I have read it a couple of times and I’m struggling to see what the change really is. There seems to be a message between the lines to disfellowship fewer people, say hello to them at the meetings, and to automatically reinstate people who are currently disfellowshipped but say they are repentant.
But at the end of the day they still say to disfellowship unrepentant people, including children. And saying hello to someone at the meeting is not much if you have to ignore them the rest of the time. I think many JWs already said a quick “hello” to disfellowshipped people and this was already allowed in fact. So is this actually a change at all? I’d like to find the earlier reference for saying hello, because I’m sure I remember that.
So what really has changed? They seem to be signalling change without putting much meat on the bones at all.
Reading these instructions, the take away would seem to be that the Governing Body don’t want elders to disfellowship people unless it is unavoidable. In a judicial committee the only thing that would get the person disfellowshipped is if they flat out say “I’m not sorry and I’m not going to stop” whatever it is they are doing. That’s very rarely what happens. More often the person says they’re sorry and they’ll stop and the elders say they don’t believe them for various reasons: usually repeat offences, only stopped when caught, was denounced by somebody else rather than handing themselves in.
The impression the new instructions creates is that if someone says they’re sorry then the elders should take them at their word. It is only an impression and they haven’t spelled this out in so many words, but otherwise it’s hard to understand what the fuss is about. If this is what they mean then they need to state it more clearly, because there will still be hardline elders who stick to the old procedures of not believing the person in the judicial committee, unless they are explicitly told otherwise.
If the so-called adjustment in dealing with minors is intended to appease Norway and other governments I think it may fall short, because they still leave disfellowshipping as an option, and that still apparently involves shunning apart from a brief greeting at the meeting. Even if that cuts down the number of cases drastically, any children at all getting shunned is too many. They need to either abolish disfellowshipping of minors or abolish shunning for minors who are disfellowshipped. Anything less, even being super reluctant to impose the sanction, or only doing so on rare occasions, is not good enough to address the basic point that shunning children is not acceptable.
