*** w75 5/1 p. 285 a contrastmissionaries with an urgent, lifesaving work ***.
another speaker, f. w. franz, the societys vice-president, forcefully impressed on the audience the urgency of the christian preaching work.. he stressed that, according to dependable bible chronology, 6,000 years of human history will end this coming september according to the lunar calendar.
this coincides with a time when the human species [is] about to starve itself to death, as well as its being faced with poisoning by pollution and destruction by nuclear weapons.. franz added: theres no basis for believing that mankind, faced with what it now faces, can exist for the seventh thousand-year period under the present system of things.
That 1914 "anchor date" appears to be drifting out to sea, soon to be gone forever.
That's how these guys operate: First they tout a date as significant. Then when it becomes obsolete, they come up with a convoluted explanation of how it really was significant, just not in the way "some believers" once taught. Later, it becomes a historical footnote, as in: "Bible students at one time thought... but now we see... evidently... blah blah blah."
dear randall.
good morning!.
here is the daniel of brazil (former bethel).. this week at the forum of former jehovah's witnesses had an interesting news!
I spent most of my life wondering what would be "special" about the latest upcoming "special" talk, program or announcement. In the end, I was always disappointed. It was never very "special." So it's hard to get worked up about this speculative thread.
Except for the May WT quote cited above, which talks about "adjusments" that "may be necessary" to the field service work and encouragement for the rank and file to "support" these adjustments.
Coupled with the recent court case in which, as someone posted, "the jury was appalled" at the WT's insistence that pedophiles go door to door and resulted in the decision to punish the WTS to the tune of $20+ million.
So, if there is anything to this speculation (and there may not be), I would speculate it has to do with FS arrangements.
I agree with posters who say the WTS will never completely do away with field service, as it's the Society's "brand." However, the 8-day conventions and the "five meetings a week" were also brands and were adjusted or scaled down when they became problematic. The same could happen with FS.
Many WTS could be solved if FS became "a special activity" reserved for those who meet certain rigid qualifications. All others could sign up to serve in other ways: hall cleaning, maintenance, visiting the sick, conducting studies with inactive ones or helping the infirm to prepare for meetings or study assigned material. They'd count their time and turn in "Kingdom Service Reports." The members of the elite corps that "qualify" for the house to house canvassing would be trained to do so in a way that exempts the WTS from liability (perhaps signing a waiver). While they wouldn't count time, they'd be honored with an exalted position in the dub hierarchy.
This would certainly be something the elders would have to "help the publishers with." It would be a major adjustment requiring plenty of maintenance and oversight.
the entire time i was gone it was nagging at me.
i hadn't been previously baptized, so leaving wasn't that big a deal.
now i'm back in the swing of it, going to all meetings and field service.
Jake has just learned the value of the popular expression: WTF?
at 37 years of age, i'm much to young for feeling this damn old, so apologies for sounding less than idealistic, but...... we need people who will be honest and true to themselves.
having offered jws the entire decade of my 20's while they tried to suck out my soul, i have come to appreciate how little of a desire these days i have to change the world.
which was sad at first.
I used to sell 'Living Forever', and all sorts of other large ideas. ...you realize that you not only bought the lie, you tried to sell it!
Exactly right. That's why on the forum I use the name Willy Loman, who is the lead character in the play, "Death of a Salesman." I started posting when the salesman in me died.
Best day of my life!
just noticed the other thread about who you'd like to meet - how about this one for those you have met.. prolly going to miss a few but here goes:.
sweet pea.
snow queen.
Apparently I have failed to socialize enough so my list is pretty short. However, we've met up with peeps from this forum in Chicago, New York City and Las Vegas, so we get travel points I guess.
Two of them haven't posted in a long time. The other, OnTheWayOut, bought lunch in Chicago earlier this month. Terrific guy.
it is commonly a human tendency to see your enemies/opponents as somehow bestial, subhuman, stupid and the like.
so, i hesitate to simply 'write off' the governing body as utter fools, senile, drunk, arrogant beyond logic, or lost in 2012 as the representatives of a 19th century religion.. nonetheless, it's simply hard to believe that they can fail to notice the intensifying confluence of negative trends and decline that surrounds them.
food service?
Or, they're just conserving cash. A lot of businesses have discovered during this recession that they are better off financially after cutting back on quality or quantity, laying off employees, and running "leaner and meaner." The remaining workers don't go away; if anything, they focus on holding on to their jobs. Even if this means doing more work, or someone else's work in addition to their own. Once they realize they can make almost as much (and in some cases more) profit by cutting expenses at all levels, the paradigm shifts. Perhaps dub leadership has figured this out, too.
i haven't attended the kingdom hall in over 3 months now.
it really is a great feeling.
no dreading the thursday night or feeling like your weekend is wasted because of sunday morning.
I have now been clean for 29 months (I think of organized religion as an addiction).
Totally right about that.
you live comfortably, though you are never certain what the future will bring.
you go to work at a business that has become the only thing you really know anymore.
you pull a schedule of forty to eighty hours a week.
Okage, your writing ability is off the charts. Great post!
this was back in sept 2011. looks like she kept her sense of humour.
.
OK, but it's stil a fascinating number to find in this particular document. Ironically, it amounts to 1 cent for each of the alleged 144,000, which is about what this particular JW theory is worth.
i haven't been one to start a lot of threads and i've actually been gone from this board for about a year only to return after the conti case blew open.
i stopped coming here because i had moved on with my life and really started to put being a jw behind me and stopped concerning myself with it.. my anger and hate of the wtbts had come to a simmer, i don't think it will or would have completely cooled, but then on one fateful morning i awake to an email from my mother.
i haven't talked to my mother in about 6 months as our last conversation was her spouting off how great of a time she was having serving where the need was greater and it was all about her and her husband and jehovah this and jehovah that.
Since the topic is on dubs and child abuse and the reporting of same, or lack thereof, I want add just one"experience" that supports the validity of some of these stories - in case there are readers who doubt such things take place in the JW world.
There was man in a nearby congo who was a convicted child molester; his victims were young boys. Many years (about 15 as I recall) had gone by since was convicted and served a handful of years in prison and had received counseling. He later became a JW thru the efforts of his dub relatives, who took him under their wing. He made "spiritual" progress (as dubs measure such) and after some years became a ministerial servant, a position her held for 7 or 8 years. He pioneered. Then he was appointed an elder. This claused some controversy among a small circle of people who knew about his background, but anyone who criticized was admonished that the Society had approved the appointment and this meant God had found the fellow repentant and that was the end of the matter.
A single mother in our book study had two boys, 8 and 9. One evening she asked to talk to me. She was interested in this elder, whom she'd met at a circuit assembly, and had been out for coffee with him a couple of times. She felt there was a potential relationship there. Then he asked her if he could take her two boys with him on overnight camping trip and she had agreed. But before the trip took place, a sister she knew in the other congo called her and told her about the elder's past and suggested she not let the boys go. She was conflicted, so she talked to me about it.
I told her I'd look into it and called one of his elders, who who knew me well enough that he confirmed the story about child abuse. He said the body had told no one about his past, but "we do keep an eye on him." He did not know about the camping trip and was concerned and said he'd talk with him. I said I'd talk to the sister and advise against letting them go. He warned me not to reveal the reason, but I said she already knew the reason.
When I called her back, she asked me what she should do. I told her the rumor she had heard appeared to be founded and that it was not a good idea to let the boys go with him, that even if he'd been treated for whatever sickness caused the incident in the first place, recidivism is rampant among molesters. She was concerned about hurting his feelings and initially argued that, since he was an elder, it must be all right to trust him. I strongly advised her to put her kid's safety first and to call and say she had changed her mind, that the boys were too young to go camping without her along and that she couldn't go, but thanks anyway, and not go into detail about why. Later she told me she did call him and he was very upset. She got defensive and told him the reason. He was furious about that. But she told me the angry exchange eliminated any lingering regrets she might have had about cancelling.
Some weeks later at a circuit assembly he approached me and dressed me down for "revealing a confidence." I told him the circumstances outweighed whatever confidentiality he thought might exist, and told him he should have known better than to put himself in temptation's way. He threatened to "take action" against me but I never heard any more about it. I did call the elder in his congo and relayed the circumstances to him; he told me that he had called the guy and also advised him to cancel any plans to take the two boys camping.
The man continued to serve. That was 20 years ago and I am long gone from the congo and the area in which this occurred, so I don't know what his dub "status" is anymore. But I can tell you unequivocably that the official Watchtower practice and policy as recently as at least the early 1990s was to keep a lid on these matters so as not to "bring reproach."
