http://www.vice.com/read/inside-the-jehovahs-witnesses-british-headquarters-829
VICE
Inside the Jehovah's Witnesses' British Headquarters
By Adam Forrest Oct 8 2014
From the pages of the Watchtower magazine: Jehovah's flock spared following the war of Armageddon
The end is nigh, and it's going to be just as fiery and painful a scene as you'd expect from the total annihilation of an entire planet. But have you heard the good news? After all the death, destruction, and downed internet connections, exactly 144,000 faithful Christians will shoot up to heaven, while anyone else who died faithful to God will be resurrected into an earthly paradise where everything is perfect and nobody starts wars over religion or gives someone shit about a particular haircut.
This, in a very small nutshell, is what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. I know because I'm curious about the smartly dressed people handing out magazines at the Oxford Circus metro station in London, and ask them what they were doing.
"It’s all Bible-based,” I'm told by a nice lady dressed in gray. Yet the two magazines I’m given—the Watchtower and Awake!—are a curious mixture of stress-coping strategies, advice on reducing diabetes risks, and some weird, Witness-specific theology about Satan’s bad angels causing “the dramatic increase in wickedness and violence since 1914."
Full-time volunteers Deep Singh (left) and Bruce Young (right) witnessing at Oxford Circus
Deep Singh and Bruce Young—two volunteer coordinators of the London magazine drive—are happy to go for a coffee to explain some more. Singh, who grew up a Sikh, became a Jehovah’s Witness at the age of 17 after being contacted by door-to-door Witnesses in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. “For me, it was a process of reasoning, rather than any kind of sudden vision,” he says.
Singh and Young get out their iPad and show me the online sign-up system. Around 1,700 volunteers sign up for shifts at 23 central London locations—mostly metro stations. The “metropolitan public Witnessing program” is now a key part of the proselytizing work Jehovah’s Witnesses are expected to do, along with the traditional door-to-door ministry the group is known for.
“It’s very flexible around people’s jobs,” says Singh. “Some might do one four-hour shift a week; some want to give some time every day, around part-time jobs. We both do this full-time because this is the life course we’ve chosen.”
So how do they get by, financially? “Well, we have a modest cost-of-living bursary for the things we need,” Singh explains. “And housing costs and bills are covered. We’re like charity volunteer workers, in effect. Something like a new suit—we might get the cost of that donated to us by a Witness friend.”
And what about the stress-reduction stuff in the magazines? Is that a PR ruse? A way of slipping into a culture where the daily anxieties of work, life, and love are literally killing us?
“How to cope with life—these are the questions we are often asked, rather than about Armageddon," says Singh. "The last days, as we call it, it’s very important, of course... but it’s not easy to start a conversation that way. God is a god of love, not of fear. Our motive is to help people love God, not to think, Oh no, the end is coming.”
“We’re not trying to talk doom and gloom,” Young adds.
"The scriptures do point out a time line to us, and where we are in the stream of time shows us we are near the end,” Singh explains. “But that is good news for us, because we know it’s an end of evil. And Jesus emphasized that as many people need to know the good news of the kingdom as possible.”
The British Jehovah's Witnesses' headquarters in London's Mill Hill
Soon, I'm making arrangements to visit the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ British headquarters in Mill Hill, a green and sleepy suburb on the outskirts of North London. I know I've arrived in roughly the right place when I see a bunch of friendly men in gray suits nodding and smiling as I walk past them.
Around 800 people work in Mill Hill. Many of them also live in the area, sleeping in austere apartment buildings owned by the British branch of “Bethel," a Hebrew term meaning “House of God."
Rick Fenton from the Office of Public Information shows me around the large factory on the premises, where 94,000 magazines are printed every hour. On a good day, they'll cram one million copies into 24 hours (the Watchtower has a global run of 46 million copies a month, making it the most widely circulated magazine in the world).
The printing and packing factory
I ask about the more casually dressed workmen lifting crates and packing vans. They are all Jehovah’s Witnesses. Everyone here is a Jehovah’s Witness.
“Nobody gets a salary—everyone is here on a voluntary basis,” Fenton explains. “They’re here because they want to be here. Everyone is motivated. And as volunteers giving ourselves to the work full-time, board and lodgings and expenses are all provided.”
How much does each person get in living expenses? “That’s a personal matter, but it’s safe to say it’s a small amount. Most of our needs are cared for, so not a lot of money is needed.”
The dining hall, where breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served for Bethelites
In the huge dining room it becomes clear how all-consuming life as a Bethelite must be. When the flock gathers here each morning for breakfast, announcements and short lectures begin on the TV screens above the tables.
Even outside of the Bethel hardcore, the demands placed upon ordinary Jehovah’s Witnesses are still pretty hefty. The more devoted members of each local congregation—“regular pioneers”—give 70 hours a month to ministry work.
I begin to wonder why any of it could possibly feel worthwhile. The vast majority of Oxford Circus shoppers have no interest in the Book of Revelation. The vast majority of doors will be slammed in Witnesses’ faces. Can’t they just keep God’s master plan to themselves?
“We’re not trying to push it down people’s throats—it doesn’t work that way,” says Fenton. “But we want to make sure they’re given the opportunity to know. The clue is in the name—we feel we are Witnesses for Jehovah, and a Witness tells others what he knows to be true.”
Some classic covers from both Awake! and the Watchtower magazines
But isn't all the Armageddon stuff a little off-putting? In my experience, telling a stranger, "Your entire family is going to die!" probably won't make him warm to you.
“If you think of what Jesus said—that his followers should preach the good news—then we’re talking about the end of crime, disease, war, and the beginning of something else: God’s Kingdom, the kind of life we all want,” says Fenton. “So yes, the end of the world as we know it is coming, but not the end of the Earth, and we’re excited about that. Because God is going to replace the way the troubled world is now with the way he wants it to be.”
A long history of failed predictions about Christ’s 1,000-year reign on Earth aside, there are further oddities which leave most mainstream Christians wanting very little to do with Jehovah’s Witnesses. For example, esotericisms like the aversion to blood transfusion—something explained in a pamphlet as “those who respect life as a gift from the Creator do not try to sustain life by taking in blood."
And then there's the elaborate, hard-to-unravel system of “disfellowshipping," and the shunning of members who both cease to believe and break the Bible’s moral code in some identifiable way. “Individuals are free to leave as they wish,” Fenton says. “They are not disfellowshipped or shunned simply because they no longer wish to associate with Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
It’s all very strange to me, and I can't say my trip to the beating heart of the British Witness community has changed any of my views. But, I suppose, as long as they're not actively hurting anybody, who am I to stop them from being consistently ignored by people in the street?
So I leave the Mill Hill building without saying a word, just as another truck full of crisp magazines heads out into the fallen, disbelieving world. The men in gray suits smile and nod goodbye.
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...OUTLAW