The "30 Other Lands" in the Worldwide Report - revealed!

by cedars 116 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  cedars

  jookbeard - I know, you can always add on to the figures! Especially with Bangladesh and Pakistan - they're the worst of the countries not under ban when it comes to publisher/population ratios. However, for the purposes of the above article, I thought I would keep it simple for any dubs reading, and focus only on the countries under ban.

  I would love to know precisely how many people around the world have never heard of Jehovah's Witnesses. I would suspect it is somewhere in the region of the 4 billion you've suggested, if not considerably more.

  Cedars
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  jookbeard

  Western Europe, North and South America, fall out from disillusionment from the vast members of the Catholic church , impressive inroads with Japan and the Philippines and tin pot 4th World countires of Africa and that's the lot.
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  zero-zero-one

  When I was still in, I used to like looking up past statistics on some of the "Other" countries.

  I think if you could see the numbers, you'd find that most of the 26,000+ publishers would be found in China and Singapore. Some of the North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) were listed in early 90's yearbooks, but never had more than 100 publishers each (with virtually no growth from year to year). The last time Somalia was mentioned, they had a whopping 1 publisher.

  I also had a friend whose parents went to an international convention in Europe about 5 years ago, and they were told by a speaker that there were currently no Witnesses in Iran or Iraq.
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  zero-zero-one

  Take the 33 countries in your list, subtract Iran, Iraq, and Western Sahara (which is a sparsely populated territory of Morocco anyway) and I think those are probably the 30 countries the society is listing.

  Also, if you're really ambitious, you can occasionally find references to the Witnesses in banned countries listed in the Department of State Religious Freedom country reports.
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  jgnat

  Interesting that this swath of the earth is the very people the Christan Missionary Alliance has targeted for the last few years. They call their campaign "Silk Sun, Sand, and Spice" referring to the countries along the ancient Silk and Spice roads, the deserts, and the Carribean sun. Rather than relegating these countries to an embarrassing footnote, they are considered a priority because they are largely untouched by the Christian message.

  I the worldwide work of translation since 2002 has translated the bible or portions in to over 2,000 languages.

  The WTBTS likes to bill itself as most energetic in the evangelizing work, but they are easily overtaken by the rest of Christendom.
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  tornapart

  It's interesting that JWs believe they are the only ones preaching the Good News (well, maybe their style of it they are). In China Christianity is spreading rapidly. There's supposed to be over 100,000,000. I wonder how many of those are JWs?
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  cedars

  Thanks guys!

  zero-zero-one - according to the talk below, which was recorded from a bethel speaker / CO in 2006/07, the 3 "zero" countries where there are no publishers at all are Somalia, Afghanistan and North Korea. According to the speaker, the Society doesn't send anyone there because Jehovah doesn't want them to be killed! It's interesting how the same thoughtfulness and concern isn't applied to observing the Society's blood policy!

  This explains why the total number of countries under ban is 33, i.e. 30 "Other Lands" + 3 "zero countries" (as I call them).

  http://jwsurvey.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Matt_24.14_Fulfilled.mp3

  jgnat - I agree that the Society definitely gives up on these countries way too easily. I can imagine a strong presence by other more persistent Christian denominations. It is no longer in the Society's interests to pursue growth in these countries, because they know they won't yield donations from people there - rather they will need to spend millions on getting the work up and running. It's a financial black hole for them, and they'd rather leave it out of sight and out of mind at the bottom of the report. After all, they need to spend all that money on a shiny new lakeside world headquarters! The time left is reduced, so the GB needs a cosy location from which to watch the sulphur start to rain down!

  tornapart - funnily enough, I know one or two JWs in China! I can't imagine there are many there at all, certainly not any significant percentage of the number you've quoted.

  Cedars
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  jgnat

  Cedars, I offer another motive. Looking at the introductory brochure used to lure new converts, it absolutely depends on an audience familiar with the bible. Jehovah's Witnesses can't witness in countries where there has not been a previous exposure to Christianity. So they let other missionary societies break their backs in countries that are uninterested or antagonistic towards other religions before they move in.
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  cedars

  jgnat - yep, that makes sense too! However, even if the more zealous and less money-oriented missionaries of other denominations are unwittingly laying the groundwork for a future JW invasion, I don't see profit in there for the Society - especially if poorer countries like Afghanistan, Somalia or Yemen were to come on board.

  The GB are already in a muddle with a growth imbalance between wealthier and developing countries. I can't imagine the WT accountants rubbing their hands with excitement at the prospect of financing hundreds of extra Kingdom Halls in those kinds of countries if the field were to open up. How would they be paid for? The people in those countries have nothing. Parts of China, or wealthier Arab states? Maybe. But, certainly vast areas of the "30 Other Lands" are rife with poverty.

  If the governments of these countries were to write to the WTS with an open invitation to start preaching, I'm sure they would do their best with the dwindling resources they have. Until that happens (which it never will!) I honestly think they'd rather forget these countries exist. Maybe once they would have jumped at the opportunity, but I honestly think things are changing. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic, but I'll be watching next year's report with great anticipation for signs of further downsizing. I have a hunch the figures will show yet more branch closures and further reduced growth. This will make it even harder for the Society to give a toss about the "30 Other Lands". They have bigger fish to fry, like liquidating assets on a monumental scale.

  Cedars
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  steve2

  jgnat, you're right on the money with your observation about the Watchtower doing the best in countries that have already been 'softened'up by other, more traditional variants of Bible-believers (most notably, the "churches of Christendom" to borrow the Watchtower's damning collective title for other groups espousing Christianity). There is one remarkable exception: Japan - although the Watchtower's heyday appears to now be over in that country. It is a country that rapidly incorporated Western ideas into its way of life, but Christianity - or more specifically, the Bible, is not a staple of the Japanese outlook on life.

  cedars, I am sympathetic to slimboyfat's view that the Watchtower does not inflate its official publisher numbers. Some of those numbers it reports annually are plain embarrassing. Denmark, for example has hovered around (from memory) 13,000 JWs from the mid 1980s until the present day (nearly 30 years of stagnation!).

  Plus, countries such as New Zealand show spurts of growth followed by stagnation and decreases. Hardly the result of doctored numbers. Some support for the view that the Watchtower does not doctor its numbers is seen in the steadily increasing total number of "anointed" - surely if they were manipulating the numbers to look good, they'd want these potentially easily doctored numbers to show a decrease, but for several consecutive reports, the nmubers have been going up and up, in contradiction to the Watchtower's claim that the anointed are dying and getting their heavenly reward.

  Still, to say that I think the Watchtower provides honest, undoctored numbers of publishers does not rule it out from ever doing lying in its reports in the future. The rumblings are that fewer and fewer witnesses door-knock on a regular basis. That is, current JWs door-knock on average far less than earlier breeds of witnesses.

  Besides, if any doctoring of numbers is going on, I'd suggest it is likely to be at the local level where the temptation to inflate one's field report must be perrenially tempting - and easily accomplished. Not that I ever, ever , ever did it; and nor did my pioneering buddies.