My wife and I developed faith-disturbing doubts around the same time, about 25 years ago. So did some close friends. We were hurt deeply by the bad treatment of some very decent brothers. Those good persons had suffered abuse from elders with power linked to headquarters support. When I spoke to Bethel elders and members of the Service Department, the answer was always something like "Let's wait on Jehovah and see how he works it all out." But the abused were never exonerated and in time some of the abusers were elevated. We started to have doubts about some of the organization's teachings. We spoke cautiously and hesitantly among ourselves for several months. And then something came crashing down like a huge gate from the skies. The organization stepped up its focus on the question, "Where else can you go? No other organization teaches anything near the truths God has revealed through the Society."
For the next ten years, until the day she died, my wife and I suppressed our doubts due to that fear-inducing concept that God has an organization and that the WT Society is that one organization he is using.
For several years I suffered almost daily agony due to losing the best friend I ever had. It didn't help much that I continued to observe abuses and the unwillingness of those in power to deal with them. What DID help was my increased attention to the Bible as a personal letter directed to each believer. I spent an excessive amount of time in personal Bible reading and study. My aim was to build up my own faith and the faith of others in the one organization belonging to God and of which we were a part. My chief references were the Society's publication indexes, and when I couldn't find in the Society's literature an answer to a nagging question, I ventured to use Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible. Years earlier this commentary was recommended to me by a close friend in the Society's Writing Department. To make a long story short, I discovered just too many conflicting differences between the Bible and the teachings of the Society. STILL, and I cannot put in words how deeply this was true: I was ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED at the thought of possibly making a mistake and not knowing what “organization” to turn to just in case I did get up enough courage to leave.
It is now more than ten years since I left JWs after being a member for 50 years and since I left Bethel after being there 40 years. I found true freedom, and I fully did "leave" the WT Society once and for all when I became free of the unscriptural notion that God has entrusted an organization to speak for him to his people and to the world.
By the way, some former friends who expressed their doubts 25 years ago, far more strongly than my wife or I ever did, have remained as JWs all this time, still in bondage to the false teaching that God is using the WT Society as his one and only organization.
