My family member says he only attends two meetings per week. And only goes out on Field Service whenever he wants to. Are some Halls less strict than others?
Meetings
by lavendar 11 Replies latest jw experiences
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Witness My Fury
They dropped the book study / group study a few years back so that leaves mid week and sunday. as long as he does some FS a month he will be largely left alone, if he misses a few months then the pressure to conform again will grow.
It doesnt matter how they dress it up and fiddle about with it, it is still a cult.
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lavendar
Thank you, WMF! Boy, they changed that!
Yes, it sure is a cult, and I wish I could help my family member see that.... :-(
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millie210
Yes lavender, they had to drop the bookstudy because the number of people attending had dropped drastically and the ones who did attend found it harder to attend the other weekly meeting. So the brilliant solution was to condense the meetings and use the flock as the reason. People busy, high gas prices, Kingdom Halls having so many congs. meeting that there werent enough free nights for them all to meet. were all reasons that were given.
The problem (for the Org) has been that canceling the book study, sent a subtle message that meetings could be cancelled! Most of them were held on Tues. nights originally and you would have thought Tuesdays were a high sabbath or something!
I heard so many people say how weird it was not to be "somewhere they were supposed to be on TUESDAY".
The fact that the material from Tuesday got moved over to the remaining night didnt seem to lessen the psychological feeling that meetings can be just "removed" by the magical Governing Body wand.
As a result, people who used to miss the book study now miss the first part of the other week night meeting where the book study material is covered. The first 30 minutes had been set aside for that and now people routinely arrive 30 min. late.
As for field service, the whole cart witnessing thing is the big fascination now. The Org is really struggling to keep people going door to door. I dont attend now but for the last couple years that I did, I would see the Service Overseer going from person to person at the meeting trying to get enough people to sign up to work with the C.O. when he visited.
Back in the day, it was hard to get on the list to work with the C.O. There were a lot of people vying for that "honor". Now not so much!
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sir82
Are some Halls less strict than others?
Absolutely, it can vary by the congregation's members' economic status, education, cultural background, all sorts of things. Also, the elders can really set the tone - real hard @$$es, mellow, demanding, apathetic, etc.
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Awake at last
Interesting Millie210. I have not been regularly attending since about 2009 and have not attended at all since the memorial of 2013 so am very out of touch except for this forum. I have to agree with you about the door to door being a failure as a sister calls on me and chats. When I suggest that I should let her go and meet people who may be interested, she says it is OK as no one is home anyway and I think that if they were, they wouldn't listen, so she may as well count time and a RV talking to me about the pets, my family, etc. -
sowhatnow
id say it depends on how popular you are, lol.
no one notices that i haven't been there for a year.[well maybe a few 'regular' people]
no one called me out on my lack of service activity for 5 years.
as long as you are there with a happy face, comment once, and give them something to write down on their paperwork for your service time someone can slink along till they die on minimum activity.
if someone i bumped into said oh i did not see you at meeting, I assure them I listened in.
wore that one out.
maybe if they stopped keeping records of everything and acted like a normal church they would have more members lol
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Sofia Lose
The keeping records of preaching hours makes every single JW a liar.
Here is how I count my time: The minute I step out of my house en route to 'service' to the very minute I step foot back in my home returning from 'service'. It amounts to a very nice 'above average' hour count each month. Has to be done this way to keep hubby and others off my back.
SL
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steve2
When in contact, my still-in relatives sometimes make revealing comments about the state of "play" in their kingdom hall. I sometimes inwardly raise my eyebrows - but I am careful not to comment because the blinds can come down quickly if they think I put a negative spin on their "revelations". Sheesh - I can play ball!
Oversall, I get the distnict impression that, despite lots of warnings from the platform and publications, more and more of them are simply slackening off.
guess one of the "dangers" of formally deleting one of the weekly meetings is it inadvertently signals a relaxing of sorts - even if the deleted meeting is added to an existing one.
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Phizzy
Back in around 2006, when I was last having anything to do with Attendance figures, I did a survey and worked out that at any one Thursday or Sunday Meeting, at least 25% of actual Publishers were missing, and no doubt the Tuesday Group Study suffered even lower Attendance.
Is it now worse than that ? Surely not. Mind you, it may have been that our very easy going Congregation did not really frighten people into attending, so we were far worse than others of the time ?