by Caupon 57 Replies latest jw friends
Having been out for a few years now I don't know what the zeal is like in the congregations now but one definite trend is that people are fed up of cold callers , whether by phone or ( very rarely nowadays ) people knocking at the door. It just doesn't work any longer. The whole movement in marketing has moved online. And this must impact on JWs.
People also ( in Europe , at least ) are very , very suspicious of religion. Frankly I would hate to be knocking on doors now.
I wonder if there is a snowball effect on their zeal? I think in the past if you didn't have the zeal you felt you were supposed to you faked it. Maybe so many people were faking it that it's starting to become unavoidable not to let the real lack of zeal leak out. And as that happens more and more feel it's acceptable to let their lack of zeal show - without even realizing what is happening.
This seems like a really hard trend for the organization to stop, maybe impossible. I agree that it's a bigger issue than apostates.
without a doubt, I simply never see them out in the FS at all these days, and the borough I live in is a very large residential commuter belt set of towns, they stand lazily at the carts 2/3 times a week playing with their mobile phones and gossiping, so much for the life saving message they are meant to have, the last chat I had with them on the cart a few weeks ago I mentioned to the lady "do you lot still go out on the D2D work around here because in the 11 years I've lived in the borough I've never been called on" she said "oh yes will still go out" she clearly is lying, I asked " why dont you leave a leaflet or something if you call? and I remember when invites for the memorial where posted through letter boxes and the special "tract" campaigns where entire territories were covered in a "leaflet drop" dont you do this anymore? she just stared at me
Caupon - "Is zeal beginning to vanish?"
'Course it is.
Why else would the GB be acting as weird as they are?
The fact that so many pioneers study with other people's JW kids keeps them out of sight as well.
What i see is this:
From a 50,000 foot view the cult is dying a slow apathetic death. The people have changed and are disillusioned with so many things.
From a one on one level many still talk super crazy culty, maybe even more so at times. I believe trying really to convince themselves. Pretending to live the new veneer, they have gone from knowing the bible front to back to a topical understanding steeped in confusion much like how the Juche religio/political cult works in North Korea. People are fervishly devout! But most don't understand. I think witnesses understand less than ever before what the hell they believe but act more devout too because they are afraid of being someone who doesn't get it.
So I think on the inside people are drifting if only in their own subtle way, but outwardly not ready to face that it's all been BS. But I do believe beneath the surface of everyone termites of reality are eating away.
My take on Hispanic JW's doing serve-us (thank you Billy for expanding my WT vocabulary) in my area:
It's painful to watch, especially knowing that my daughter does the same thing in some other part of the town. Approving that baptism was the biggest mistake of my life
I certainly think it is beginning to vanish.
One can hope, at least.
But the evidence indicates that something is not going as well in JW land as the GB would hope.
I got baptized in the mid-90s. At that point every elder was expected to be able to hold their own in field service. About half the ministerial servants could do the same, maybe 1/2 the regular pioneers, and the odd publisher or two who was really smart but never ascended up the ranks. I'd say 20-25% of publishers could hold their own. The rest were just there to drop off magazines, count time, and run away as fast they could. I can only speak for the men since I wasn't in the habit of going out in FS with women.
By the early 00s there were already a few elders who were complete dunces, the type of men who'd been professional MS's but had been pulled up the ranks due to attrition. FS had become more nakedly a time-counting operation. A lot of the intelligent publishers with no titles simply disappeared from the map, moved away or stopped attending meetings. I estimate the number of people who could hold their own dropped to 15% or so by 2005.
After I left, things seemingly got much worse. Contemporaries of mine who were not very bright and had spent their adolescence and early adulthood being two-faces and constantly finding ways to avoid JCs started becoming MS's and elders. Men who had once been considered pillars, intelligent men who could quote hundreds of bible verses, began to drop off from the elders' list and either stopped attending or became a lot less involved than they had been. Being inquisitive seemingly went from being a virtue, a sign of someone being a deep, spiritual person, to being seen as a sign of an independent spirit and possible apostate tendencies.
