About the Preaching Work

by Mad Sweeney 7 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Mad Sweeney

  I think it is intuitive to most of us that the preaching work is a collosal failure IF the goal is to recruit new Dubs. It's been mentioned that the growth rate of other religions, even some that do pretty much NO recruiting, is as high or higher than JWs. Does anyone have a link to some data about religious growth rates either internationally or in the USA and how they compare to JWs?

  If we can show definitively that other religions grow as much as the Dubs without doing door-to-door recruiting/selling, then we will have another bit of hard proof that our intuition is correct: the preaching work is NOT about recruitment AT ALL (except for the occasional serendipitous convert) but rather about CONTROL OF THE RANK AND FILE'S TIME, ENERGY AND MONEY.
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  Soldier77

  Wasn't it on JWfacts? I know I saw somewhere a graph of religious growth recently being linked from a post on this site.

  Sorry, not much help... but I'd be interested in looking at this data as well...again.
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  StAnn

  Not a link but the Pew Center for Research did a study on pretty much all of the US denominations last year. You should be able to Google it.

  HTH,

  StAnn
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  Soldier77

  Mad this is just the USA but it's a start: http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
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  ziddina

  Okay...

  I liked this point: "The survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members.Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths...."

  And, in light of that comment, I particularly liked this point: "Jehovah's Witnesses have the lowest retention rate of any religious tradition. Only 37% of all those who say they were raised as Jehovah's Witnesses still identify themselves as Jehovah's Witnesses...."

  Of course, that point - and that data - has been mentioned before, but.... It's still good news!!

  Zid
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  mentallyfree31

  I baptized three people, and none of them were related to house to house work. It was all referrals from family members. Nothing ever panned out in the hundreds of bible studies that I conducted as a result of meeting people door to door.

  -mentallyfree31-
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  not a captive

  I bet that eases your conscience, mentally free.

  I bear the responsiblity of some Iowa neighbors "learning the truth" and three getting baptized. They have had a bad time of it. Two still in, the marriage broken. They want to know how I am doing. I haven't told them the final word yet ----I'm out.
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  WTWizard

  It was a complete waste of my time. I can remember working a territory through, when the not at homes would be worked to death. After that time, they would destroy the not at homes and return the territory. Then, it would be sent back out as fresh territory--occasionally, someone took the rags. When that happened (usually, they would be just curious), they would take that as proof that the territory still isn't dead. Of course, very few ever went as far as getting baptized out of the field past about 1993.