Spain. Memorial attendace:
2011 202.000
2012 192.000
-4.5% in just one year.
Source: Watchtower 15 November 2012
Jehovah's blessing?
Spain. Memorial attendace:
2011 202.000
2012 192.000
-4.5% in just one year.
Source: Watchtower 15 November 2012
Jehovah's blessing?
for those who are interested, the november 2012 awake!
is now available for download online.. among items of possible interest are some of the latest examples of fear-mongering "armageddon art" on pages 12 and 14.... .
speaking of armageddon, you will be sad to hear that the criteria for surviving the great day of god's wrath just got a little more stringent.. there are a number of extra things in this month's awake!
So what I gather from the article is that the Governing Bother members of our Beloved Mother Organization have been playing soccer a lot. At least, some of them present some symptons.
Very deep. I have to meditate on it before I can respond LOL.
BTW, what's the problem in this board?
the wt will do endless research on the r.c.c and the faults of popes.as can be.
seen in their publication.. are not the popes and the r.cc.
humans and will make mistakes.. is it any different from god's choosen nation and all the kings and .
Here in Southern Europe, one of the forces behind JW success was anti-Catholicism. There are no big Protestestant churches, Catholics used to be intolerants and the Government official religion. In Portugal, Spain & Italy Catholicism is "The Church", the only one big Church as that name suggest.
So, in the 60s and 70s in Italy and in the 80s in Spain and Portugal, a lot of people became JWs as that was a new approach to Christianism, mainly in urban areas and developed regions.
In every talk, brothers remembered the atrocities of "The Chuch" from supporting fascists regimes to Inquisition. One of the main points was Papal infallibility.
Well, actually JWs have in our days what we could call "the Seven Popes". Seven men are leading the Organization having total control of their members. They are spiritual dictators and they have more power in JWs lives than the Pope has on Catholics. That's the irony.
for those born in or dragged in as little children, normal customs are not imprinted on our minds.. such as the simple saying ''bless you'' when somebody sneezes.
this has frustrated my wife for as long as we have been together!
she felt it very rude that when she would sneeze i would not respond with the customary phrase, i had to explain that it just was not part of my culture, not imprinted on me.
I remember one American brother that though speaking almost nothing in Spanish, he always said "¡Salud!" (meaning "Health!"). He was really enthusiastic saying it. There's no "JW tradition" about saying that so I didn't realize there was something bad about saying "Bless you" in English.
as a born in, or in at a very young age, what were your worst memories as a young jw child?.
i remember not being allowed to go to sleep in the meetings when i was tired.
not being allowed to do lots of things at school other kids could do.
My parents were baptized when I was 8. Until then, I was a "normal" boy. After that, I couldn't play with kids from school, celebrate Xmas, Halloween or any other holiday.
It was so painful at that age!!I remember one of my friend's mother asking my mother: 'Why can't your son play with the rest after school?'
Plus, there were no many kids in the congo. It was depressing.
When I have doubts if it's a cult or not, these things come to my mind. How many religions teach that kind of crap?
i kid you not.
the latest watchtower study edition has the following question under consideration in the "questions from readers" article on page 20:.
do jesus words found at matthew 19:10-12 suggest that those who choose to remain single have received the gift of singleness in a mysterious way?.
They encourage singleness not because you can serve the borg more being single, since COs, DOs and GB members are married but to to comfort those who cannot find a parter "in the Lord". They're preventing them from being so sad and discouraged so they want to go to the world and abandon the cult.
They try that these JWs feel special being single but it's all about hypocresy. File and rank witnesses who cannot marry feel bad.
I have one experience probably will not appear in a Watchtower. It's about one pioneer who spent his 20s and 30s in the field circus. He became a MS and an elder and didn't worry about marriage, education, work and those wordly things. When he was 35 he quitted pioneering because his part-time job didn't allow him to live alone. Then, he saw all the brothers in his congregation had their own family and no one really care about his loneliness. One thing is what is printed in WT-publications and other different what happens in the congos. This lack of love from their brothers despite of all his efforts to serve the most-perfect-Organization and he only got it.
Finally, he became inactive and rumors spread in the congo about his lack of faith and joy in God's service. Probably, they say, he's now an apostate. As time goes on, probably in a year, nobody will remember what he did for this religion or even who he was.
This experience hasn't happened once or twice.... but MANY times. I've seen it a couple of times in the congos I've served. So sad but so real.
just scanned through,,article on giving dollars, houses, and wills to the wts, of course.
article on being forgiving,,article to choose 'singleness.
did check numbers they gave on spain,,their 2012 memorial attendace, showed a decrease also,, 4.5% decrease,,their publishers total shows a decrease from the 2011 peak.
This religion is becoming a "grandmothers cult".
Actually, the only places you can find young people, prepared in WT-wisdom and their source for publishers growth are the foreign languages congregations and groups. Some groups are 80% women with few men available.
I knew recently that in congregations in my area, elders are preventing young ones to move to the foreign language groups because they need men to work in their congos and they're realizing there are very few.
well, got this brochure inviting me to a district convention to the public talk.
oddly, the time for the public talk was nowhere on the invite, instead they had a location and the start/end times for all 3 days.
unusual.
I don't know what the rules on beards are now, but from what I saw, they're still frowned on. Not part of the dress code. Even though I remember a bunch of illustrations of Jesus with a beard.
I know brothers from Germany, Belgium and Netherlands with bears and taking parts in congregation meetings. It's curious when they meet in District Assemblies with British and Southern European brothers and they see it. So I think it's really an Elder's rule in each congregation.
wheeeeeee!!!!
another month, another ypa article that i get to make fun of.
here's part 1 if you missed it, and if you enjoy this then there's even more mockery just a click over here.
The problem with marrying in the Lord is that you have very few potential partners. Add to that, the fact that you can't be with someone too much time to know your partner with all that pressure to get married. And there's also the hormones factor.
With all of this, you have the perfect combination. In the three last years, I've know for seven or eight divorces, most of the with a non-biblical base. And all of them followed the same pattern: young people in their first 20s.
On the other side, there are those who don't find a partner, both men and women.
Blondie:
What they fail to address is that there are so many more single women than single men in the WTS
That's true, but I don't really understand it. I mean, there's the same number when they are 12-14 but suddenly in the 20s there are much fewer men. The reason? What I've seen in my area guys don't want to wait to find a girlfriend and women tend to wait more.
I also think that all this pressure coming from the family affects more to the women at that age. Don't really know.