The Dedication program for congregations was heavily edited.
On Sunday, the Watchtower Summary was taken by Peter Bell.
Then some new guy interviewed a Branch committee member and summarised the whole Saturday Dedication in 20 minutes, which I'm sure was a rub in the sores of poor JWs who weren't "privileged" to attend Saturday, they only got to see one small clip of Kenneth Cook dedicating thr facilities.
Then there were more branch reports. Stephen Hardy took the Britain branch reports and still goes along the rhetoric that most increase in the Britain branch territory is from immigrants. That's not entirely true. The British are still part of the main flow coming in, albeit mainly previously inactive, disfellowshipped or children of JWs.
Then the final talk wasn't the dedication talk. It was an entirely different talk by Kenneth Cook about counting your blessings. Compared to Saturdays largely positive program, Kenneth saved the harsh counsel for Sunday.
"You may think they've been in the truth for decades, how could they do something like this?
Well, a perfect set of teeth can still bite your tongue"
And he left it at that. Whilst the mindless drones laughed, I thought wow how passive aggressive of him! No consideration to the fact that these "faithful ones" may indeed become unfaithful and merit discipline themselves?
Also, a pathetic illustration was given about a farmer kicking a nest on the ground every time he saw it on his morning walk.
Then one day he looked up and saw the bird had begun building the nest in a tree.
He said "I'm so glad that little bird is now finally protected from the cat".
Same reaction from everyone.
So I was fuming and thinking why the absolute hell would he kick the nest anyway?! What a moron! In this country, birds nests are protected by law. His point was "how did you view the farmer at the beginning? We don't always see the bigger picture of things until we give things time". It still didn't explain the point to me, I was convinced that this farmer was still the village idiot.
Then after many cherry picked blessings he mentioned, Kenneth gave counsel about going to extremes with personal hobbies and entertainment, saying that these could distract us from the ministry. The emphasis was on this: as long as the people are faithful, then the dedicated buildings would only be as good as the people in it. Living next door to a bank doesn't automatically make you rich, Kenneth said the day before, and drawing this home again, he said that we want spiritually mature men and women to serve.
It seems this was a passive aggressive attempt at counselling the British for their irreligious lifestyle. In some ways I agree, the British now are mainly godless in society, however I feel he could have been more open about this to bring the point across rather than delicately embarrassing certain groups.
