After lurking for 7 and half years (is that a record?!) it’s time for me to say hello.
So who am I, and what’s my story?
I’m a born in JW, with all my siblings, mother, wife and children in. I live in the UK (Southern England) and it was 25 years ago that I was baptised at Bowes Road. If I’m honest I always had some slight doubts. I did skip through Crisis of Conscience in the local library when I was studying with an elder who was a family friend. But I was 16, excited about all this prophecy which was coming true around me and thought any questions would be answered in a future WT, or of course the Big A would come. I left school with the minimum qualifications because, as my family was told, Armageddon was imminent. Why do more? And to be fair at the time I embraced it. Why learn stuff that would serve a career which would then be useless in a paradise earth?
I pioneered in the 90s, went to Bethel for a time in the 2000s. It was when I came out of Bethel that the doubts began to solidify. I found the London Bethel, as a whole, cold and cliquey. The brothers on my team made it fun in the daytime (the practical jokes were sometimes great fun) but stuck in a separate tower block rooming with a nutty newbie (who should never have been in Bethel) and a young married couple who welcomes us by explaining which cupboards were ours and which were theirs…I quickly started to hate it. Being given one rule book was bad enough, but TWO! (London Bethel had its own one) felt crazy. “Don’t feed the birds – it will encourage rats!”
Post Bethel, the only job I could get was night shift work, and then in a shop, both of which meant missing meetings. That, coupled with the Internet and my doubts, started me on my journey.
So when did my doubts really grow? They started, as with quite a few on here I think, with the ’95 change to Matt 24:34. Interestingly I think it was two things. One the change itself and secondly the way it was handled. First the change. In the 80’s, when I was a teenager, the focus of talk after talk was the generation of 1914. It gave so much urgency to talks. I can remember talks around ‘88 going along the lines of ‘So how old would someone need to be to be aware of the outbreak of WW1? Why if they were born in 1910 they would be now 78 years – how long does a generation last. The bible says 70-80 years…brothers why waste time on a career in this world when this world is passing so soon?”
It was constantly stated. Endlessly. To handle that change with a shrug and say:
“Eager to see the end of this evil system, Jehovah's people have at times speculated about the time when the "great tribulation" would break out, even tying this to calculations of what is the lifetime of a generation since 1914. However, we "bring a heart of wisdom in," not by speculating about how many years or days make up a generation, but by thinking about how we "count our days" in bringing joyful praise to Jehovah”
was shocking. I mean come on, YOU, the F&DS said it over and over again. Speculated? You said in every Awake! Magazine up to then:
"This magazine builds confidence in the Creator's promise of a peaceful and secure new world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 pass away."
Grief - that annoyed me. But I could cope with it, and might not have been here today if they hadn’t changed it in 2008 and again in 2010. The 2010 change was so obviously made up that it really got me researching online. The new 2013 changes to the F&DS tipped me over the edge to bluntly saying, “Guys, you’re making this up as you go along”.
There’s more to my story, particularly with living inside an Organisation that clearly makes some doctrines up, how I find myself in a seemingly unique no-mans land and coping with a family that’s all in but I’ll come back to that later.
Thank-you for reading.