by Fadeaway1962 62 Replies latest watchtower bible
slimboyfat - "In other words, to state the obvious, reducing the number of congregations, and Kingdom Halls, in the United States has more to do with generating money, than it does rational or considerate organization of local congregations."
I can distill it down even further.
It's about survival.
Hello fadeaway 1962, Jeffro, respectful-observer, road to nowhere and the others
thanks from Europe for the ..bice informations and comments about the yearly Report.
The decrease in clear :
By the way concerning the Reporting of 'field service' Here below are the latest instructions :
« Provision for Reporting Less Than 15 Minutes:
Until further notice, there is no need for the Congregation Service Committee to determine which publishers qualify to report field service in 15-minute increments. (sfl chap. 22 par. 14)
If any publisher shares in the ministry for less than an hour during a month, even if this amounts to less than 15 minutes, the secretary should simply note on the Congregation’s Publisher Record (S-21) that the publisher participated in the ministry that month.
There is no need to ask such publishers to specify the number of minutes they shared in preaching. In the monthly report to the branch office, the publisher would be counted among those reporting field service and would be counted in the total number of active publishers. «
Thanks to Atlantis and Co and my closest friends in Euroe.
Greetings
JC MacHislopp
slimboyfat5 hours ago
Thanks, I don’t know that I’ve been translated before!
Wow, I'm kind of jealous
I just watched a Cedars video where he “analyses” the latest figures and downplays the impact of the pandemic. Friend or foe of Watchtower, that’s pretty stupid. It’s clear the pandemic is the major driver of these decreases, especially when some of the countries that posted the largest decreases are not places where you would expect a decline in a “normal” year.
Large, sudden decreases in Angola, Malawi, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania are probably best explained by difficulties adjusting to the pandemic technologically, rather than a sudden mass drop in support for the religion.
In fact I want to point out something, possibly unwelcome here. If we discounted the impact of the pandemic, if it were possible to do so, especially all the decreases in African countries (and Britain because of its peculiar problems in the pandemic) it’s entirely possible that JW growth would be greater this year than last year. I don’t think the latest figures add any evidence that Watchtower has already entered decline overall. If anything, it might suggest a slight improvement on recent trends.
It will be interesting to compare Seventh-day Adventist and Mormon figures for the year, assuming they are published in a way that allows meaningful comparison.
It seems fairly likely that the pandemic is largely responsible for the reported declines in average publishers and Memorial attendance.
However, with the provision to write letters and to report as little as 15 minutes preaching per month, the significant reduction in preaching hours does not seem to be entirely limited to the pandemic. The 2020 report starts from September 2019 before the pandemic, and yet the peak publishers for the year is only 12,691 higher than the peak for the previous year. For comparison, the peak difference between the 2018 and 2019 reports was 103,208.
If the pandemic is largely responsible for problems with reporting, then it would be expected to see an artificially inflated increase after the pandemic is over, accounting for any actual increase in addition to numbers recovering from potentially unreported details from 2020. This could be as much as 3% if the actual increase independent of the 'recovery' is around the 1.5% mark of recent years, which the Watch Tower Society may dishonestly hail as 'remarkable' growth.
It should also be borne in mind that the pandemic is ongoing and that the 2021 report will include data starting from September 2020. So statistics (possibly with a 'phantom' increase as described above) may not recover fully until the 2022 report.
Also interesting to note that while the average publisher figure is down -3% for the year in Britain, the peak figure is up by 3.2% to an all time high of 141,412 publishers.
These erratic numbers indicate a huge collapse in numbers in Britain from March 2020 when the pandemic hit, followed by a huge rebound in August. The figures from Britain in April/May must have been absolutely off-the-charts appalling. (-25% or more?) No wonder the GB sent an emergency instruction to the Britain branch for JWs to “break the rules” and resume ministry by letter writing,
However, with the provision to write letters and to report as little as 15 minutes preaching per month, the significant reduction in preaching hours does not seem to be entirely limited to the pandemic.
Jeffro, the direction to report even 15 minutes preaching came in September 2020,which is after the 2020 service year ended. So the impact of the 15 mi leeway will be in the 2021 totals.
In many countries, letter writing was only for those whom you knew, and not to general public, thus resulting in a massive drop in number of hours.
Also, the field activity was heavily dictated and regulated due to changing covid laws/rules of the country, leading to different trends for different countries
Speaking of the effect of GDPR and pandemic...
One publisher I know in a western European country informs me that witnessing is carried out strictly by email. No physically mailed letters, no phone calls (except to family members who don't mind being harangued about "the truth" on a weekly basis).
A consortium of congregations have arranged a sort of "clearinghouse" for emails addressed to hospitals and rehabilitation facilities. Emails can be "addressed" to "patients" or "medical staff".
The actual emails with the witnessing message are sent to a central email address. A group of "approved" JWs with access to that email address inbox review the emails sent, and then forwards them to actual hospital / patient / doctor email addresses that they and only they have.
The net result is, witnessing is reduced to writing impersonal emails addressed to "Dear neighbor" or "Dear doctor" and sent to a "black hole" where the email is later distributed [somewhere]. There is no feedback to the JW email writer, no chance to "cultivate interest", no ability to make return visits, nothing. Just write an email, send the email, write another email, send the email, ad infinitum.
It is of course a completely unsustainable model. Eventually, the return visits that JWs had pre-pandemic will get tired of weekly phone calls, or they will study and become JWs, and there won't be anyone with any RVs or studies to do.
So, get on a bus, drop a tract on the seat next to you as you exit, yes, I preached this month. Lol
I give them credit for posting the negative numbers.
