we were talking about some countries having all of their meetings in one day and we were saying wouldn't be cool to do that so we could get them all out of the way and have the rest of the week off. But one sister said ... It was the meetings that kept us spiritual so we needed more of them not less.
There was a tiny congo (call it Congo A) about 40 miles from our home. It was formed out another congo (call it Congo B) that was another 30 miles down the highway, all because a zealous CO said felt there was a big boom in JW growth coming and he urged B to form a new congo in this little village. They did so by convincing two or three families to move there to support the two families that were already living there. A couple of other families from an urban congo nearby also agreed to move there.
In all six families, about 25 people (counting kids) made up the new Congo A. They had four or five "studies" coming to meetings as well. But there was no work there and the weather was extreme in this mountain village, meaning residents were often snow-bound in the winter. The two urban families moved back home in less than a year. One of the families that originally lived in the village just stopped coming to meetings and refused to talk about why. This left three families in Congo B, and soon one of the men lost his job and the family was forced to move away. This all happened within 15 months.
The two families that were left lived at opposite ends of this rural area, about 20 miles from each other. So they took turns holding all the meetings at their respective homes. Every Sunday, at one home or the other, they held the school, service meeting, took a break to eat lunch, and sat back down for the "public" talk and WT study. The "studies" had long since lost interest in this bizarre little group and that meant the meetings were attended by two families (four adults and four kids, two of them infants).
This became problematic, of course, for all the reasons you can imagine. Finally a new CO arrived in the circuit and he wrote the WTS and got permission to "fold" this tiny little Congo B back into A from whence it came.
In telling the story, the CO would always say, "It's the meetings that keep us spiritual and this is what can happen when you go five or six days without a meeting." Of course, that overlooked the fact that each family supposedly had its own book study one night during the week (although I'm told this was about as frequent as the "family study" all dubs are supposed to have). The CO also overlooked the fact that his predecessor "sold" the idea of this "split," telling all the dubs that Jehovah would bless the whole thing without fail.
Looking back, I think the CO was partly right. Frequent meetings are important to the JW system. Not because Jehovah's spirit is involved in any way. Rather, the indoctrination doesn't work when you give people long intervals in which to recover. I believe it was this indoctrination that the dubs missed, even if they didn't recognize it as such.
I know when our family began its planned fade, the first time we went three weeks without going to any meeting of any kind (and without reading any of the WTS publications), we were like patients recovering from pneumonia. We could breathe again and it felt good to see the sky.
