Are the statistics out yet?
by slimboyfat 169 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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slimboyfat
There are over a million Ukrainian refugees in Poland, so that must have had an impact on the Polish numbers.
I vaguely recall hearing that JWs had a special scheme to relocate JWs from Ukraine to Norway. I don’t know any details, but if that it true then it would have impacted the Norwegian numbers in particular.
In terms of the UK and other Western European countries I think the impact is probably quite small.
The UK apparently took in something in the region of 100,000 refugees from Ukraine. If JWs were proportionally represented in that group (using the 2021 Ukraine ratio of 1 to 323) that would be around 310 people. Plus they would only have been there for a few months of the 2022 report, so maybe count a third 100, or less. I haven’t heard of Ukrainian JWs coming to the UK.
In Poland, however, it would be a boost of 1000 extra publishers, or more.
Also interesting that there’s a small increase in Japan over the past few years. This is despite the population of Japan as a whole going into decline. (Down by 1 million in the last year, according the Watchtower estimate)
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Gorb
Best report ever!
G.
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Phizzy
I know that Slimboy and others will do a proper analysis, numbers are not my thing, but I was heartened to see that the ratio of J.W's in "Britain" , publishers to population ,is static.
To me that is NOT an increase !
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slimboyfat
Not an increase in terms of proportion of the population, as Jeffro is eager to point out. Increasing by 1% in Britain seems to be just enough to keep pace.
That is important context, but there are other contexts to consider as well - such as how are other churches doing by comparison. The Church of Scotland had a particularly bad year this year and reported a 5% decline in membership. This accelerates a decades long trend of decline. Their highest ever membership was 1.37 million members in 1957. I made a graph of their decline since 1957 which I will attempt to post below. The spreadsheet ‘fill in the cells’ function indicates that a crude extrapolation of the trend predicts the Kirk will disappear altogether in 2041. (I don’t personally think that will happen) But if this graph doesn’t put JW growth, or ‘decline’ in Britain into perspective then I don’t know what does.
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Jeffro
slimboyfat:
But if this graph doesn’t put JW growth, or ‘decline’ in Britain into perspective then I don’t know what does.
It’s almost as though people in other denominations are more free to leave. It certainly is a mystery. 😂
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Jeffro
I wonder if The Watchtower will soon take another jab at people claiming to be ‘anointed’ maybe being mentally ill. Except of course for the ‘governing body’ who are definitely legitimately ‘anointed’ because reasons.
https://jeffro77.wordpress.com/index/pure-worship-ezekiel-revisited-part-3/#Tribulation
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slimboyfat
I can see the point of correlating baptisms. But what happens to the trend line of the ‘hours required for additional publisher’ line if JWs begin declining overall? Wouldn’t it tend toward infinity? So what are you really measuring there? And how could it be used to compare with the outreach programmes of other churches that are in decline?
Jeffro you seem to have two basic responses to JW growth. The first is to deny that it exists and say the Watchtower data are wrong. The second is to say that even if the data are correct (the Australian census, for example) it doesn’t count because: disfellowshipping and North Korea. If you believe that Watchtower growth doesn’t count then why are you interested in tracking it anyway? If you can dismiss all favourable comparisons of JW growth with others groups as either factually wrong, or inconsequential if true, then there is no way the data can ever contradict your starting assumptions.
I have been very surprised by the continued growth of JWs over the past few decades. I became inactive in the early 2000s at a time when JWs were still reeling from the fallout of the ‘generation’ disappointment in 1995 and most western countries were in decline. In Britain the publisher number had dropped to around 122,000 from a high of 132,000 in the mid 1990s. I fully expected JWs to continue declining just as practically all other churches were in decline. If you had asked me in 2002 how many JWs there would be in Britain in 2022 I might have guessed less than 100,000. Instead here we are in 2022 and there are around 140,000 JWs in Britain, despite the fact that most other churches have continued or accelerated their decline. To paraphrase a famous quotation: when the data change I change my opinion, what do you do?
People are good at coming up with reasons why not every JW in the official count is a true believer, and the threat of disfellowshipping is indeed a good reason to suspect that not every JW is a true believer. But people raising this issue rarely seem to reflect that questions could be raised about the membership of other religious groups too. The issues may not be the same but there are obviously members of other churches who are not true believers either. For example, it is noticeable that local and national politicians tend to be members of the national church at a higher rate than the population as a whole (current and former first ministers, deputy first ministers, leaders of the opposition, local councillors and so on). Is this because politicians are an exceptionally godly bunch of individuals, or is it because membership of the national church still conveys a certain status that they find useful in their careers. Anecdotally I know of members of other churches who are members for social reasons rather than purely religious reasons. On the other hand nobody joins JWs in order to gain respectability locally or politically. So this phenomenon of non-true-believing members is not unique, or even particularly distinctive of JWs. In fact I suspect it’s probably lower among JWs because of the social costs involved in membership that don’t apply to other groups. So just as there are some factors that may inflate the membership of JWs there are factors that inflate the membership of other groups that don’t apply in the case of JWs. So to dismiss any JW growth with the wave of a hand is to ignore the wider picture of religious phenomena in general. -
Blotty
Slim, The watchtower gets a lot of hate, in my opinion is actually woefully unjustified - especially if it comes from other so called "Christians" (Who claim to abide by the bible) Have they made mistakes? yes Have other religions? yes
Just look at almost any other religion and do some digging, there's dirty laundry whether one admits it or not..
People openly acknowledge they want to see the Watchtower fail and just blindly jump on a hate bandwagon (for "Christians" this is worse as where in the bible does it say be nasty to "false religion" or jump on hate bandwagons? - I know of no such scripture )
So really your arguing a point that is never going to get through to some (ironic coming from me, Ik) Who just blindly want to hate and not acknowledge any good in an organisation that has actually done some insane things the Bible in 1000 languages (How many other places have done that?) for starters.. People are going to make surface level arguments to try and playdown or discredit them just because they don't like them for one reason or another