Was it something like 400,000 to 600,000 that left within a year or so after 1975. I remember several I had grown up with leaving then, I envey them now.
Do you guys think there will be a time when everyone will leave the JWs?
by FinchAndWeston 18 Replies latest jw friends
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OnTheWayOut
Watchtower, by all normal statistical reckoning, will be around for more than 50 years. It is in sharp decline, but they won't go from 7 million to nothing in that time. If only 1 in 3 children stay in, that's still a considerable number during the next 50 years. Their own numbers are BS, but they still don't show the sharp decline that we are recognizing. (They may really have 7 million active members, but many are barely active compared to the 3 and 4 million highly active ones they had at one time.)
But, normal statistical reckoning is not necessarily the way things will go. Once the hardcore JW's (mostly over the age of 50 now) have passed away, the decline will gain momentum. Younger JW's are not as invested in living a life surrounded by JW ways as the hardcore are. They have televisions and computers and go to movies and watch sports and read outside materials. Many want their kids to go to college and they don't typically pioneer past a couple of years out of high school if they pioneer at all.
My greatest hope is in GB 3.0. The first Governing Body (with Ray and Fred Franz in the 1970's) was radical and self-important about creating changes within WTS. The next morph of the Governing Body was led by Ted Jaracz and he stacked the place with idiotic yes-men. Those guys firmly believed in the importance of a real majority rule in the house and the only way to get that was to let the Holy Spirit direct Ted J. and vote with him. They have largely become "cut-and-paste" producers when it comes to the printing of new materials. They let the almighty dollar dictate their directions via the lawyers now, and Ted J. is gone. They are still operating on some path that Ted J. has started them down with the "overlap generation" and moving out of Brooklyn, but they are moving toward a smaller core of the inner circle of people they can count on.
GB 3.0 (the next morph) is overdue to start forming. Sooner or later, they have to put some more bodies in the GB. What direction they will take, while highly speculative, is almost certain to be money-driven. If WTS really starts to hurt financially, there's not much more to reduce in costs. They might totally stop printing, they might really turn up the heat to get donations. But whatever they do, it seems they will have to loosen the control or tighten the control. Either one is trouble. Loosening allows people to hang on, but take WTS less seriously as the main part of their life. Tightening forces people to decide whether to stay or leave, many will leave.
Give them a chance to make a few bad decisions, similar to "overlap generation" and we may indeed take down WTS inside of 50 years.
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cantleave
I am hoping for something bigger than just the end of JW's. I think in a few generations all religion will be gone! Everyone will have woken up to the fact religion is bullshit!
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Sheep2slaughter
No.
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Jim_TX
No, I don't.
But then again... if the main office owns all of the meeting halls, and decides to have a fire sale, and dumps all of the halls, then where will they have a place to meet? I can see something like that happening... but not any time soon.
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WTWizard
You might think so. However, I can think of another instance where people defy logic. In your Bible, within the first few pages, it threatens death for eating of the tree of knowledge of good and bad--meaning that such knowledge is only for God. A thinking person should see a red flag right there--why would God not want mankind to know good and bad, except to enslave us? Instead of thinking that way, most people will think we have no need to know bad, and we should just know good. And who decides what is "good"? God, of course--for his selfish purposes, to enslave us.
Knowing that, how many people actually read that and reject Jehovah? Or, they read right in the next chapter that Satan tried to liberate mankind from Jehovah's tyranny. Most read that Satan led mankind into rebellion--but will not realize that it is rebellion against tyranny. A thinking person would realize that Satan is trying to free us from Jehovah's tyranny and is actually our friend, not our enemy. How many people are drawn to Satanism when they read this scripture? Not very.
With this, I don't think there will come a time when the majority of active witlesses will actually up and leave the cancer.
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cedars
Watchtower, by all normal statistical reckoning, will be around for more than 50 years. It is in sharp decline, but they won't go from 7 million to nothing in that time.
OnTheWayOut - I think you're confusing the size and operational scope of the Society with the number of JWs. It would be a mistake to suggest there will be "zero" JWs 50-years from now. Far from it. If there are still people around now who follow Russell and take pyramidology seriously, then who's to say there won't still be people who love the idea of the Watch Tower Society decades after it has collapsed from financial meltdown? IMO this process has already begun, and the signs are all there. In only 7 years they've halved their magazine printing commitments, and have suffered a 16% reduction in branches last year alone. They're also selling properties at drastically reduced prices in the middle of an economic downturn, which screams "desperation". The Society of old just wouldn't tolerate that sort of operational down-scaling - but they don't have a choice because it's out of their hands. As the growth slows down in developed countries, the pool of wealthy publishers who can donate also diminishes, and what they can donate must be spent on supporting faster growth in developing countries that can't service their own needs. It's completely unsustainable, and they've been feeling the heat for some time now. They just hate to admit that they're broke, because they realize this would be tantamount to announcing they no longer have God's backing.
At this rate, I would generously give them another 20 years max before the last printed Watchtower rolls off the press. It'll be downhill from there.
Cedars
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FinchAndWeston
Very enlightening. I was a "die-hard" witness and I left ... maybe there is hope for family and friends stuck in the permafrost of the organization ...
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Sic Semper Tyrannis
As Nathan Knorr once said, "We have to keep these presses running". I think the news of these developments regarding the downsizing of printing has tempered down the seriousness of everything because we all (JWs and ex-JWs alike) are getting so used to changes in the last 20 or so years. If they had eliminated one Awake! magazine a month in say, 1972, people would have rightly wondered what was the matter. People still do, especially among the ex-community, but Witnesses in particular have been conditioned to accept any change as Jehovah moving things forward and organizing the preaching for the final effort. Thus the deleted magazines are because of the end is becoming so closer and I'd imagine if there are more branch closings, they might even try to imply that there are government restrictions in place that forced the decision, and that means the Great Tribulation is at hand. No one in their right mind thinks that there will be no JWs in 50 or so years. The point has been made that organization's best years are behind it, and you'll see a lot of consolidation to come. The Society wont cease to exist either, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a rump organization based out of one of the Wallkill and Patterson complexes, with PO Boxes and Private Mail Bags scattered throughout the world. It's a publishing empire, and the guts got taken out of it when they found that they can no longer count on people paying for everything they print. A publisher that has no books that people are buying goes bankrupt and out of business. Through the remaining trickle of donations and sale of properties they'll limp on. But without a steady stream of new literature to offer at doors, it's hard to see the preaching work being too effective. It already is weak enough.