by stapler99 15 Replies latest jw friends
In another thread it was being discussed how inefficient the door-to-door preaching is, and I thought this raised an interesting question - what proportion of Jehovah's Witnesses will make a convert in their lifetime?
In my experience, I can think of two or three people that my parents have studied with and who were later baptized. But I know of so few baptisms that it is hard for me to think about it. I think the number must be quite small, at least less than a half.
Me - 60+ years = 0
Wife 60 years = 2
George
My dad 20+ years pioneering, 1 study baptized. And that's the only study that was baptized in our congregation while I was there. I attended there for about 7 years.
I guess I was guilty of bringing one or two to baptism, in 58 years of being in. They were "referred leads" though, passed on by others who felt I was better qualified to lead the lambs to the slaughter.
My middle sister, who has spent over forty years in full-time work, Sp. Pio and Reg. Pio. was bemoaning the fact awhile ago that she had not done the whole process, i.e from knocking on the door in the first instance and then bringing the person to baptism, ever in her career.
Of course, she too has had many, many referrals that have gone on to be JW's
But, when you count the hours she has spent, it is such a poor return that a commercial organization would never countenance expending that kind of effort.
Many go door to door out of obligation but deep inside they don't want to have a bible study - that was my case even though I only went recruiting for about 4 or so years out of 19 years that I attended kh.
My wife's aunt who was a pioneer for the longest time brought in at least one young teenager that I know of but that's the only one I know of that got baptized.
I have numbers to this!
In 2009 there were 276,233 baptized.
In 2009, 1,557,788,344 hours were spent in FS.
That = 5,639 hours spent per new baptized for the year.
If I was the CEO of the Corporation, I would fire the whole company. 5,639 hours to recruit one new person per year is ridiculously inefficient. Since I have my spreadsheet up I'll share another interesting nugget of analysis of 2009:
276,233 were baptized. Average Publisher increase through the year, 188,730. What happened to 87,503 publishers through the year? Hmmm?
How many of those baptised are the children of JW's? The internet may be the worst thing that ever happened to the JW's. With the touch of a finger you can find out things about the JW's that you could never find out before.
Soldier
That = 5,639 hours spent per new baptized for the year.
It's quite staggering when calculated. If you were to go out once a week for 3 hours, it would take over 35 years.
What cannot be worked out is how many of those baptized is directly attributed to door to door work as some of those baptized would be family members, relatives, workmates and casual acquantances.
5,639 hours spent per new baptized for the year
I think it's safe to say that, especially in North America and Europe, the vast majority of baptisms are youth brought up in the Borg which makes this number even MORE inefficient and probably why they're pushing even harder for kids to get baptized - and the younger the better...
Oh yeah, those were just numbers. I agree with all of your statements about born-ins. That makes the numbers even worse!
