Who Exactly Answers Your Letter When You Write the Society? (page 2)

Healthworker

"I think the Service Department open the mail and they will respond if they are willing to do it"

If the question raises serious concern about a WTS viewpoint. What would motivate them to answer?

My first and second letters were not answered even though a USPS delivery confirmation stated it was delivered. I followed up with a phone call to express both a complaint and an inquiry as to whether it was not recieved. I was told, it was delivered to a wrong place. They transfered me to service department where correct mailing address was provided. I resent the letter and did recieve a response. I believe, staff members are assigned to each State for example in this instance. Attn: California Service Desk followed by the New York state address. No name of the individual is listed except the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

Scott77

Band on the Run

I would love to write a carefully crafted letter to the Writing Department but I feel it will go directly to circular trash. There was no email address when I checked with jw.org. They must have form letters. I believe they love the monolithic approach and anonymity of their correspondence. No one ever asserts any personal responsibility.

I stumbled upon a law review article written by a female JW lawyer. There was a business address but I was certain she would answer legal correspondence. As soon as I was home, I wrote her a nice note on Crane's paper. Her article on Jehovah's Witnesses and Japan before and during WWII was technically well researched and written. Speaking of monolithic orgs, she did not illustrate her article with a single individual Japanese JW's story. All she wrote about was corporate action and how courageous "Judge" Rutherford was. My larger point was that I was going to go to a foster home in high school to finish high school. Why would Jehovah allow her to be a lawyer and I could only be a maid? I did not expect a response and received none.

Her article was published to the world. I am hard pressed to think of any answer she could have provided. I do not fathom how women can function as lawyers in JW land. My assumption is they lawyers desperately.

My family always spoke of going to particular people at Bethel depending upon the hurt. I did write to Henschel concerning m father's library and received a reply. A Bethelite visited me with a young black woman in tow. It was a strange pair.

I would write to vent constantly rather than post here but I believe such thought just makes them more secure in their righteousness.

Billy the Ex-Bethelite

Here's how it was in the US when I was in Bethel:

Letters and forms that are sent by DOs, COs, and BoEs are handled by the Service Department. This is mostly judicial, appointment, assignment, procedural type stuff. It's tons of paperwork they handle, but not really doctrinal stuff, as I understood. It gets handled by language/district/circuits that are assigned to "deskmen". Each of them has a secretary, all brothers. They have a lot of form letters. There were a few sisters in the department that did things like record congregation territory boundaries.

Doctrinal questions, stuff that comes from the territory or from congregation members, gets routed to Writing Correspondence. Here it gets distributed to brothers by language and by subject matter, I believe. These brothers have secretaries that are sisters. They have an entire scanning, tracking, and routing system to speed things up. They have boilerplate responses for many questions that get a little tweeking, such as quotes from the letter that was sent. These form letters get sent to the person who sent the question and/or letters get sent to the local congregation. Yet the letters typically take forever to get responses sent out. A fair amount of the correspondence is pretty weird. And a lot of it is tearful letters appreciating some article that came at "just the right time." The kind of stuff that any religion would probably receive.

Balaamsass

I had a buddy at the service desk who did that. 90% were form letters. A copy goes to your COBE. (My buddy HATED his job). "These people are sincere...and I send them a canned letter..."

Some very strange ELDER from WAY OUT in the boonies gave a wacked out public talk at our hall. A Ministerial Servant took it on himself to write the Society and tell them all about it. Of course within a month we got a copy of the letter. The COBE read it out loud at an elders meeting, and was pissed the MS "made him look bad". I thought the whole thing was kind of funny (the speaker sounded like a penticostal snake charmer), the speaker deserved it and the MS actually BELIEVED ANYTHING sent to WTBTS was confidential.

Scott77

	"...the MS actually BELIEVED ANYTHING sent to WTBTS was confidential".
	Balaamsass

One way to retain the royalty of Watctower speakers I think, is share with them what others say about them. In doing so, the Watchtower speaker's detractors are taken care of as big 'family team' with the Watchtower being the 'mother' taking care of its 'sons'.

Scott77

millie210

Thank each and every one of you for your answers.

It does seem like it is somewhat of a lost cause to try to get a fresh eye to look at anything you might bring up in a letter.

So.........if you are dealing with some corruption on a local level, there really is nowhere to go with it is there?

daringhart13

I had a prominent District Overseer tell me they end up in the garbage. He even did the whole 'crumple up and toss' motion while explaining it to me.

Don't bother. They don't care. Its a cult.

Balaamsass

Sorry but you are correct. Even Governing Body members have personal secretaries, and really don't care.

Some years ago I was trying to put an end to a notorious JW child pornographer who moved from area to area.

I made an end run around the brother at Bethel who tended to shred these reports. So I had a personal friend... who was a personal friend of a Governing Body member... hand deliver my letter and files to the GB member (who knew me personally). Shure thing ..right? No response......

They don't care.

LongHairGal

Millie:

I was very frustrated when I wrote to the religion years ago. I wrote several times. In many cases I did not get answers to my questions and they didn't even address points I brought out and conveniently ignored them. In some instances I got condescending type answers that I felt were an insult to my intelligence and had a generic feel of a form type of response. They also send copies of your letter to your congregation (I couldn't care less).

This is not intended to discourage you from writing. If it feels cathartic to write a letter, then do so. You might actually get lucky and get a decent response. But, don't be surprised if you don't.

Who Exactly Answers Your Letter When You Write the Society?

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