I wrote this up on my blog, thought maybe I'd share it here. Some of these points have been discussed by others but they are all very valid. I've got three of the biggest reasons why preaching is worthless:
The most important part of being a Jehovah's Witness is to preach. They go door-to-door, they go to the street corners, they call people on the telephone. It's really amazing that these people are capable of undertaking that. I can't believe I could ever do it as well. While I do have the utmost respect for people who can do that work, at the same time I can't help but notice how pointless the whole thing is.
Pointless you say? Why would it be pointless? Well here's a couple points I thought of. I have been told by many Jehovah's Witnesses that those who have not heard the "good news" will be judged at Armageddon by their heart condition. Well then why should we preach? If heart condition is the deciding factor, why are we trying to make them Jehovah's Witnesses? If they won't be judged based on their status as JW's, why do we bother? If they were to hear the message and reject it, would they be destroyed at Armageddon for rejecting it? If I hadn't talked to them and not given them the chance to reject the message, would they have been spared at Armageddon? If that's the case then I've caused the future judgement of a lot of people in my time. I've talked to many people who turned away the message. I guess I would have been better off not preaching. It would have ended up saving more people in the end.
For that, and many other reasons (being the Watchtower literature's own words), I've come to the conclusion that JW's and the Governing Body think only JW's will survive Armageddon. Saying that God judges hearts is a just a way for JW's to avoid saying they think the person they are talking to is dead meat at Armageddon. JW's do a lot of double-talk to avoid saying what they really believe. Just goes to show you how awful and absurd most JW's think their beliefs are.
Another point to consider is that if the JW's message is so urgent, why do they pick the least effective way of delivering that message? Lives are supposed to at stake due to an apocalypse that is to occur any moment now. Yet they choose to knock people's doors? If you lived in New York City and government officials knew there was a problem with the drinking water, and they had only days until that drinking water reached people's taps, do you think they would send a small amount of people door-to-door warning people? Obviously not. They would utilize television, the radio. They might even impliment some sort of text message system to alert citizens. Yet JW's use a ridiculously lousy method of reaching people.
Lets also consider the hours that JW's spending preaching. Each year they spend over 1 billion hours preaching. It's a remarkable figure. But let's take a second to look into that figure. There are about 200,000 people baptized into the JW's each year. We aren't even going to get into the amount that are disfellowshipped, become inactive or die. Those numbers don't matter to my argument here. Okay so for 1 billion hours preached, 200,000 are baptized. That means it takes 5,000 hours of preaching to baptize one person. That means that if we were to spend 8 hours per day preaching, not taking any days off, it would take us 625 days to baptize one person. That's not far from two years. There is a problem with that though. How many of those baptized are JW children, coerced into getting baptized. Of all the people I've seen baptized, the majority of them are JW children. I'm going to give their numbers the benefit of the doubt and say that 1/4th baptized are people that aren't children of JW's. I doubt it is even close that high. It would probably be more accurate to say it's around 1/10, but even that seems a little high. I have no proof of that figure and there probably never will be any proof so this is just speculation. However, any honest JW would probably agree with me. By using the 1/4 number, that means it would take 20,000 hours of preaching to baptize one person. That means it would take 2500 days at 8 hours per day to baptize one person. That is nearly 7 years.
Lets take that number and factor it even further. Okay, based on our 1/4 number it is taking 20,000 hours to baptize one person. The average amount of hours per month for JW's is around 10 hours preaching. So the average JW spends 120 hours per year preaching. How many years would it take the average JW to baptize one person? It would take them 166 years. Yikes. That doesn't seem very effective, does it? What an unbelievable waste of time.
