by minimus 26 Replies latest jw friends
I was in 4 congregations in the first ten years since my conversion in the southern state of Australia and they were all very conservative and I would say cold ,very little if any socialising .
I moved to a northen state which was quite the opposite much more warmer and friendlier ,certainly more liberal easy going and the 2 congs were more into socialising outside of WT activities .
I was their for the next 22 years as a JW.
It just shows you that if you treat people nice, even if the religion itself has many issues, that you can stick around. Once you are realizing that you’re being treated like crap, you figure—-what’s the use?
"The buildings always smelled of pee" Punkofnice..
In the various kh I have entered there is one thing to be noticed its the obsession about opening windows; they never do. This is particularly bad where two or more congs share a kh.
Zeb - one thing to be noticed its the obsession about opening windows; they never do.
Don't you remember that convention talk about not breathing the air of the world Zeb?
RB.
VIDIOT:
Again, you are right. The JW religion is terrified that the rank & file JWs are going to learn the dirty lowdown about them. As you said: they don’t give a [ ] what the world thinks anymore. That’s not their concern at this point.
They are afraid of a real mass exodus almost overnight.. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing and a real nightmare for them! I don’t know if they would recover were this to happen.
LongHairGal - "...They are afraid of a real mass exodus..."
Damn near every insular authoritarian regime in history has feared mass exoduses (exodi?).
In fact, that very fear has even occasionally triggered behavior that ended up causing it to happen when it wouldn't have otherwise.
In the WTS's instance, though, I think the fear might be warranted... supposedly thousands of JWs walked after the Dateline expose back in '02.
Now, while I do suspect that the Org leadership wants to downsize the membership (similar to their reduced product output and real estate asset liquidation), they definitely wouldn't want it to happen too quickly, for a variety of reasons.
Quite a few people did leave after the 1975 fiasco. In 2 years following 1975, 1977 and 1978, the WTS had a 2% decrease in both years. But then people started "forgetting" or realizing that making an issue, would mean being labeled an apostate, or put themselves in a position where they could not stay but felt uncomfortable staying (many PIMOs ?).
Then of course, new people came in and the WTS by that time had buried that fiasco, children of jws were born after that event which became history of long ago, and since it was no longer mentioned in the publications or talked about by their parents, the children had no reason to wonder about it. And if jws brought it up after that, they were looked at suspiciously.
