Posts by wizzstick

Last night. I have two friends who I've talked to about this. Both fleshly brothers actually. One I think can half see where I am, the other is a newly appointed elder so is 'filled with the spirit' (or is on a high and is in a very positive place).

What I've started to do is cut and paste various WT quotes into a blank Powerpoint. That way one of these brothers allowed me to share it with him as a) it wasn't a bad apostate website, and b) it was all from the WT.

I'd just done a PPT on 1925. Something I'd always dismissed as not important but was actually as important as 1914 and 1975. He was shaking his head with it all and saying "What?". So it works well.

He's been Googlechatting with me all day, very much trying to find defensive positions for the GB. I just keep hammering the point, like the Moses one above, that there is nothing comparable in the huge history of the Bible.

Do you see what I mean by no mans land. I can see the crap but I can see pluses too.

32

My JW Experiences and Living in No Mans Land

by wizzstick in

jw
friends

lots of proper pioneering (90 hours), lots of calls, lots of studies, lots of interest.

enough to make it all interesting.

driving this buzz was the sense that armageddon was imminent.. my father was never a jw, and was very opposed.

wizzstick

happytobefree,

What do you see them preaching?

When I've explained about the Kingdom preaching work on the ministry I've always seen that as a overaching phrase that covers the setting up of God's kingdom on earth (Daniel 2:44/Matt 6:10) which is accomplished by Jesus (thus covering the gospel of Jesus bit) as King of God's Kingdom.

It makes sense to me. God Kingdom on earth sorts outs mankinds issues.

As I say, that's where I am right now. That may change as I learn more.

32

My JW Experiences and Living in No Mans Land

by wizzstick in

jw
friends

lots of proper pioneering (90 hours), lots of calls, lots of studies, lots of interest.

enough to make it all interesting.

driving this buzz was the sense that armageddon was imminent.. my father was never a jw, and was very opposed.

wizzstick

I could never go to another lot StAnn.

It's simply what I believe. If anything I'll fade with these beliefs (if they stay), but otherwise I'm done with religions!

50

My Story - a (kinda) newbie from the UK

by wizzstick in

jw
friends

after lurking for 7 and half years (is that a record?!

) its time for me to say hello.. so who am i, and whats my story?.

im a born in jw, with all my siblings, mother, wife and children in.

wizzstick

Hi jgnat,

In the link below I explain what I mean by no mans land:

http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/253892/1/My-JW-Experiences-and-Living-in-No-Mans-Land#4758180

32

My JW Experiences and Living in No Mans Land

by wizzstick in

jw
friends

lots of proper pioneering (90 hours), lots of calls, lots of studies, lots of interest.

enough to make it all interesting.

driving this buzz was the sense that armageddon was imminent.. my father was never a jw, and was very opposed.

wizzstick

Following my first post (http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/friends/253883/1/My-Story-a-kinda-newbie-from-the-UK), this one is more around my experiences of being a JW and where I am in my head today.

The 80s were, in retrospect, the last great decade of the Truth in the UK. Lots of ‘proper’ pioneering (90 hours), lots of calls, lots of studies, lots of interest. Enough to make it all interesting. Driving this buzz was the sense that Armageddon was imminent.

My father was never a JW, and was very opposed. So I started to attend meetings when I was legally able to do so in 1986. I look back on my first congregation with a lot of affection. It was a mixed bag of people, mostly intelligent (there was a brother who could read Greek and Hebrew), sane people who were left of centre JW’s. What do I mean by that? It was local terminology that was used round those parts, based on politics. If someone was a hardliner, they were called right wing, if someone was very liberal they were called left wing. Using politics to illustrate where people were in their attitude towards the Truth kind of underlines what kind of people these were. Interested in the world around them and could use it in a fun way.

We had some fruitcakes. There was a batty sister who said and did crazy stuff. She answered once using the old Heineken lager ad line (Refreshes the parts other beers can not reach) to describe the Holy Spirit (Refreshes parts other spirits can not reach!). A retired vicar started to come to meetings and shouted down a microphone, a local nutty woman rolled up in a wedding dress and declared she was the bride of Christ…but by and large the ‘pillars’ of the congregation were left of centre types who didn’t interfere with your life and were a good bunch.

So I started to pioneer, as I wanted to do more. Well, I knew I couldn’t in all honesty do 90 hours but I could do 60, so regular auxiliaried. Most of the younger ones in the cong had faded by now, so I started hanging around with a slightly younger bunch (5 years younger) some of whom were looking to do a house share. Three of us did one, and had a blast. We got in to trouble with a more right wing neighbouring cong for distributing invites like confetti at Norwich DC for our house party (it even had an elder baiting line “You’ll get higher than a hippy at an open air festival”) and it was heaving in there. But we were pretty good. Weekly WT studies were tried, but fizzled out.

The ministry in the 90s was getting really hard. My pioneer partner struggled to get to 90 and then struggled to get to 70 when it dropped. A pioneer couple in their 40s had lots of tricks to share. Like planning out a series of country calls so rather than doing the closest ones all in one visit you did one in one village, and one in another so that you’d spend most of the time driving. Day after day! I struggled with this initially as it bothered my conscience, but in time I developed various ruses for getting the time in. Shopping for sick calls, cinema visits with kids (see that lovely mountain on the screen, one day the whole world will look like that). Crazy in retrospect. As if this is what Jesus had in mind. Of course I became an MS during this time and was being tipped for being an elder.

As I mentioned in my first post, the ’95 Generation change surprised me. But I was zealous and still thought the end would come. As the 2000’s rolled through doubts started to appear and my zeal dropped. When I moved to London I really started to focus on developing a career. I got a job on the road for most of the week, and missed lots of meetings. After a move to a new cong I wasn’t made up as an MS as the old cong didn’t recommend me but frankly I didn’t care. I felt that I’d given enough and now it was time to take back. But I felt bad feeling like that and hoped to be in a stronger position soon.

It was only after the 2010 Generation change that I started to really question things. It struck me as amazing to hear elders say how wonderful this new understanding was, when these same ones had been up once saying how the generation of 1914 would definitely not pass away! People just don’t seem to get it. What is a comparison?

I reasoned like this with a close friend. Imagine Moses before Pharaoh:

“Pharaoh let god’s people go!”

“No!”

“Ok tomorrow you shall have a plague of rats.”

Moses comes back before Pharaoh a few hours later.

"Sorry, I’ve had a new understanding on this. It’s a plague of frogs. Not rats…. just so you know.”

It’s crazy! You can’t imagine such a scenario. Yet that’s what we’re supposed to swallow.

I’ve pointed out to a couple of friends that Christmas could be a good example of the light getting brighter. They didn’t realise its pagan origins, then they did so it stopped. That’s more like the process round the circumcision issue. One issue, one meeting, one prayer for guidance and then one outcome.

Compare that to the Last Days, or blood, or generations, oral sex or the other flip-flops. How are we supposed to trust an organisation to give guidance to our kids on higher education or provide real spiritual food at the proper time when they cock so much up?

So I’m done with it in my head? Right? But I’m not.

This is what I mean by being in no mans land.

On one hand, I still believe they are right on the core basics. Really the stuff Russell did. Using gods name, Jesus the ransom, a mortal soul, god not being part of a trinity, and paradise restored. I really do. Am I captive to the big concept? A m I too early in my journey? Or is that bit really true?

The JW’s are neutral (by and large anyway, I know about the UN thing and the Hitler letter but that’s not much from an 130 year history – look at how political the Mormons are in comparison) and that is something that Jesus stressed on his last night on earth. So that’s another plus.

But on the other hand there’s the above crap. The many unfulfilled statements and predictions. Which clearly do not come from God.

This is the current theory I have that I went through with my friend last night. That God is using the JW’s but only to do one thing, the Kingdom preaching work. The rest is all made up. All of the rest is the interpretations of men. He tolerates them as they they’re doing the one thing he wants: t he kingdom preaching work

It’s not a brilliant theory. Why allow them to make up so much crap in your name? He didn’t do that in either the time when the Hebrew or Greek scriptures were writte n .

As I said to another friend, who wouldn’t want this to be true? To live in peace in paradise on earth. Fulfilling ones personal potential and being at one with nature and God. Seeing dead ones back. Never dying.

So the basics I still believe, the rest is crap. For now anyway. It feels pretty lonely in no mans land!

Does anyone else get what I mean?

50

My Story - a (kinda) newbie from the UK

by wizzstick in

jw
friends

after lurking for 7 and half years (is that a record?!

) its time for me to say hello.. so who am i, and whats my story?.

im a born in jw, with all my siblings, mother, wife and children in.

wizzstick

Big thanks to all for being so welcoming. I look forward to posting more.

And a huge thanks to Paul from JW Facts. I think that this site (thank-you Simon) and your JW Facts site represent the most important JW sites on the internet today.

Reasoning from JW Facts (there's a book title in there!) I've used on two friends over e-mail and whilst it's early days it's made them think. The early ex-JW sites were so poorly made and frankly nutty, that any JW (including myself) that came across them would likely switch off and agree that these apostates were crazy indeed.

Thanks all again.

50

My Story - a (kinda) newbie from the UK

by wizzstick in

jw
friends

after lurking for 7 and half years (is that a record?!

) its time for me to say hello.. so who am i, and whats my story?.

im a born in jw, with all my siblings, mother, wife and children in.

wizzstick

After lurking for 7 and half years (is that a record?!) it’s time for me to say hello.

So who am I, and what’s my story?

I’m a born in JW, with all my siblings, mother, wife and children in. I live in the UK (Southern England) and it was 25 years ago that I was baptised at Bowes Road. If I’m honest I always had some slight doubts. I did skip through Crisis of Conscience in the local library when I was studying with an elder who was a family friend. But I was 16, excited about all this prophecy which was coming true around me and thought any questions would be answered in a future WT, or of course the Big A would come. I left school with the minimum qualifications because, as my family was told, Armageddon was imminent. Why do more? And to be fair at the time I embraced it. Why learn stuff that would serve a career which would then be useless in a paradise earth?

I pioneered in the 90s, went to Bethel for a time in the 2000s. It was when I came out of Bethel that the doubts began to solidify. I found the London Bethel, as a whole, cold and cliquey. The brothers on my team made it fun in the daytime (the practical jokes were sometimes great fun) but stuck in a separate tower block rooming with a nutty newbie (who should never have been in Bethel) and a young married couple who welcomes us by explaining which cupboards were ours and which were theirs…I quickly started to hate it. Being given one rule book was bad enough, but TWO! (London Bethel had its own one) felt crazy. “Don’t feed the birds – it will encourage rats!”

Post Bethel, the only job I could get was night shift work, and then in a shop, both of which meant missing meetings. That, coupled with the Internet and my doubts, started me on my journey.

So when did my doubts really grow? They started, as with quite a few on here I think, with the ’95 change to Matt 24:34. Interestingly I think it was two things. One the change itself and secondly the way it was handled. First the change. In the 80’s, when I was a teenager, the focus of talk after talk was the generation of 1914. It gave so much urgency to talks. I can remember talks around ‘88 going along the lines of ‘So how old would someone need to be to be aware of the outbreak of WW1? Why if they were born in 1910 they would be now 78 years – how long does a generation last. The bible says 70-80 years…brothers why waste time on a career in this world when this world is passing so soon?”

It was constantly stated. Endlessly. To handle that change with a shrug and say:

“Eager to see the end of this evil system, Jehovah's people have at times speculated about the time when the "great tribulation" would break out, even tying this to calculations of what is the lifetime of a generation since 1914. However, we "bring a heart of wisdom in," not by speculating about how many years or days make up a generation, but by thinking about how we "count our days" in bringing joyful praise to Jehovah”

was shocking. I mean come on, YOU, the F&DS said it over and over again. Speculated? You said in every Awake! Magazine up to then:

"This magazine builds confidence in the Creator's promise of a peaceful and secure new world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 pass away."

Grief - that annoyed me. But I could cope with it, and might not have been here today if they hadn’t changed it in 2008 and again in 2010. The 2010 change was so obviously made up that it really got me researching online. The new 2013 changes to the F&DS tipped me over the edge to bluntly saying, “Guys, you’re making this up as you go along”.

There’s more to my story, particularly with living inside an Organisation that clearly makes some doctrines up, how I find myself in a seemingly unique no-mans land and coping with a family that’s all in but I’ll come back to that later.

Thank-you for reading.