I posted the comment below on another thread on elders stepping down. Although I left the JW's years ago, I still hold a fascination for the evolution of the religion and am curious on what future trends and developments may occur. So I thought I would start a thread on what future changes you think will occur in the organisation as the years go by, either doctrinally or organisationally:
There is definitely a phenomenon occuring in the organisation where as the years go by and disillusionment and disaffection worsens, the motivation is diminishing of members who are expected/required to devote more of their discrete time and energy, ie, elders, pioneers and MS's. Especially those with families.
This phenomenon is behind the reduction in recent years of the pioneer hourly requirement and the reduction in the number of meetings. As time goes on the Watchtower is having to adapt to this by reducing the time-requirement burden on pioneers and elders while at the same time trying to keep the hard statistical data from being negatively affected as much as possible. In other words, for statistical appearance and publicity purposes the Watchtower Society has been implementing changes to make it easier for JW's to statistically continue to serve as elders (reduce the number of meetings), MS's and pioneers while at the same time reducing the actual time and energy needed to fulfil those roles.
This trend will no doubt continue as time goes on, and probably worsen post-2014.
One of the further changes we might expect to see to reduce the burden of elders, especially ones with families, is to somehow reduce the time and energy spent dealing with judicial committee matters and which is to a large degree the main reason for the worsening problem of elders resigning. All the extra evenings and time out to attend to judicial matters takes a huge toll on elders time-wise (away from family, etc) and emotionally. The Society will likely try to simplify or minimise the disciplinary/judicial function of an elders job somehow in years to come. For example, they may change the elders rules so that judicial committees are only formed for reports of gross immorality (fornication, adultery) with any other less serious sins to be dealt with in a more simplified way, eg, two elders simply meet with the sinner on a saturday morning taking some time out of their field service time, provide some counselling and reproof, and then tell the sinful publisher that they are merely 'marked' rather than go through a full judical committee investigation. They would then do this again on, say, a monthly basis instead of knocking on empty doors to sell magazines on a Saturday morning or Sunday arvo to continue to provide more encouragement and shepherding to help the sinner, rather than ignoring the weak and fringe in the congregation and having to reactively do judical committee meetings during weeknights instead on top of all their other duties as elders.
The disfellowshipping arrangement is a double-edged sword for the organisation. It keeps gross sinners and apostates out, but it is taking a big toll on burning out elders and it is also destroying the number-base of JW's who might otherwise stay and make donations.
Another thing they could do is reduce the number of meeting assignments for elders. These can take a lot of preparation and nervous energy. In years to come they might totally eliminate the book-study and simply the Service Meeting, for example. They could also impliment video talks, eg, have the Presiding Oveseer in each congregation on a roster system to give a public talk that is shown on a video screen across all the congregations in an entire circuit. After all, everyone studies the same Watchtower article around the world on the same day, so why not all listen to the same public talk screened across a whole circuit of congregations?