The imperative for the individual and collective GB member is to honour their appointment as custodians of the sacred Watchtower cash-cow.
Everything else is subordinated to this end. The pride they hold in this role has only been revealed by their antics on the JW TV; a bunch of ignorant pedagogues, a living example of the proverbial blind guides. (I used to think they must be decent people before they became visible, yet I knew Knorr was a grumpy old bugger)
When it comes to money matters (and money matters most of all), the JW doctrine is ever flexible to meet the needs of the moment. When doctrine become implausible... which it routinely does, it can always be rationalised by tweaking Bible texts to give the famous Watchtower spin by presenting something as “God’s will”...and the sheep, with brains on hold, can only follow. Just think... if the sheep are told something by the GB that it is God’s will; that cements it for the follower, he or she is not permitted to say or think “Oh no it’s not!” Or question “How do you know that?”
As a business venture the imperative is to be rich enough to do what you want and the management need money to keep their message prominent to bring in new punters. Using a publicly accessible TV station is surely the commercial rationale of the moment for an ex publishing company with a cult agenda.
For thirty or more years they have been getting a fairly consistent number of new publishers, averaging something around 175,000 per year. As the membership steadily increases notwithstanding the disfellowshipped, the faders and the deaths, the effort vs results indicates a significant drop in efficiency. It now takes something like 13,000 hours of witnessing to make one new JW. In other words the message is no longer all that popular and in future it will continue to decline in appeal as the internet arbitrates religious questions with its democratic freedom of information.
Money and membership numbers are the only true Watchtower values which denote operational success. Through years of selling pointless literature printed by virtual slave labour; the WTBTS amassed great wealth and great wealth earns great interest. At the same time there exists is a lot of momentum of loyalty through family membership built up over the century and whilst there are fewer converts in the educated and richer West, there are enough old JW families to perpetuate the religion through their offspring alone. So this is the trend: the org is growing through breeding and not by preaching. This makes me think that the same could eventually happen in the third world where expansion does exist for now, that a saturation point will come and the JW org will nevertheless be in control of even greater wealth and large numbers of dim-witted believers loyally breeding new child members... just like they did in the Catholic Church.
There is however a dramatic difference; the Roman Catholic Church has a magisterial hold over its vast but diminishing membership based on the myth of an apostolic inheritance from Jesus’ appointment of Peter. The Watchtower religion makes its claim by contrast as a doomsday cult, not of this world, which can never claim the ‘earthly’ authority as does its envied and supremely successful rival.
The authority of a doomsday cult arises from the confidence in the accuracy of its predictions...