Did others experience this on the ministry or among JWs generally?

by slimboyfat 61 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  slimboyfat

  Sometimes it's hard to know if our own experience of JWs was typical and what features were peculiar to our own area or the individual JWs we knew personally. I was wondering if others experienced this among JWs:

  A few times on the ministry, when we were working wealthy areas with large houses, some brothers and sisters would make the comment that they look forward to taking ownership of one of these big houses after Armageddon, when the worldly people have vacated them. Sometimes the conversations would get specific about who is going to get which big house. I thought it was pretty distasteful, and also a bit pathetic to be using the "truth" as a way of dealing with obvious resentment and envy issues.

  Was that sort of conversation typical in your experience?
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  Room 215

  In a word, yes; I encountered it often in the course of working through the affluent areas of the territory with a group.
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  TimeBandit

  My wife and I would say stuff like that in service sometimes. I've heard others say similar things as well.

  TB-
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  dropoffyourkeylee

  I heard similar statements. It always struck me as stupid, even when I was in.
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  Alive!

  Yes. I've heard that kind of conversation a few times in different countries - how very spiritual, ahem - last time I heard it, was the last time I went out in field service.
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  konceptual99

  Two things have been consistent about my experience of working affluent areas:

  1 - "these people won't be interested, they already have their paradise"

  2 - "I want this house after Armageddon"
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  rusholme

  I heard this quite often. Both the "I'll get that house", or how they'd get one even bigger. However, more common was trash talking the houses and the people owning them. How they'd soon get it all taken away from them, how their efforts are fruitless, and how they probably never have time to enjoy their luxurious facilities because of long work hours and high mortgage costs. Cognitive dissonance at its best.
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  LoveUniHateExams

  Yes, these types of conversations happened regularly.
  

  Here's another one, less distasteful but more absurd, said when encountering a vicarage:

  "do you want to talk to the enemy, or should I do it?"

  What is it with these peoples' mindsets?
  
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  slimboyfat

  The reason I bring it up is because I'm reading about the revolutionary Watchtower movement in Africa and one writer mentions that:

  "An informer told Stephenson that he had overheard Watchtower adherents discussing ways of equitably dividing among themselves his orchard, farm, house and other property in God's New Era. Stephenson conveyed this distressing news to the local administration. But although the informer had eavesdropped upon a private conversation, he reported no decision to take the path of violent rebellion. The Watchotwer men apparently satisfied themselves with believing and propagating belief, placing their full reliance upon God's future work, in the meantime, purifying their communities of sin."

  It's intriguingly difficult to distinguish the universal JW experience from the particular situation here. On one hand many Watchtower adherents in Africa in that period did stray from official Watchotwer teaching and become political agents. Plus it's probably not uncommon for oppressed people to talk about taking ownership in general, quite apart from Watchtower religion.

  Nevertheless there is also the sense that what at first might appear extreme, political, revolutionary talk (given the context) in fact is the sort of ordinary, everyday JW discussion that might as well take place during the ministry on the streets of Paris, Melbourne or Manchester.
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  slimboyfat

  If this topic of conversation is so commonplace I wonder if there's ever been any comment on it in the Watchtower. Has there ever been a study article that said: "quit talking about owning people's houses on the ministry and generally being envious assholes. Just cut it out brothers." Or something meaning that, reading between the lines.