Hours it Takes to Get One Baptized Publisher

Smoldering Wick

marlon
Location: Wales uk

Just a thought a quick calculation in 2001 it took around 4,438 hours to get one baptised publisher.
l hope those figures are right, l will check them again later.
in 1969 it was about 2000 hours-that means it is now taking about double the number of man hours (preaching & teaching hours) than it did in 1969.

I saw that post while browsing through:
http://www.purelanguage.net/forums/showthread.php?s=b002bc5bfb658d3270409d01d60cafeb&threadid=949

Can you imagine it taking 4,438 hours to get one convert? ...and that's with the "new arrangement" of not studying with Bible Studies for 10 years!!!

If the society paid these poor brothers and sisters minimum wage to do their grunt work...each convert would cost them $22,855.70! Not to mention all the gas mileage and food expenses!

No wonder they didn't want us bright young people going off to college and getting real paying jobs.

I personally spent a minimum of a thousand hours a year working for the society. What did I get for all my time, effort and hard work?

See below:

Sad thing was...I wasn't to show off my souvenir to anyone even though it cost me $5,150 a year to get it plus gas & expenses of course! *sigh*

True dat sista !!
I did the same, spent 5 years pounding the pavement.
For what ? Some book that tells you how to be more effective.
Sheesh!!
I looked at the photo of my class and the majority of them are like me.
In a galaxy far far away.

ring

damn, as a witness for 19 years, I dont
think I have a life total of
25 hours in field service.
Was I a bad witness?
No wonder I never converted anyone.

Pathofthorns

Here are some figures for Canada I put together a couple years back to illustrate the futility of the work.

In 1999 there were 18 694 308 hours spent in the preaching work in Canada.
Those hours resulted in 2 467 persons being baptized. This number includes those who are baptized and “raised in the truth.”
For every person baptized 7 578 hours (rounded to the nearest whole number) were spent in the preaching work. This number again includes those who are baptized and “raised in the truth.”
This means, that a 10-hour per month publisher would spend 63 years (rounded to the nearest whole number) on average to bring a “new one” to the point of baptism. Again, this figure includes those who are “raised in the truth” who are brought to the point of baptism.
If we take an extremely conservative estimate that 50% of newly baptized ones have been raised in the truth, the 63 years doubles to 126 years of preaching at 10 hours per month to bring someone “in the field” to the point of baptism in Canada.

jerome

what does a jw have to do to be baptized

is there a time period do you have to put in a certain number of hours of feild service

do you have to show a certain amount of blind faith?

what does it take?

DB

For years, at Circuit Assemblies especially, I have marveled at how few have been getting baptized. Figure 800 pubs in the circuit averaging 9 hrs per month for 6 months (the general span between assemblies) equals 43,200 hours combined for the circuit over the 6 month span. We average about 6 people baptized at each assembly, most of whom are born and raised as jws. Subtracting them, we average maybe 2 "new ones". So jws are devoting, in my area, 21,600 hours per new disciple every 6 months, on average, or 3,600 hours each month combined in field service on a monthly basis.

BTW, a few years back, we had ONE person baptized at a circuit assembly. The speaker gave the baptismal (dismal...it's always a bore), and was shocked to see only one person rise when it was time for the vow. It was rather comical at the time, but even then I thought, man, things are tough, all that time spent for one disciple.

RunningMan

I posted this calculation a couple of weeks ago:

Last year (2001), there were 107,218 Jehovah's Witnesses in Canada. They reported 18,544,473 hours of field service. This activity resulted in 2,030 new baptisms. Now, let's calculate their efficiency.

Each Witness averaged 173 hours in field service during the year. Every baptism came as a result of 9,135 hours of reported activity. Another way of stating this is that it took 53 JW person-years of activity to generate one baptism. This does not seem terribly efficient, but it is really just the tip of the iceberg.

If you attend a Jehovah's Witness convention, you will find that the majority of their newly baptized members are not converts from outside the organization. Approximately 90% of them are children of their own members. It is not necessary to canvass from door to door in order to contact your own children. So, of those 2,030 baptisms last year, only about 200 of them represent actual converts.

Now let's rerun the calculation, using more realistic numbers. Each convert came as a result of 91,352 hours of field service activity, or 529 person-years. This seems to be a grossly inefficient use of labor.

How many doors must JW's knock on, in order to make a convert? Well, that depends on the type of activity. If a Witness is conducting a Bible study, then one call could take a full hour, or possibly even more. If that same person is canvassing new territory, then 20 or 30 calls could be made in an hour. If we make the assumption that each hour of field service generates five house calls, then 456,760 doors must be approached to find one convert. Since the average Canadian household contains 2.6 persons, then a total population of almost 1.2 million must be contacted in order to make one Jehovah's Witness convert.

But, it gets even worse than this. I have given them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that all 203 of these converts came as a result of the door to door work. Really, many of them came into contact with Jehovah's Witnesses through informal methods, such as friends, relatives, and coworkers.