by Hecce 182 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
This notice is not official yet and it should be confidential until released thru the proper channels. A friend of mine told me about a huge elders meeting in Southern California. The subject was the relocation and dissolution of some congregations; it seems that this is the result of some project that has been going on for some time and is going to be implemented right now.
Please let me know if this is happening all over the country?
keep us updated with further details please.
Here we go!
The Big Sell-Off
Wonderous contraction is taking place!
Wasn't there some stuff going on around the riverside area about a year ago that sounded like the makings of something like this?
Wasn't there some stuff going on around the riverside area about a year ago that sounded like the makings of something like this
I assume that both actions are related, my understanding is that some sort of surveys have been done during the last few months in order to launch this project. I will see if I can get more information from my source.
I know this happened in Europe. A city with something like 18 congregations was consolidated into just a handful of Kingdom Halls. It caused a lot of disruption, breaking old friendships and making JWs travel a long way to the meetings. Now they are discussing re-opening a couple of Kingdom Halls. But the damage is alread done. I think numbers will be down because of this. Each time congregations are moved some marginal JWs take it as a cue to stop associating.
It sounds like good news to me.
Two years ago I posted an article on my blog about the Watchtower's real estate holdings (http://pathologicallyintellectual.blogspot.com/2014/09/analysis-of-watchtower-real-estate.html). Obviously they would want to get their hands on the money some how. I suspected that they were running return on investment calculations on every property (or intended to at some point). They would then sell off any hall that didn't meet their target.
If the target rate is 4%, a reasonable estimate in this economy, they would expect a hall worth half a million to send $20,000 a year from the congregations using it. If they don't get that much, they can sell the hall, invest the money and come out ahead. So this meeting raises another question. Are they telling the elders the target return, so they can shake down the flock, or are they just selling off the properties?
I can see them pursuing the first tactic, at least for a while. The elders will go back and give talks about how they need to cough up "X" more dollars or the Society will be forced to sell the Hall and everybody will have to drive across town to go to meeting. If that doesn't produce more money they can consolidate halls, probably figuring that anybody that bails out wasn't contributing that much to begin with.
This will be a very interesting story to watch.
Very interesting theory Jeff and it would not surprise me at all. The theological issues that the WTS have are terminal in the long run but as long as the org has money then life goes on as normal for the heavyweights in their ivory towers. Any strategy to maintain funds over pure scale of membership has to be a winner for them
