When I resigned, I told them I was too sick to continue. Everyone knew I was incapacitated most of the time. I'm older than dirt. What I didn't tell them was, "You all just put us through eighteen months of misery based on the mindless prattling of a mentally ill man (in and out of a mental institution) and the insistence on the part of one of you that we take all his accusations seriously. We spent the last year and a half in a witch hunt mode, from which I have not been able to awaken you. I give it up. All you accomplished was to prove the man nuts and to hurt some really faithful brothers and sisters."
Not having stated the obvious helped. The circuit overseer visited about three weeks later. They deleted me then. Unexpectedly, he wrote a letter to the Service Department or whomever, saying "Brother Old Goat is seldom seen in the ministry." (I averaged 20 hours a month, though most of it was informal witnessing because I was an am seriously ill. I was house-bound most days.) I got a six page single spaced letter from them telling me how vital service was and saying, "You can't resign. We delete you for not going out in service." I never replied.
I took decades of letters and files to my office. (I still worked part time when and as I could. We owned the business) I dumped them all in an industrial shredder designed to handle inch thick piles of paper. I mentally severed my connection with the Watchtower in my office basement. I had just started to physically deteriorate. The three years previously had been spent either in bed unable to even get to the bathroom without assistance or in a UniversityHospital. But in the opinion of the elder who had started the trouble noted above (now dieing of cancer, I might add. I have no sympathy for him.), I was "faking it." He had the ear of the Circuit Overseer.
I wasn't really surprised. I had been active since the late 1940's. I'd seen similar foolishness from the service department before. The 'brother' in charge way back when was an ex-marine who never got it out of his blood. He only heard what he wanted to hear. He and his buddy Nathan had called one of my friends out of his circuit and back to bethel to grill him over a so-called demonic experience that occurred in his circuit. It was insane. So, no, I wasn't surprised. But I was angry. I'm still angry.
If it had been secular employment, we'd have ended up in court. No employer could do what they did and come off unscathed. As it was, I shrugged my shoulders and saw it as par for the course.
The really insulting thing was subsequent elder anger that I'd resigned. And even greater anger that brothers and sisters called me with their problems in preference to going to the elders. I faithfully sent them to the elder body, and I never commented on their reluctance. But I understood it.
The Society and elder bodies seek to control your every breath. They act stupidly. I am still seen as a faithful witness. I'm not though - not in anyway that they would recognize. I spent a goodly time angry at God over the whole thing. It took me a while to recover a sense of proportion. I expected God to teach his children good sense, and was angry that he hadn't. The alternative is, they aren't his children, and he isn't responsible for that other fella's kids.
The ecclesiastical authorities among Jehovah's Witnesses make me physically ill. There is an occasional Christian among them, but not many. In my last active years I was gossiped about. I was accused of being an apostate. (Wasn't so at the time; I'm not sure it's so now. I believe the doctrines, mostly. A few I puzzle over. I don't teach contrary doctrine. I especially didn't then.) I was faking my illness. I lied on my service report. My wife and I were on the verge of divorce because she couldn't cope with my illness. You name it, someone said it. Much of this came from the mentally disturbed man I mentioned earlier and was passed around by his elder buddy. How does one defend against this? I ignored it until someone specifically asked about something. Then I dealt with it on a person by person basis.
Attending meetings was a chore. I need help dressing some days. I can't walk well, sometimes not at all. I would get sick in the middle of a meeting and have to leave. My entire family would have to drag me out to the car and get me home. It was a big chore. I stopped going. I eventually gave up trying to resolve my issues. They're not resolvable.
The elder who was the focus of everyone's problems has been deleted twice since. They keep reappointing him. He's dieing now. I'll dance on his grave. (Can you hear the enduring anger?) At the same time, I silently thank him for helping me to see what the Watchtower truly is, a power mad organization of Pharisee-like individuals who haven't a clue what real Christianity is. (Elder during meeting: "We tried love and it didn't work! Now it's time to get tough! --- Honest, that bit of conversation really happened!)
Eventually a rift developed between the "bad elder" and his primary supporter on the elder body. Mr. Bad Elder has a history of attacking other servants going back to the mid 1960's, when he was first appointed a Congregation Servant. He left a trail of "bodies" all over the region way back when. He'd contrive complaints and try to get those removed whom he felt were cutting into his power or whom he felt showed him in a bad light. He lied to do it. I remember sitting in our Kingdom Hall office/library and discussing his complaints against another elder. He insisted the man's business practices disqualified him as an elder because of something an Awake! said. I asked him to show me the article. He said he didn't remember what issue it was in, "but it's in there somewhere and we need to delete him!"
We're in the library, right? Okay. Index in hand, I go looking. I find an article. We look. He says, "Yes! That's it!" I say, "Show me where it says what you claimed." It didn't of course. Nothing of the sort was there. So he dropped it, right? No way Jose'. He was back within a week saying, "You know he lies during committee meetings?" On and on it went, until another elder and I cornered a Circuit Overseer and told him the whole story. He cooled down for a while. Later he went back to it, picking off two more elders. One simply moved to another congregation to get away, and one threw up his hands and resigned.
After I resigned, he would drive by my house once or twice a day. It was out of his way, and I do not know what he thought he would see. Another Witness family lived across the street. He enlisted the "brother" in his spy network. After a few months this brother walked across the street to tell me that he was supposed to keep track of my movements. Tell me? Does this sound like Christianity to you?
There wasn't much to see. I was mostly in bed.
My health improved for a while. I was able to resume attending, though I often had to go into the office and lay on a couch. I fixed up the Kingdom Hall library, sorting the books and filling in gaps. There was an old copy of Pastor Russell's sermons in there. The circuit overseer came and saw it. He was an obnoxious kid as far as I was concerned. He was, to say the least, uninformed. He told the elder body they needed to meet with me to discuss the apostate literature I'd put in the library. He gave them a list of books. Apparently he did not know that the Peoples Pulpit Association was the first name of the Watchtower Society of New York.
I made one of the elders go through every book in the library and verify that it was a Watchtower Publication. The only things that weren't were a couple of dictionaries and some Bible translations. Does this sound anything like Christianity to you?
Interestingly, I later found that one of the men I pioneered with back in the late 1960's and off and on into the 1970's had a similar experience, though the actual issue came from a sister looking through a box of books a non-witness had donated and that had come from his grandmother's estate. Because he was Ministry School Overseer, he was blamed for two non-Witness pamphlets found in the box. Of course, he hadn't even seen the box. It was left on the doorstep and the sisters carried it in and snooped. Are elders insane? or just stupid?
So here I am. Cut loose from a religion I spent most of my life actively supporting. I do not reject Jehovah's Witnesses. I think many of them are fine Christians. I think of every elder, every ministerial servant, all those in authority especially those in Brooklyn as suspect. I spent too many years dealing with them directly to see them any other way.
I'm trying to reassess my relationship to God and to the Witnesses. I've been re-reading back issues of The Watchtower with a more critical and thoughtful mind. Will I go back? I do not know. Does something need to change? Yes. This is not the clean organization I always hoped it was and wanted it to be. The spiritual soiling that concerns me isn't the common sins of common people. That happens, and it won't stop. Life is life. What concerns me is the self-view, the self-justification (as opposed to divine justification) of those in authority. And the crazy-butt side doctrines that have nothing to do with faith. Oh my Lord, make them go away!
