So many replies to this thread and more than six hundred views so far to boot! First, thank you one and all for your replies. I have appreciated everyone’s thoughts and contributions on this. There is a good divergence of opinions as well and they all have given me a lot of food for thought. Second, I have the feeling that my experience may not be unique or even rare. I have to wonder how many other disfellowshipped individuals are torn between their desire to fellowship again with friends and family and their desire to hold on to the freedoms they now enjoy.
As I said, I don’t really expect to hear from this man again. But if I do, I have decided to extend kindness to him. I think this is right because it is applying the Golden Rule and giving him the honor and respect I would want to have. That doesn’t mean that I will soft pedal my beliefs about the WTS and its leadership, but that I will make every effort to ‘season my sayings with salt’ so that they will be easier to accept.
That being said, I am still wondering why he might want to see me again at all. I think loneliness is a factor although I don’t doubt he has made some friends during his exile. I like to think that I said some things that have made him think and sparked enough interest so that he wants to question me further. I don’t plan to make any demands or lay down conditions about further association. Since he has been an elder, he knows as well as I do what that would mean.
I plan to continue to use questions in our talks similar to the ones I posed in this first conversation. It is a tactic I learned when I attended Pioneer Service School and it has proved useful in the past. I will put the burden of proof on him and in this way I hope he will see there is no scriptural defense for the WTS, that the organization is a false religion. By questioning him, I will make him draw the conclusions and thereby make him realize what is actually going on.
I had to laugh at 00DAD and his example of a scriptural rationale for judicial committee hearings. I had forgotten about the Jewish Sanhedrin’s trial of Jesus Christ. Now there was a textbook example of how to run a star chamber proceeding and I’ll be sure to point it out when the topic of disfellowshipping comes up again as I’m sure it will.
Some may wonder why did I contact this man in the first place and that is a fair question. When my sister told me he was disfellowshipped, I knew that at least nine years had passed. How did I know this? Because when I last visited my Alabama family in 2004, he was disfellowshipped then, but had regular communication with my sister. Our talk yesterday showed that nothing had changed. My reason for contacting him was to ascertain his attitude toward the organization.
As our friend BluesBrother has shared, it isn’t unusual for people to stay out for years but still have the desire to return. The late mystery writer Mickey Spillane had been disfellowshipped more than thirty years before eventually being reinstated before he died. I think my friend has not yet settled in his mind what he wants to do. Yes, he still thinks the WTS is “Jehovah’s organization.” I believe he is motivated by fear of a horrible death at Armageddon. I have the faint hope that he may be open to another option, an option that will respect his human rights and still allow him to worship God in the way he pleases. I don’t have much hope of this happening through our conversations—if they ever take place. But I want to at least make this effort for no other reason than the friendship we enjoyed in the past. I call myself his friend. I want to act like one and offer him a choice. It will then be up to him to take it.
Quendi