What Mr. Flipper said here:
MADMEN- Welcome to the board. The WT society is quite good as are their elders at NOT following policy exactly to the tee anyway. I have seen elders in many different congregations handle a similar matter in dozens of different ways. It depends on the elders dealing with the judicial committee matter. AND it depends on how badly they want a certain inactive person to go away if they don't like him or her. It really comes down to if they perceive you to be a threat to the local congregation.
- is absolutely true. Any judicial matter is tainted by the politics and personal opinions of the local elders on the committee. I had a girlfriend years ago whose mother had faded and quit attending the meetings years before.
The local body of elders disfellowshipped her in a spite of anger because she refused to come back. They used charges of gluttony and alcoholism - neither of which was true.
That same body of elders took absolutely no action against an active MS who made homosexual advances to one of my friends - he was in his 40s, the guy I knew about 19. But the offender's dad was a well-respected and popular elder.
It is like dealing with a grizzly bear in the north woods - he may look at you and walk away; he may chase you down and tear you to pieces. Both (the bear and the elders) are completely unpredictable.
I pretty much forced the elders to disfellowship me in 1981 after I faded (and wrote a self-DA letter) in 1979 simply because I made an open effort of protest to help get people in an extended family group out of the organization. About 50 people left - as it turned out, only myself and Marion Dunlap (city overseer of OKC, and brother of Ed Dunlap - who is featured in Ray Franz book) were actually disfellowshipped. NONE of the other 50 were even contacted. Marion and I speculated that they simply did not want to read out 50 disfellowshippings all at once because of the bad publicity for them.
I never was asked to attend a committee meeting...they just called me one Sunday morning (after I had been away for two years) and told I was DFd. The guy who called smugly told me "none of your friends will talk to you any more". I told them that my real friends would still talk to me and that we had nothing more to discuss.
I viewed the DFing as a final badge of honor.
