by DT 5 Replies latest jw friends
Suppose the Governing Body hired you as a consultant at a rate of $100,000 a year. All you are required to do is meet with them four times a year and suggest ways to keep the organization growing at least a little bit. As soon as there is a year of negative growth, you are out of a job.
Assume that you don't care about the damage caused by the Watchtower Society. What recommendations would you make? How long do you think you would keep the job?
1. Reinstitute the Book Study groups.
2. Reinstitute food at assemblies and conventions.
3. Reintroduce good quality hardcover books.
4. Bring back the colourful convention programmes.
5. Bring back the announcements section of the Service Meeting.
6. Have more local need talks.
7. Stop being overly prescriptive for public talks and talks at assemblies and conventions.
8. Increase the size of the magazines and start charging for them and all literature again.
9. Make blood transfusions a conscience matter.
10. Encourage congregations to do organised charitable activity in their neighbourhoods.
11. Push family night in addition to the Book Study and suggest actual material to be covered.
12. Increase pioneer hours to 90 and aux pioneers to 60.
13. Appoint more special pioneers so that there are a couple in most congregations and get local congregations to pay for their keep.
14. Reopen branches in all countries where JWs are active.
15. Concentrate more on public relations, emphasizing family values, charitable works, and dropping the blood ban.
16. Encourage members to donate a tenth of their income.
17. Drop the overlapping generations nonsense and acknowledge we don't know when the end will come.
18. Appoint more international brothers to the Governing Body and drop the requirement to be anointed.
19. Introduce an extra prayer meeting and song sessions where Witnesses pray for local brothers and Kingdom Songs.
20. Have more huge internations conventions with hundreds of thousands in attendance like in the 1950s.
Slimboy, I just got word from the Compound, you got the job !
I think the time series we observe show that implicit date-setting really works. Look at the increases prior to 1975, but more importantly, look at the increases during the 1980s and early 1990s. This was a period when the implicit countdown was really on -- the old generation teaching pretty clearly had a time limit that expired around the turn of the century. In places like Japan and Canada, we see the effort levels simply dropping away around 1996/1997, when the generation teaching changed (not too long before people would have begun abandoning it on their own, I suspect).
The problem with the JWs now is that the overlapping generations idea simply can't support the sort of sacrifices they want people to make -- not in large enough numbers to keep increasing. It's one thing to keep your son out of college in 1984, say, when the End simply cannot be more than 15 years away. It's a whole 'nother thing to make that decision when generations might overlap and, indeed, he could live his entire life in this System. Thus, the current policy of pounding the table.
On the other hand, if there really were a solution less proposterous than "overlapping generations," you can bet they would have implemented it over the last 15 years.
They could start pushing the 2034 date if they get really desperate. It's getting to about the right time for it, only 20 years away now.
Yup.
And that should see most of the present GB, and even the real string-pullers behind them, safely shuffled off this mortal coil, so the new GB and their controllers would have to do the post '75 shuffle equivalent, not the present lot.
