Did the elders keep secret files on us?

by XJWBill 29 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Tina

  Greetings,
  No one knocks on my door-never have since I left.
  The fs groups make an obvious skip over my house,I know I've watched and waited over the yrs to see if they would knock.
  I'm not DA'd or DF'd,but even since the cong,revamped the territory the newer ones still never knock-I believe there must be a notation in some record about my son and I. Tina

  Carl Sagan on balancing openness to new ideas with skeptical scrutiny...."if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense,you cannot distinguish useful ideas from worthless ones."
• 

  logical

  It doesnt matter who you give it to, when a company / organisation has information it will keep it. Also, it will sell it, regardless of rules or laws, and we will never know, at least conciously, that it has been distributed.

  Rest assured, nobody can be trusted, except close family and friends, just be careful what you tell people and who you tell.
• 

  thinkers wife

  Bill,
  First of all welcome to the board. I am glad you are at peace with yourself that is priceless.
  Not to differ with JT, because he is an excellent source of the inside workings of the Org., IMO.
  But in 1984, there was a "kangaroo court" held in my congregation. It dealt with some vile lies that a person I had studied with went to the elders with. The elders called a meeting. They made it clear to my ex husband and I that it was not a judicial hearing. They chose to have two elders from our congregation and called a third one in from another. When I questioned this, they simply said that since there were only two elders in our congregation, they wanted a third party to hear it.
  Also at the meeting were the woman who had made the accusations and about four other publishers who had heard the incident. Just to make things clear, I was from a small congregation of about 30 publishers, and this woman had publicly cursed me at our lunch break from FS. I have very little idea of what her accusations were with the exception of hearsay, and the horrible things she was allowed to scream at me during the meeting.
  They handled the entire meeting just like a comittee meeting (I know I have had enough of them). After several hours of grilling, they sent everyone out except for the ex and I. They again told us "this is not a comittee meeting". Then they gave us an ultimatum, they said "we feel it is in your best interests to step down as pioneers, if you don't step down we will have to remove you". I said again, "I thought this isn't a comittee meeting". They again said it is not. But we feel you are under too much stress and it would be best for you to step down. Needless to say, we had no choice. Even though it was very clear she was a liar, even the witnesses present, though lamely had to admit she was the one who made the attack.
  The upshot of the matter is, several years later, my ex husband became and elder, he was privy to the private file box. There was a file with our names on it and the date the the "non-judicial, kangaroo court meeting".
  So I am here to say that in this instance, the file was made and kept of a non-judicial meeting.
  TW
• 

  LDH

  There was an incident that this reminded me of.

  My dad used to be cong. Sec, and one night after the meeting brought home the 'card file' with all of the publisher's time cards in it, etc etc.

  As was his habit, he left his meeting bags on the porch while he took out the garbage. When he came back, like ten minutes later, the card file was missing.

  He went kinda nuts asking us if we kids took it, but no we were all inside the house with Mom doing chores.

  All 5 of us put our heads together, there was an elder who lived about a 5 minute walk away, and we think his teenage son came and stole the card file with people's confidential info. It was never recovered.

  One of the main reasons we decided it was him: My dad began receiving harassing phone calls (long before the days of caller ID). It was to the point of 55-60 hangups per day, on all of us. We were going nuts. My dad finally contacted the phone company and they had him sign a document that if they put a trace on the line at his request, he either had to be willing to prosecute whoever it was, or he had to reimburse the phone company the cost of the tap ($3,500).

  About three weeks after the phone tap was put on, a police car pulled up in our driveway. A young man (elder's son) from our cong was in handcuffs in the back seat. The police asked my dad to press formal charges against this little bastard, but my dad didn't/wouldn't. Yep, he had to pay the bill. The other elder (there never was a judicial committee) could only pay a little so my dad ate the rest.

  About a month later, the publisher record cards disappeared, never to be recovered. YEARS of data were on those dang things.

  Bizarre, huh?
• 

  reagan_oconnor

  3 elders= judicial committee. No matter *what* they try to tell you!

  After my divorce, my ex-husband went on a "spiritual rampage" -- he signed up to regulary auxillary pioneer, was given priviledges in the congregation, made a lot o' friends in his new hall. (These new elders had no idea that he'd he'd sexually molested his sister only a few years before. In addition, they weren't aware that he'd gotten me pregnant, married me, then insisted that I have an abortion. They also didn't know that he'd been having an affair -- thus, the divorce.)

  So, he was a sleaze.

  We were still on polite speaking terms after the divorce (until the stalking started, but that's a whole other story) and I would run into him occasionally. One day, he started preaching at me, pulled a WT out of his pocket to explain some "new light." My belief in the JWs ended in 1995 with the "new light" about the new definition of "generation."

  Three months later, he was gone. Left, didn't DA and wasn't DFed, but gone nevertheless. (I'd like to think that I helped water the seed of doubt that had obviously been planted along the way.) He later told me that he'd questioned the JWs for years, but only kept up appearance for his parents' sake (sound familiar?).

  The point is... he refused to meet with three elders to discuss. He said he had questions that he honestly needed to have answered, but wouldn't meet with three elders. They had several meetings to discuss his doubts. There was a point when the elders were yelling at him, and snuck a third elder into the hall and tried to bring him in. My ex walked out and never went back.

  I don't think that they can DF you if you don't meet with them. They used to do that in the early 80s (that happened to my Mom, who went crawling back -- MORON!) but they don't do it anymore, correct me if I'm wrong...

  --Reagan

  "I'm not a woman to be honked at." -- Maureen O'Hara, The Quiet Man
• 

  SanFranciscoJim

  I know of an incident in Maine where an elder was disfellowshipped for some sort of wrongdoing. Rather than keeping the publisher's records at the Kingdom Hall, he had these documents in his home. Instead of returning the entire box of records to the body of elders, he individually mailed each record to each publisher in the file. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that Kingdom Hall when the publishers got to see what was being written about them over the years!
• 

  Englishman

  Apart from files being kept, a bro moving to another congregation will definitely have his resume sent to his new PO. This will be in letter form and will list all his so called strengths and weaknesses. I have seen letters saying "Under no circumstances is this person to be entrusted with money / secrets / sisters etc etc."

  Englishman.
• 

  Pork Chop

  JT is absolutely correct. No individual records are kept other than Publisher's Record Cards and sealed judicial files. Paranoia is running amok again.
• 

  outnfree

  Pork Chop!!!!

  Welcome Back!
  But I'm rather disappointed to see that this is your third post and so you may not have posted over at the "murder letter" thread yet where we need your expertise.

  I'll just go check right now...
  
  outnfree
• 

  praying_mantis

  They DF'd me, and I didnt meet with them. However, I told an elder over the phone that I would never set foot in a KH again. Perhaps that was all they needed to know.

  Interestingly, he told me my "records" were sent to the congregation in the town I am currently in. I said, "Oh really. And whose property are they?" He said, "The congregations." I laughed and said, "Publisher records for someone who hasnt been in service for 4 years?"