At the moment there are only a few totals for 2016 on the ''about us'' part of their website. I cant help but feel they are getting closer and closer to just putting out figures that dont show how the org is doing in different parts of the world. Just a few years back they had local congregation reports on the notice boards, national reports in the Kingdom Ministry and the yearly report in the Jan 1st Watchtower as well as the yearbook. That has all gone now. They have moved a long way away from that because of the pretty bad reports over the last few years. It will be just another step to cut the info from their site to the bare minimum. I really hope I'm wrong though.
284000 baptized in 2017
by jw-verite 69 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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eyeuse2badub
How can there be so many half empty KH's if so many are getting baptized? Must be at least one or two leaving or becoming inactive for everyone getting baptized! Or are the numbers being artificially inflated?
just saying!
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sir82
How can there be so many half empty KH's if so many are getting baptized?
Easy - the meetings are excruciatingly dull and JWs take any and every opportunity to skip them.
You know how excited you got when you were in school and there was a "snow day" - snow was too deep so school was cancelled?
Multiply that sense of joy by about 10 and you get the JW reaction when weather forces cancellation of a meeting.
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WTWizard
And I hope every single one of them get disfellowshipped and/or are replacements for people that got disfellowshipped. And not for something that they will get reinstated for, either. Hopefully, they are full blown apostates and will never rejoin the jokehovian witless cult again.
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alanv
eyeuse2badub. Although there is a reasonable amount of people getting baptised each year, the figure does not tell you how many witnesses have left, either faded or disfellowshipped etc. In other words they got 280,000 in through the front door but also a large number out the back door. JWfacts has some good graphs of this on his website.
Hopefully if it is published we will see how many publishers have left later this month .
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jookbeard
it just goes to show that the creative reports they publish must be treated with scepticism, the reality is the number really getting is a fraction of that.
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Half banana
@Stillin the world average annual population growth is just above 1% I think I read 1.14 %, it is declining and will be 1% by 2021.
The JW increase in publishers has been about 2.5% but remember the “world average” is not the same demographic as JW membership which includes a lot of nations with higher numbers of children than average, especially in South America and central Africa. So it would be expected to produce new JWs at above the world average of population increase by insider births alone. It seems that the % increase is in line with JW births of born-ins based on this demographic.
But half the number of all new Witnesses go missing each year through deaths, DF and faders so there is probably another group of new converts coming in to make up some of the losses especially in Brazil where they don't take the JW religion too seriously and also in the politically unstable parts of tropical Africa where historically JWs have always flourished.
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Sanchy
No surprise if there's a bit of a spike this year in baptism/publisher numbers with all the political turmoil. The constant narrative in the news feeds right into JW's fears.
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OneEyedJoe
The numbers for the US are pretty telling, though. 28k baptized, with a publisher growth of only 3k. No matter how you interpret that, it's not promising. Even without the typical calculus that would leave you estimating that 25k left (obviously this is only an estimate and relies on these numbers being typical and sustained since baptisms and publishers aren't exactly aligned). Looking at the publisher growth as people that are soon to be getting baptized actually makes it look worse in my view. Yeah, they baptized 28k last year, but if the publisher growth stays at these levels, baptisms will inevitably dry up too.
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Crazyguy
With all the Halls closings and sells offs you really believe these numbers. I made a million dollars last year too, no it’s true just ask me!