by cedars 83 Replies latest jw friends
You have shown no such thing. You are not comparing like for like across the tables. An increase of 1 strict member would be equivalent to an increase of 1.06 (or thereabouts) of a weak member precisely because they measure different things. You only produce a statistical anomaly by forgetting the difference between the two during the calculation.
Your conclusion that 'a JW who reports field service at least once a year' is necessarily a 'strict member' is rubbish.
The only reason scientology gets any press is because of who the members are.
Your conclusion that 'a JW who reports field service at least once a year' is necessarily a 'strict member' is rubbish.
I didn't say any such thing. Why look at the peak figure rather than the average anyway? Growth figures are measured on the basis of the average figure not the peak.
The point about strict versus not so strict counting is that JWs frequently claim fewer members than other churches in comparison to those who self- identify as members when a census is conduced.
So you end up with stuff like 100,000 JW "publishers" in a country, and 100,000 "members" of another church, and yet in the census you get 120,000 actually claiming to be JWs and only 80,000 claiming to belong to the other church. It's on that basis that the membership criteria are judged to be strict among JWs compared with other churches.
Why wouldn't there be more Dubs that Hubbardites regardless of the location? Dubs can be lazy and never have to think about science. It's way easier to be a dub.
Pm for Cedars
slimboyfat:
JWs frequently claim fewer members than other churches in comparison to those who self- identify as members when a census is conduced.
Because it inflates their growth rate. Round and round we go.
It's on that basis that the membership criteria are judged to be strict among JWs compared with other churches.
But you have no valid basis for comparison, because there is no mechanism for counting 'membership' of the other churches in the same manner as the JWs are counting. There may be as many or more, proportionally (obviously there are more in actual terms), of members of the 'other churches' who meet some equally arbitrary 'qualification' for 'actual' 'membership' of their own churches. 'Reporting time' in 'field service' is an entirely artificial benchmark for determining religiosity (or more accurately, it's an appeal to pride interfaced with a way to guilt people into placing Watch Tower literature). The JW 'strict criteria' method of counting serves no purpose for comparison with anything else. It is simply used to inflate growth. On other threads, you have said that JWs are growing faster than other religions, but their statistics provide no basis for a direct comparison.
Cedars:
There's no way 4 out of 10 newly baptized ones were coming in from informal Witnessing when I was an active Jdub. It was more like 8 or 9 out of 10 were friends or (mostly) family, with an extra 1 or 2 out of 10 the product of "some form" of preaching activity.
This was exactly my point: If you talk to friends and relatives (not counting children), that usually falls in the informal service category (or at least I'd count it as such back when I was properly in, and I don't see why the org wouldn't). This plus the children who join, probably accounts for pretty much every new member in most of the world. The only question is whether friends and relatives are closer to 40% or closer to 60% of the people who join each year. I believe they might be right in it being closer to 40%.
Pull my finger.
where is bohm when you need him
There are more angels dancing on the head of a needle that there are ar*eholes in the entire seedy district of Soho. I rest my case.
