So did anyone catch the January JW Broadcast?
It's the "spiritual content" of what would have been introduced in the October Annual Meeting, had the October Annual Meeting taken place.
Morris, Splane, and Jackson introduce a new JW study publication: "Live Forever Eternally - An Interactive Guide".
Details were sparse, but apparently it is a 256 page book (when in actual printed form), primarily designed to be used in its electronic form, stuffed with links to videos.
It is designed to be "just one book" to be studied prior to baptism, where "all 60 questions that baptism candidates have to know" are found in just one place.
The purported reason is to make JW "Bible" studies more "productive", i.e., lead to more baptisms.
Splane brought out the governing body's "great concern" that 10 million+ "Bible" studies are conducted by JWs every year, but the number of baptisms has been stuck at 200,000 - 300,000 per year for decades. So the thinking is, this new book + a "new method of conducting studies" (again, no real detail, but apparently it involves more "discussion" and less "question and answer").
Want to know my thoughts? Well OK, glad you asked!
I imagined a team of restaurant owners gathered in their office late at night after closing.....
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"I can't figure it out, Tony. We only get 3% of our visitors ever coming back to eat a second time at our restaurant. It makes no sense to me. We serve the best $#!+ sandwich in town!"
"It certainly is a puzzler, Tim. I wonder what could be the issue?"
Grim faces and stares at the floor continue on for several minutes.
Finally David jumps up. "By Jove I've got it! I've got it! I know why people aren't buying it! Our methods are all wrong! We've been so focused on selling our $#!+ sandwiches we haven't seen how the world is passing us by! What we need to do is....
...now listen carefully....
...this is going to work, I know it....
...what we need to do is...
...instead of selling $#!+ sandwiches.....
...we need to sell $#!+ PIES!"
Rapturous applause and backslapping ensues as $#!+ sandwich-making equipment is rolled out and $#!+ pie-making equipment is moved in.
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That's pretty much what this latest change is - a different form of the same horse puckey. It never occurs to these bozos that the reason that of the 0.001% of the people they manage to talk into studying, only about 2% ever bother to get baptized, is not the form of teaching but rather the content.
Idiots.