@thomasmore; congregations does not mean buildings, although in many cases 1 congregation = 1 building in the past, nowadays they’ve been strongly consolidating that, often 4 or more congregations per building. In places like Congo and Brazil and other developing nations with lots of (both native and western) languages, every language gets their own ‘congregation’ although they often share buildings, meeting times and often even speakers (either using a common tongue or someone doing translations). Although in places like Congo you also have heavy persecution of Christians by some groups so as the wars there ebb and flow, you’ll have a sudden explosion of congregations that were previously unreported and other such non-sense. JWs don’t go back and update their reports with new data.
Anony Mous
JoinedPosts by Anony Mous
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44
2023 Yearly Report UNDER the Microscope
by raymond frantz inhttps://youtu.be/pi7sn2rnrke?si=lnvklqct6nuayv2q.
branches of jehovah’s witnesses: 85 (= down one from 86 from the previous year and quite possibly they are referring to the hong kong bethel that closed down recently).
number of lands reporting: 239 ( =the same as 2022).
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Where’s the 2023 Service Report?
by slimboyfat inwhat’s keeping them?
this has got to be the latest it’s ever been.
maybe it’s the last one they’ll ever publish too, after dropping reporting hours for publishers ….
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Anony Mous
There’s various reasons, as others pointed out the children are getting baptized earlier and earlier, I’ve heard about 6, 7 and 8 year olds getting baptized - first graders, that’s ridiculous, many kids at that age can’t even read or go to the bathroom independently.
Then there is also the drop in counting hours, suddenly all the PIMOs are counted once again as ‘active’ publishers, all you need is a check mark which they will even accept doing a part in the meetings. Back in the day, elders wouldn’t even accept us as active if we didn’t have at least 10 hours on that slip.
Remote attendance is another one of those things, you don’t even have to show up at the meeting to get counted, I’ve heard many say that people choose to stay home.
All-in-all, they will eventually run out of tricks to stop the bleeding unless there is a major shift in the disfellowshipping at which point they simply will end being JW to me and just another church.
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Jehovah and Pleiades
by James Brown indoes anyone remember seeing old watchtowers in their kingdom hall library before they destroyed them all, of the watchtower annoucing jehovah from pleiades kingdom.
i am 72 years old and i remeber seeing these old magazines somewhere..
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Anony Mous
JWs have always followed what seemed like was popular at the time, whether it was Pyramidology which was popular towards the end of the 19th century, the early 20th century was beset with cosmology after Einstein and Hubble’s theory, in the 60s and 70s it was the end of days from cosmic/Mother Earth origins (that’s where JW depictions of Armageddon started getting meteors and cracked open earth) after many Hippie cults, in the 80s and 90s it was the end of day due to nuclear (remember those Awake with nuclear bomb explosions on the cover), then in the early 2000s it was technological progress which morphed into environmentalism. They’re just following pop culture and are always proven wrong, within a few decades the posts on here will all be about how they followed the COVID and Environmental cults, it’s just a thing to appeal to the masses that ties their death cult into the popular causes of what could bring about fear and death, as if a god needed human imagination to kill billions of people.
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The Memorial
by jhine inthe wt teaches that the memorial ( communion) should only be celebrated yearly and only the anointed can partake of the bread and wine .
is that right ?
i don't think so ..
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Anony Mous
Jesus used the words ‘do this in remembrance of me’ so seemingly whenever you ponder the sacrifice of Jesus in the accompaniment of other Christians, you should do it. There seems to be neither a temporal limit nor restriction.
Similar language in Hebrew scripture is used to signify weekly (Shabbath) and various other religious events which occurred at least monthly if not required daily during some religious weeks. I know some churches still have daily and require at least weekly communion in the weeks leading up to Christmas, Easter etc.
Justin Martyr’s First Apology indicate that weekly administration of the Lord’s Supper existed in the first century. The Catholic Church actually puts a limit of communion no more than twice daily to prevent people from thinking that it could somehow be quantified, so people doing it daily in early Christianity were seemingly not uncommon (still not uncommon amongst people in the clergy).
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My grandmother called my mother
by Anony Mous inso, i’m just posting this as a warning to lurking jws.
if you’re still on the fence, here is a story.. my grandmother, now in her 80s hasn’t talked to anyone in the family for over 20 years ever since my mother was the last one of her children that left ‘the truth’, she had sent my mother a card to never talk to her again.
so here we are 21 years later, she gets a call out of the blue that she needed help, she hadn’t been able to get into her kitchen.
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Anony Mous
@joe: this is not surprising, 10 grandmas who have perhaps a few years left of small $10 donations isn’t as good as a whale that wants to give $50 for the next 20 years.
I do think even as old as she is, my grandmother is waking up. My mother shared she was able to talk extensively about all sorts of things and she doesn’t want to admit, but seems to know she was wrong, cried about the fact she hasn’t talked to anyone in decades. Not sure if all her children will visit before she croaks, my mother was the most recent at 20 years, some of my uncles and aunts were disfellowshipped or never baptized decades earlier and some have passed away already.
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My grandmother called my mother
by Anony Mous inso, i’m just posting this as a warning to lurking jws.
if you’re still on the fence, here is a story.. my grandmother, now in her 80s hasn’t talked to anyone in the family for over 20 years ever since my mother was the last one of her children that left ‘the truth’, she had sent my mother a card to never talk to her again.
so here we are 21 years later, she gets a call out of the blue that she needed help, she hadn’t been able to get into her kitchen.
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Anony Mous
@Jan: I attend a Presbyterian church with my family. I am not a believer, but I do enjoy the conversation, interpretation and the music (we have a choir and instrumental section). They also do tons of outreach, both foreign and domestic, make an effort towards non-believers and other denominations and people give freely.
@Dio: not in the UK but not very far from there :) in the US it is also called social services colloquially, but the actual department name is different by state, I think the UK actually calls the organization “Social Services”, although isn’t it part of NHS now?
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My grandmother called my mother
by Anony Mous inso, i’m just posting this as a warning to lurking jws.
if you’re still on the fence, here is a story.. my grandmother, now in her 80s hasn’t talked to anyone in the family for over 20 years ever since my mother was the last one of her children that left ‘the truth’, she had sent my mother a card to never talk to her again.
so here we are 21 years later, she gets a call out of the blue that she needed help, she hadn’t been able to get into her kitchen.
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Anony Mous
So, I’m just posting this as a warning to lurking JWs. If you’re still on the fence, here is a story.
My grandmother, now in her 80s hasn’t talked to anyone in the family for over 20 years ever since my mother was the last one of her children that left ‘the truth’, she had sent my mother a card to never talk to her again. So here we are 21 years later, she gets a call out of the blue that she needed help, she hadn’t been able to get into her kitchen. My mother didn’t even have her number in her phone anymore, so as soon as she hears the voicemail, she sends her husband out to help, next day my mother goes and visits.
Long story short, grandmother doesn’t even recognize her own daughter, thought she was a nurse, no, you called me yesterday, completely forgotten, but yes, people are continuing to break into her apartment and moving stuff in the kitchen and she had locked the door to the kitchen as a result and then someone stole the key. As you can surmise, she has advanced dementia at this point.
So where is your JW friend. She is the executor of her estate at this point, too old to make it up the stairs to her apartment, so she never visits, but we go shopping together but she buys too many groceries (whether that is all true is up for debate). Nobody from the congregation comes? She laments, nobody knows who I am (she has been nearly 60 years a JW, pioneer for most of it) I go to meetings on Zoom, nobody visits, how about elder so-and-so, died, so-and-so, died, so-and-so, retirement home, okay, so literally nobody knows who she is, nobody cares, nobody arranges for visits or wants to pick her up to go to meetings. She had been without food for 3 days and the only person left to call, I must imagine she has tried the elders, other JWs, is her daughter, who she hasn’t talked to in 21 years, not in the store, not at family functions, flat out stonewall ignored.
So my mother is now in conversation with social services, who were already investigating ‘weird’ bank statements, apparently, grandma’s executor, a JW pioneer, you know the deal, has been spending money on her own ‘needs’ because unlike my grandfather who always worked (he was ‘fiercefully’ against the JWs) and left a nice, cozy pension, pioneers have nothing for their old days.
Truly despicable, this morning my church did a call for a family from another country and another church (not even the same denomination) in need and people stepped up, even though they don’t even know these people. JWs can’t even be bothered to take care of their own and would leave an old lady to die because she stopped being able to attend in person a few years ago and even a ride to the meeting is too far for this new generation.
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Why are the 2 newly appointed Governing Body Members from Bethel, when there are anointed ones all over the world? they could have used.
by RULES & REGULATIONS inlibrary.
books & brochures.
enjoy life forever!—an interactive bible course.
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Anony Mous
This guy? https://twitter.com/gagefleeglegb?lang=en
Both of them were already lackeys at the GB.
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Changed behavior of the governing body on the topic of “vaccinations” in the Covid era
by Pedro ini'm looking for an explanation why the gb has made a radical change on the issue of vaccinations.
was there pressure from outside?
were there any financial or other benefits to promoting experimental genetic therapy?.
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Anony Mous
@luckynedprepper: NYC has a "vaccine referral bonus program" for churches. So for every follower that gets vaccinated they would give the church $100. Hence why JWs had a 98% rate of vaccinations, they are sheep, it gets the borg money.
As far as the JW investments in Pfizer, Henrietta M. Riley is one of the fronts for the WTBTS investment fund, it has existed about as long as we have data (established for WTBTS in 1948, although it is possibly even older): https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/386043103
You can go back year by year and see where they receive and pay out money to the WTBTS as well as various companies, however lately (since the Biden admin took over) the IRS has not required to publish detailed investment reports on tax filings for large investment corps, but you can see in prior years how they invested in Pfizer, Microsoft, Apache Corp, BlackRock, J&J, American Tower etc. (many big pharma, big oil-and-gas, big real estate, military-industrial investments)
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Ban on Independent Meetings
by lssjr insource - march 2021 announcements - - https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5085868283920384/2021-march-147-english-german-announcements-reminders.
this is a sobering reminder of what happened some 40 years ago when raymond franz and others were literally kicked out from the jehovah's witnesses for having pre-arranged private spiritual discussions.lesson: paragraph 7 is another example of the i and t in dr. steven hassan's bite model of the 21st century cult - information and thought control at its best!!!!
"my gosh, there must be a lot of independent meetings these days.
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Anony Mous
I wonder if this is why they stopped the book study meetings. Private meeting at private places with small groups. I remember when I was little those would start at 7:30 on a school day and often go on for 2-3 hours if you had a ‘real’ book study group. Funnily enough, the entire book study group became apostate as a result and soon after they cancelled them all and put them in the Kingdom Halls, then they eliminated them a few years later.