Jehovah's Witness British Branch - All Time Peak! (page 2)

Room 215

Really, folks, who cares whether the JWs in Britain, or anywhere else, grow, shrink or stagnate? Just have a look at what passes for popular entertainment on the boob tube as a barometer of the collective intelligence of the unwashed masses.

Seeker4

Billy is correct that end of the service year numbers are skewed due to "catching up" with missing reports, etc., where some publishers will be counted at least twice, or maybe more. So, in a congregation of say, 100 publishers, if everyone reports their time for the month, and then in addition, three or four are counted twice due to missing reports they finally turned in, it shows as a 3-4% increase for that month.

There still may be an increase. That wouldn't surprise me. In countries with a lot of third world immigration, growth seems to be greatest among the immigrants, as with the Hispanic population here in the US.

Keep us posted if the "increase" continues for the next couple of months.

S4

sir82

SBF,

Just curious, do you have a feel for where the growth is coming from?

For example, here in the US, fully 25% or even more of the JWs are in Spanish-language congregations. In areas with huge recent-immigrant populations, the growth is astonishing - probably double-digits, percentage-wise. That big increase offsets the (very likely) actual decline in numbers among English-speakers, so that the net result is typically a 1-3% overall increase in the US count of JWs.

I believe there are lots of immigrants in the UK as well, and I am sure the JWs are targeting them. Are they driving the growth going on there?

besty

Reminds me of a wee calculation I did a few months back speculating how the proportion of immigrant to indigenous JW's may change over the next few years. I used Spanish JW's in the US but the same applies to the UK, except for Spanish you would substitute '20 different European languages'

Started with 280k Spanish witnesses which represents a quarter of the total number of districts.
From there I assumed a 10% growth rate in 'Spanish' JW's and a 2% decline in 'English' JW's.
Run that forward 5 years and you still get 2% annual growth in the overall number but the proportions have changed to 60:40 in favour of Spanish. Plenty of assumptions in there but its as good a guess as any.

watson

Just having more children. More unbaptized publishers making the ranks.

besty

Just on a sidenote - technically its called the Britain Branch, indicating in which country it is located - British would indicate a nationalistic entity

:-)

Joker10

Could you provide the numbers for December?, including those baptized?

aniron

According to the December 2008 Kingdom Ministry Jehovah's Witnesses reached an all time peak number of publishers and pioneers in August 2008.

Well if it does, why didn't you give us the number?

As has already been said I know how the Service Overseer would run round at the end of August getting every one who was anyone, to put a report in. As he used to say "Its the end of the Service year and the report to Bethel must look good." I often recall him chasing up elderly sisters to "just put a couple of hours down". Also if you you had missed the months before report and you put two in, say one for 5 hours in July and one for 5 hours in August, it got counted as TWO publishers reporting and as 10 hours service in August. Now you only need say 6 publishers doing that and it would mean 12 publishers reporting double hours. He certainly knew a few ways to massage the figures.

Billy the Ex-Bethelite

Or perhaps Witnesses are still increasing slightly.

Perhaps they are increasing slightly. It still doesn't make them "the truth". And it's very little return for the amount of time and money they spend trying to recruit new members.

Also, in light of the dismal economy recently, I would expect that they could bring some back like they did after 9/11.

B the X

Homerovah the Almighty

I wonder how much of this increase comes from immigrants?

Bingo, where there are incidences of high immigration many times you'll see increase in their numbers, its happening in my locality right now.

Jehovah's Witness British Branch - All Time Peak!

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