I had the opportunity to attend Monday nights forum on the question, "Who is Jesus?". The hosting college provided a moderator and there were three speakers; Mormon professor of theology, local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses Elder, and a Methodist minister. Each speaker had a 20 minute intro as well as a 5 minute conclusion with about an hour of question and answer in between.
The local Elder went first and discussed the history of the organization, persecution of witnesses in Nazi Germany, medical issues, and supreme court victories. Of the 20 minutes provided, 2 or 3 were spent discussing wbts theology on the person of Jesus. The entire presentation seemed to be geared to say, "Hey, we're not some weird cult. We're just like everyone else, and by the way we've got a great organization that's done some pretty amazing stuff." Not quite what one is looking for during such a discussion. I've noticed though that the organization seems to have a pretty tough time discussing Jesus at all.
The Mormon professor was pretty articulate and straight forward, but the Methodist minister seemed only concerned with refuting anti-trinatarian arguments.
The question and answer portion of the evening was pretty benign. The moderator read the questions from yellow flash cards that had been filled out by the audience during a ten minute recess. He seemed to weed out anything to inflamatory.
Conclusions were good, accept the Methodist minister had some bizarre matrix skit played on a movie screen for his conclusion that was very strange to say the least.
The oddist part of the evening for me was the number of J dubbs present at the event. I went with a friend of mine and didn't expect to see any one I knew. I wasn't aware that the organisation participated in these types of events.
