Bullet list of major (recent) changes

by RN 38 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  fugue

  @slimboyfat:
  I don't know what anyone else has seen about Gilead changing. This was in the Kingdom Ministry just 5 months ago:

  *** km 10/11 p. 6 Are You Learning All You Can From Jehovah? ***
  Watchtower Bible School of Gilead
  • Purpose: To train pioneers and other full-time servants for missionary service.
  • Duration: Five months.
  • Location: Watchtower Educational Center, Patterson, New York, U.S.A.
  • Qualifications: Married couples who are baptized for three years and are between 21 and 38 years of age when submitting their first application. They must speak English, be married for at least two years, and be currently in full-time service at least two years without interruption. Applicants must be in good health. Pioneers serving in a foreign country (including those with missionary status); traveling overseers; Bethel family members; and past graduates of the Ministerial Training School, the Bible School for Single Brothers, and the Bible School for Christian Couples may also apply if they meet the qualifications.
  • How to Apply: In selected branches, a meeting for those interested in this school is held at the district convention. Further information is supplied during this meeting. If there is no meeting at conventions in your land and you would like to apply, you may write your branch office for further information.

  Maybe I'm missing something, but that sounds like Gilead is still going strong. Anyone else?
• 

  wha happened?

  huge loss of congregations in Japan

  I didn't know this. What kind of numbers are we talking?
• 

  Black Sheep

  Could someone remind us again what the "generation change" of teaching was in 1995/1996, and how it was different than the "overlapping" generation change of 2008-2011?

  In 1995 they inhitched the generation from 1914.

  In 2010, the hooked it back up again, but stretched the definition of generation beyond any sane breaking point, substituting the word 'contemporary', which still doesn't make sense as contemporary means coeval.

  co·e·val /ko'ev?l/

  Adjective:	Having the same age or date of origin; contemporary.
  Noun:	A person of roughly the same age as oneself; a contemporary.
  Synonyms:	adjective. contemporary - contemporaneous noun. contemporary
• 

  wallsofjericho

  1992 Nethinim to the Governing Body

  this vanished as quickly as it came. If I recall Barb Anderson wrote about this on freeminds. I beleive some in the writing dept. got in shit for this.

  Could someone remind us again what the "generation change" of teaching was in 1995/1996, and how it was different than the "overlapping" generation change of 2008-2011?

  1995 saw the generation go from that of the 1914 generation to the "wicked generation". This was a major shift as there was no correllation between the two and the wicked generation had no temporal impact.

  Interestingly, if you look at the current 2010 teaching of overlapping generations, it is essentially the same as the 1914 generation that freddie the oracle taught and the WTS kept till 1995. The only change between that generation and the current is that generation = overlapping contemporanious generations instead of just one 70-80 year generation.
  All else is the same. This (overlapping) generation that saw the events of 1914 will by no means pass away until all these events occur. The WTS has just gone back to Freddie's 1914 generatin teaching but stretched it out to a 140-160 year term instead of a 70-80 year period

  however, they used Freddie's 99 years as an example of a generation so applying this rule it could stretch out to 198 years from 1914. :P
• 

  wallsofjericho

  • 15 minutes service time to be active - result: higher publisher numbers (cant remember year)
  • both parents can count a study for children - result: huge increase to number of bible studies (again I can't remember the year)
  • 2007(?) - dropped closing of the call in 1931 (they say 1935 but the prophecy applied to this was 12 years from 1919-1931, 99% of dubs don't know this. - result: disconnected a timeline to armageddon from failed WTS prophecy
  • 2007 - dropped wicked generation and changed to 144,000. then 1 year later changed again to overlapping. result: was less obvious that all the WTS was doing was reversing their 1995 change back to what it was before that, but just stetching the number of years of a generation. This would make the WTS appear to change generation teachings immediately after the death of a WTS president as was the case since the death of russell. (look it up, it's true)
  • 2011 - pioneers in April only require 30 hours. Result: huge increase in appearance of pioneers in April.
  • 2014 -pioneers in the summer will only require 15 hours of service time and walking 1 old lady across the street
• 

  ScenicViewer

  Tornapart asked,

  Shutting down Branch offices?

  Yes, there have been at least a couple of threads on that. Several branches around the world have either closed or will be soon.

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/watchtower/beliefs/199804/1/Are-they-really-closing-down-branches-in-Martinique-Guadeloupe-and-French-Guyana

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.net/jw/experiences/224627/1/New-Zealand-bethel-is-to-be-closed-down
• 

  cedars

  Here are the branch office figures for the past 13 years...

  • 1999 - 109
  • 2000 - 110
  • 2001 - 111
  • 2002 - 109
  • 2003 - 109
  • 2004 - 111
  • 2005 - 112
  • 2006 - 114
  • 2007 - 113
  • 2008 - 115
  • 2009 - 118
  • 2010 - 116
  • 2011 - 98

  Last year's figure of 98 branches represented an unprecedented 16% decrease. It will be interesting to watch that figure in the next worldwide report. I suspect it will continue to drop. After all, it isn't cheap to run a branch!

  Cedars
• 

  slimboyfat

  So Gilead wasn't downgraded at all?

  That would make a good graph. I wonder when was them last time there were 98 branches.
• 

  cedars

  Thinking about it, I probably shouldn't be drawing too much attention to the branch figures. This is a very simple statistic for the Society to manufacture if they get wind that it is causing controversy. For example, they get to decide what constitutes a "branch", so they could technically award branch status to a mud hut in the middle of a rainforest somewhere if they really wanted to!

  This is where we start to enter another issue entirely, which is this - will the Society get desperate enough to "cook" the numbers in the worldwide report as their decline grows worse? Have they already started to do this, in the name of "theocratic warfare"?! I have no idea, but if they embark down that road, they must surely realise that the truth will eventually catch up with them. Getting caught manipulating their own statistics would only dent their credibility further.

  Cedars
• 

  ziddina

  "This is where we start to enter another issue entirely, which is this - will the Society get desperate enough to "cook" the numbers in the worldwide report as their decline grows worse?..." Cedars, above

  I have begun to suspect that the Watchtower Society has been 'cooking' their numbers for many decades, now...

  Fudging them, at the very least.