The book "Crisis of Conscience" can be read on three levels, and although these levels are never far apart, the prose dictates that we keep these narrative arcs separate in order to get the best from this volume.
First we have a largely autobiographical thread that runs throughout the book. Ray Franz's early beginnings in the WTS, his service as a missionary in the Caribbean, his call to work at Bethel HQ, and his subsequent participation in the higher echelons of WT management. Then follows, for reasons embedded in the other levels, the reason for his leaving the WTS and his ultimate sacrifice, that of expulsion from the movement.
Second, Franz tells of a hidden, and silent conflict that took place in the leadership circles of the WT at this crucial time in WT history, and which went unreported to the Rank and File. It starts innocently enough when WT President Nathan Knorr requested Franz, along with three others, Ed Dunlap, Reinhard Lengtat, and John Wischuk, to compile a sort of WT theological encyclopedia that would explain in simple terms what the WT said the Bible said. That is, how the instrumentality of the Bible was interpreted by the WTS. This eventually became the "Aid to Bible Understanding " book. The book went on explain subject by subject, like most other Evangelical Bible Dictionaries, various aspects of biblical theology and how the WT treated them.
While researching the subject of church governance, Franz discovered an anomaly between what the Bible said and how the WT was organized. Hitherto, the WT was organized around single individuals, from a President who centred all authority in his own hands, and who, through patronage, parceled out this authority to other individuals, from Branch Managers down to Congregation leaders. Franz discovered that the NT pattern was for a multiplicity of leaders in these various offices, and that the privilege of patronage was collective and not an individual one.
Both Knorr and Fred Franz, at that time the Vice-President, and Ray's uncle, approved of this feature in the Aid book, and promptly on publication it was announced, that starting in 1971, a new governing arrangement was to be implemented, which was the multiple leaders arrangement, to be called "The Elder procedure". By the end of 1971, the entire body politic of the WT was effected and everywhere from the branch level to the congregation level, multiple leaders were installed.
There was one exception, however.
At Bethel HQ, the Individual Leadership was still in practice, with Knorr firmly at the helm and unwilling to permit or encourage any alteration. Thus began a struggle within the inner circle of the WT, as a group of men called the Board of Directors, and who hitherto had acted merely as decorative impedimenta under Knorr, realized that they should have real power within the Leadership. This grim conflict between Knorr and the Board of Directors was never without acrimony, but they finally won and the so-called Governing Body was established, and Knorr, who was now ailing, was relegated to a side role. Franz reveals his own disappointment with this new arrangement when the WT was now reduced to being controlled not by single despot, but by a group of men who collectively acted as a single despot. His discomfiture was noted and he was eased out of authority and subsequently fired.
On a third level, Franz reveals much of his own horror when he discovered some of the more intemperate statements that the WT writers made about the End of the World as we know it, the unscriptural legalism that governed WT thinking, and the scandal of Malawi that was successfully covered up. Chapters 7-10 are revelatory on these subjects.
One gets the impression that Franz was a sensitive man who, despite supporting much of WT theology on subjects such as the Trinity and the Afterlife, and who had no animosity toward his other GB members, was not afraid to speak out about abuses of power, as he saw it. On the whole the book is an absorbing read, and provides us with a vital understanding of how the most important change in WT history, came to be.
