The new Communist government were reasonable. You can preach in your Halls just not "door to door." Missionary Stanley Jones and other non chinese stoped...but encouraged the chinese brothers to continue. Nancy did and was arrested and warned many times. Having many kids including an infant she finally was sentenced an served 23 YEARS...her kids were adults when she was released. WHY WHY WHY Nancy. Could she have preached at a coffee shop or informally? Pushed to go "door to door like the apostles" she ruined her life and family...not so "encouraging" now my eyes are open.
Nancy Yuen China 1953- 23 years jail for refusing to stop door to door! Why did she do it?
by Witness 007 18 Replies latest watchtower scandals
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ScenicViewer
Is it true that missionary Witnesses stopped going door to door, but encouraged Chinese Witnesses to keep doing it?
Why? The double standard of that is awful.
It also shows the lack of love that the Watchtower organization has for it's rank-and-file followers. It leaves the feeling that people are disposable to Watchtower as long as a good persecution story can be published, which can often be spun into a good sales pitch to make the Organization grow.
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Witness 007
She was a hero paraded thru every Convention as a shinning example of integrity...too bad her 1 year old was now 24!!! Missionaries were worried they would be deported and too obvious to do door to door...so they didnt do it.
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dozy
yeah - Franz talks about this experience extensively in one of his books. Ridiculous that the missionaries were allowed to make some "adjustments" in their ministry ( ie stopped going DTD ) but the chinese JWs weren't given the same option. Different now of course - JWs don't go door to door in lands where it is banned , but back then there seemed almost to be attempts to provoke the authorities.
w637/15p.437HowIKeptStronginFaithinaChineseCommunistPrison It was back in 1954 that the authorities called Stanley Jones and myself, both of whom were missionaries, down to the police station and told us that we would have to stop preaching from house to house. If we wanted to do any preaching we were told to do it in our “church” and not outside of it. While they did not prohibit our conducting home Bible studies, they demanded the addresses of all those on whom we called.
This called for some adjustments in our preaching activity, in order to keep it going at least to some extent. Of course, the police had not told us that all of Jehovah’s witnesses must stop preaching from house to house; they said it only to us missionaries. So our Chinese brothers did not slow down in the ministry even a little bit, but were eager to press on, showing that Jehovah’s spirit was on them.
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Ding
This is similar to WT policy regarding brothers refusing to be drafted into military service in the USA.
If a judge sentenced a man to do "alternative service" (non-military) probation instead of sending him to prison, the WT said that was fine -- the JWs could do the alternative service because it was non-military.
However, they didn't allow them to AGREE to do this type of service as a way of avoiding criminal prosecution.
They also didn't allow them to TELL the judge that it was acceptable to the WT for them to serve this type of sentence.
That would be "compromising."
Because of this, JWs were needlessly treated as criminals, and judges assumed that their only option was to sentence those JWs to prison.
As a result, a number of JW men became convicted felons and went to prison needlessly instead of performing alternative non-military jobs.
Of course, the GB called this "persecution" by the world system.
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Las Malvinas son Argentinas
The WT wanted a martyr to draw attention to their work in China, and they got a willing participant in Nancy Yuen. Though most of the blame rightfully goes to the organisation who trained and conditioned Mrs. Yuen to make such dangerous decisions, there is a huge part of me as a mother that feels that she chose an organisation over her family. She had an exit visa to Hong Kong (which had to be extremely difficult to get at the time) to join her family, but she chose to stay and had to have an inkling as to what would happen. She's not a hero or a martyr. Her children needed her as their mother, but she had other things in mind. She could have been in good standing with 'Jehovah' even if she went to Hong Kong and preached there. It was entirely unnecessary, and the Society should have had the foresight to wait on a more favourable political climate to emerge in China (as it eventually did) to push more strongly on their missionary efforts. I'd be curious as to what her children think of her and what she did now, and if they and her husband still are JWs.
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xchange
Ah, such fortitude she displayed and no doubt used by the society to shame everyone into examining our paltry 10 hours a month average service time and the freedom we have to enjoy such work.
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fulltimestudent
Quoting ScenicViewer: " Is it true that missionary Witnesses stopped going door to door, but encouraged Chinese Witnesses to keep doing it?
Why? The double standard of that is awful."
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Not excusing the two missionaries, but attempting to understand their dilemma. The 'new' Christians (I use that term for a reason that will become clearer) they had converted, needed their continued guidance. If they went to jail, they could not be in the congregation to guide the new ones. They had to make a decision, and they made the same decision, that was soon made by the early church leaders in the waves of persecution that the early church experienced in Roman times
Persecution of the early church was, in the beginning, random. Individual cities and regions would try to eliminate Christians for a variety of reasons. But mid-third century things changed, persecution began to be commanded by the Emperor. In 249 CE, Decius became Emperor and in the first major persecution of Christians initiated by an edict of the Emperor Decius. He was concerned at various problems confronting the Empire, and blamed lack of worship of traditional Gods, and ordered that throughout the Empire everyone had to sacrifice to the traditional Gods. This led to a general proscription against Christians. How did they react, Bishop Dionysius (in Egypt) says, "... everyone (the Christians) cowered in terror." Thousands apparently lapsed as Christians and introduced a problem to the Church which would split it in the future. We also know that many of the Bishops (Congregation leadership) ran away and hid. We could view that more compassionately if we understand the key role that Bishops played in local churches by this time. If they were all killed, recovery of the churches would be more difficult.
Future persecutions by the Roman state, specifically targeted the leadership of the Church (cut off the head and the body is useless) and the church itself began to build a tradition of martyrdom in which the story of individual martyrs would be read in church (like in a service meeting) to stiffen the resolve of those early Christans in order to try to prevent compromise.
I think you will clearly recognise the parallel in modern China, and not merely in the missionaries decision to comply with a official demand that limited, but did not entirely stop their public proclamation, but also in the WT Society's need to provide examples of 'faithfullness' to soft-living westerners, as (no doubt) the WT leadership must have wondered as to how many would stay faithful in a periods of active persecution.
I often wondered myself how I would behave if my children were threatened with death in front of me? I also have a low pain threshold and wondered if I could be tortured without compromise?
All needless, it took disfellowshipping to give me an opportunity to break the shackles (largely self-imposed) on my mind and to re-examine the concepts of both the JWs and Christianity and to realised it was all a fraud and all the 'experiences' of 'faithfullness' were also just a waste of human life.
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doofdaddy
It's a very long time ago but I met NY in Hong Kong at her first meeting after being released. All were crowding around her. I had no idea. I seem to recall that her children secretly paid a bribe to finally get her out but that was never printed. Actually I went to dinner at a very wealthy Chinese jws place and was there when they recorded her story for the wt. Actually I think a gb member flew out to do the recording and to catch up with Stanely Jones etc, It is sooo long ago I forget the details but they were all great people and happliy accepted me as just a rank and file. Why did she do it? Stubborness and that strange human trait that serving a god gives you a licence to do what ever is necessary....