TMS... that's what I'd do if anyone told me I couldn't talk to my children anymore if they were Dfed. My son also told me the same if I was Dfed.
If anyone ever dared come between me and children......
Necessary family business
by stillin 25 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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TMS
" TMS... that's what I'd do if anyone told me I couldn't talk to my children anymore if they were Dfed. My son also told me the same if I was Dfed.
If anyone ever dared come between me and children...... "
Of course, I'm not saying we didn't pay a price organizationally even though we weren't disfellowshipped. We moved to a nearby congregation with our "reputation" for not following "theocratic order" following us. Just to understand. . . I had been an elder over 20 years, a congregation servant before that, gave talks at district and circuit assembies, conducted Pioneer Service School, etc., but wasn't allowed to read in the book study in my new congregation. This put the burden on an unbaptized husband of an elderly sister, who struggled so mightily through the study, the conductor would have to dispense with the reading of the paragraphs to finish on time.
When we showed up for midweek field service(we had been regular pioneers) the sisters naturally deferred to me. This made the Service Overseer scramble to get some young MS to take the group during the week. Just to play with them, I would alternate my days of participating to give them even more ground to cover. I eventually stopped altogether, but I'm certain they never felt comfortable leaving the assignment uncovered. A bizarre situation happened one Sunday when the speaker didn't show up. Some of the elders were out of town and the one in charge panicked and asked me if I would give the public talk on short notice. I complied, thinking how ironic that I wasn't qualified to read in the book study but was giving the public talk . . . . lol!
My wife was the first to stop attending and the elders made an issue of not issuing her a Kingdom Ministry. When I asked the presiding overseer somewhat incredulously if it was really a body decision, he slipped me a KM sort of on the sly. Later when the body decision was more rigidly enforced, I would let my wife have the original and make a crudely obvious black and white copy that I stapled together for my use. I sort of used it with pride, just waiting for some elder to have the nerve to bring up the old Lamp book quote about not copying publications.
While all of that was a very painful period for all of us as we were still essentially true believers, all of the anguish quickly dissipated when I read one chapter of Crisis of Conscience online in 1996. That very day I unloaded W&A volumes from 1956-94 into the dumpster along with all our other publications.
tms
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Billy the Ex-Bethelite
"Necessary family business" means that if the JW family members are sick or poor, they can speak to the df or da in order to get whatever help they can get from them. Because we know that the local KH doesn't have any provision to care for the needy JWs.
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stillin
Sadly, my wife is still gung-ho about the religion. She and I can't get eye-to-eye on much of anything anymore. So I just let her overhear my conversations with our child. Maybe that will help my wife to repent.
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Quarterback
Necessary family business is not a biblical term, and neither is 'Disfellowship'.
It's just a mental warfare strategy that the Admin Class of the WT soc is trying to use. "Shunning" is I suppose another word for it.
Shunning is used in the Med field, Legal field, and many religious org's worldwide. Mind you, it's not as extreme as the Muslim faith does, but it is a form of bullying. The Wt Soc go extreme in putting a wall between the family members.
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WTWizard
This is how they bust up families. What happens when a child gets baptized at age 6, and then salutes the flag 3 days later because of a slip-up? Are they able to really control such mistakes at that age? Most of them do not really understand that a flag salute is a pledge to their country until they are much older. Then they get into a hearing for saluting the flag, only to get disfellowshipped by heartless hounders (who won't even hear of an appeal or reinstatement). What then? And how is a 6- or 7-year old going to ask for reinstatement when the hounders are that heartless?
And you are not going to shame people back in. Rather, it will drive them even further away. In the meantime, other family members harden up, and this creates a mess. Supposing the disfellowshipped son (with a wife that is still in good standing) now has children? Are the grandparents supposed to limit their association with the grandchildren because their father is disfellowshipped? The problems this arrangement create make it almost impossible for the grandparents on that side to have a normal relationship with their grandchildren. To me, this punishes one generation for something their children did, and another for what their parent(s) did.
Yet, they never let you in on it while you are studying.