Jehovah's Witnesses - Once Again the Fastest Growing Faith in the U.S.

by davidl7 99 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  OnTheWayOut

  Correct me if I am wrong as I say this off the top of my head.
  
  WTS has bent over backward to continue reporting positive numbers in the U.S..
  I believe, years ago, they incorporated Hawaii and Alaska back into the U.S. numbers rather than separate tabulations. That caused the U.S. to gain but the former count to simply disappear. They started counting older JW's again by pleading them to report at least 15 minutes of activity every month whether they ever knocked on a single door or not. They started counting the children by making them publishers younger and younger.

  I know the numbers don't mean squat because Catholicism or Protestantism doesn't count members by their publisher's card. It's apples and oranges. Reality seems to me that the numbers are more and more meaningless with fake reports and inflated reports from the membership with plausible deniability from HQ about such goings on.
• 

  leavingwt

  Even if every single person on the planet was a JW, WT would still be a lying, destructive, apocalyptic, millenarian, authoritarian, high-control group.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
• 

  Mad Sweeney

  And they always report PEAK numbers.

  So whichever month's number is highest is their reported peak for the year.
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  BurnTheShips

  I thought the yearly numbers were based on averages, not peaks.

  BTS
• 

  slimboyfat

  WTS has bent over backward to continue reporting positive numbers in the U.S..
  I believe, years ago, they incorporated Hawaii and Alaska back into the U.S. numbers rather than separate tabulations. That caused the U.S. to gain but the former count to simply disappear.

  No that's not correct. When they started to include Alaska they obviously compared the new combined figure with the previous year as if it had already been combined.

  They started counting older JW's again by pleading them to report at least 15 minutes of activity every month whether they ever knocked on a single door or not.

  That new rule must have boosted the percentage increase in publishers for the year it was introduced, but that was years ago now. Regardless of that change, JWs are still much stricter than other churches who continue to count members who show little or no commitment to the church.

  They started counting the children by making them publishers younger and younger.

  Maybe they did but it's the first I have heard of it. I think it would be difficult to gather information on that specific point. If anything I have noticed parents increasingly refusing to follow instructions in the Watchtower to push their children toward becoming publishers and getting baptised at a young age.

  I know the numbers don't mean squat because Catholicism or Protestantism doesn't count members by their publisher's card. It's apples and oranges.

  That's true. And the only way for a former Mormon to get the Mormon church to stop counting them as a member is to write to them specifically removing themselves, something only a tiny minority of those who leave can be bothered to do. The amount of people who no longer have anything to do with the Mormon church but are still counted as members must be considerable. Census returns from various countries bear this out where those who identify themselves as Mormons are only 20% or less of the official number.

  Reality seems to me that the numbers are more and more meaningless with fake reports and inflated reports from the membership with plausible deniability from HQ about such goings on.

  There are no doubt a lot of fake hours and publisher in the statistics. I suspect it was ever thus.
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  slimboyfat

  I thought the yearly numbers were based on averages, not peaks.

  The yearbook gives both a peak number and an average. The statistics posted on the Watchtower website only show the peak. I don't know what figures are being used for the publication linked in the first post because they match neither the official peak nor the official average number.
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  I quit!

  Maybe Jdubs are having more children now. It certainly isn't growing due to the success of the door to door work. And we keep hearing of congregations being combined due to their shrinking size and not enough qualified elders. I wouldn't put too much stock in this report.
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  slimboyfat

  I don't think the door to door work ever was the effective. I know far more who became Witnesses through extended family and work colleagues than from being called on at home.
• 

  alanv

  The 4.37% figure is based on this books figure from last year. Unfortunately both figures are wrong. So the true figures are as the society have said which is 2%. This has been rounded up. The true figure is actually around 1.7%
• 

  Mr. Falcon

  I've always wondered why they rarely talk about the huge amount of people who are DF'd, DA, inactive or whatever. They only make reference to this "somber" statistic as evidence of "satanic attacks" on the Organization.

  If you have 10 apple trees one year, and that same year you grew 3 new trees, but 5 trees died, you now have a total of 8 trees. But they would print and brag that they have 13 trees, plus have started studying with 5 other trees from different crops. What kind of Orwellian math is this?

  

  According to these figures, JWs are going out in field service 9 days a week! Print it!