or....they could be gearing up for a doctrinal change.
After all, aren't there GB members who are way too young to really be classified as 'annointed'? Give it a few more years and the numbers going up will be a non-issue. At the least, it won't matter a single iota for the JWs who loyally swallow anything that comes from the gilded Tower.
They've already admitted that "evidently" the 1935 sealing of the anointed was completely baseless, and that seems to be primary reason for the big increase in partakers.
The other day I was around some JW family and they were talking about the number partaking. Someone guessed that it was down to 8000, and I piped up that it was ~14000 now. The room got quiet and the topic was changed to something else pretty quickly. This is definitely something that matters to some in the cult (especially those in the 30-60 yr old range since they were raised on the idea that we needed the 144k to die off)
The sooner they admit failure on this topic, the better it will be for them IMO. They need to get ahead of it because it's such an obvious failed doctrine that many have to see it and one uncorrected failed doctrine can sometimes be all it takes to cause doubts.
To go along with your point of elders trying to pry an hour out of publishers so they're not irregular/inactive-when i stopped turning in time, the elder I was supposed to turn my time to, just put down an hour for me without even asking! He is a friend so he was basically just covering for me
That's another great point. It's easy for an elder to feel OK about counting someone erroneously as a favor to that individual (without thought of how it impacts the stats) but it's not so easy for an elder to fail to count someone partaking and have any justification for it (aside from manipulation of the stats). In one case you're doing a personal favor for someone, in the other you're actually directly disrespecting someone (possibly someone you know). This will make it much more likely for the average, relatively conscientious elder to pad the publisher stats while they'd refuse to adjust the partakers down.
Another thought - it also probably feels much less significant to add an hour for a few publishers in a congregation of 100 than it does to not count the 1 partaker.