The ineffectiveness of the Watchtower Society preaching work

by RULES & REGULATIONS 22 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  RULES & REGULATIONS

  How can the Watchtower Society claim effectiveness in their 140 years of preaching the ''good news''..... spending billions of hours in ''field service'', having the ''faithful and discreet slave'' lead the preaching work, passing out billions of Watchtower literature since the 1870's, while the Pentecostals have been more effective using other evangelical methods?

  Congregations	119,954
  Members	8,579,909

  JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES

  
  

  
  

  Comprising over 700 denominations and a large number of independent churches, there is no central authority governing Pentecostalism; however, many denominations are affiliated with the Pentecostal World Fellowship. There are over 279 million Pentecostals worldwide, and the movement is growing in many parts of the world, especially the global South.
  

  
  
  
• 

  Crazyguy2

  Because during this time of great preaching they were able to amass a huge real estate portfolio.
• 

  slimboyfat

  I think there are a few things to bear in mind with this comparison.

  How many actually congregations do Pentecostals have? I doubt there are as many times the number of congregations of Pentecostals as there are adherents when comparing them with JWs.

  The number of JW congregations worldwide is actually pretty impressive. Only the Catholic Church and a couple of other church organisations have more congregations worldwide than JWs.

  And you are treating all Pentecostals as one group. Pentecostals consist of a huge number of different organisations with variations in belief and practice.

  Plus Pentecostals are considered by most to be a denomination of Christianity, with mostly orthodox beliefs, so conversion to Pentecostalism is not as great a leap as it is for those leaving Christian groups to join JWs.

  A huge part of Pentecostal growth has been in Latin America where millions of Catholics moved over as part of a wider political and social phenomenon that involved breaking up traditional power structures including the Catholic Church. There has been a trend for some who joined the Pentecostal movement to go back to the Catholic Church as the church attempted to address the concerns of many who had left.

  My own observation of Pentecostal churches in the UK is that the long-standing groups such as Assemblies of God and Elim Pentecostal are subject to decline as all mainline churches. The only Pentecostal churches continuing to enjoy any growth are the ones supported by immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. In my town the Assemblies of God Church closed a few years ago and the Elim church has declined significantly. There is a local variant of Pentecostalism which is peculiar to the area, and resulted from 1950s and 1990s (Toronto blessing) revivals. But this small group has declined over the last 20 years from around ten churches locally, to three small churches.

  Pentecostal churches generally are characteristed by temporary bursts of activity and expansion, followed by decline and closure.
• 

  RULES & REGULATIONS

  And you are treating all Pentecostals as one group. Pentecostals consist of a huge number of different organisations with variations in belief and practice.

  Yes! Even with 700 different denominations, how do they get 279 million members to join? Since they don't go door to door like Jehovah's Witnesses, shouldn't they be admired for their massive membership? Someone wants the hear about Jesus!

  I guess my question is....." How do people hear about Pentecostal churches? Does someone just walk into their church meetings, are you invited to attend, or does the television ministry bring people in?

  Isn't something really wrong with the Watchtower Society message that people actually join other religions?

  Goes to show you that Jehovah is not behind this religion!

  
  
• 

  Thomasdam

  they used to be everywhere all the time. I don't see them but very rarely. Once in a while I see a cart in some square. But door to door I am sure they do it but I have not had any in years.
  
• 

  BourneIdentity

  It's ineffective because very little is done. Sure, they say it's over 2 billion hours per year, but let's think about that a minute.

  I live in an area where there is a lot of rural territory. You have to get out, take the door, get back in the car and drive down the road maybe a 1/2 mile to a mile before the next one. It's not uncommon to fill up a minivan with 7 people and do that for a morning. When all is said and done, that's 21 hours logged among them all and how much time was spent going to a door, maybe 20 minutes?

  I believe of those 2 billion hours, it includes the Bethel workers slaving away for the Organization, again, no preaching to anyone is involved with that.

  JWs get to count time to do relief work when there is a natural disaster. Sure, they may informally witness here and there, but again, very little preaching is done in those scenarios.

  At a new Hall build, let's say there are 100 brothers and sisters working a 10 hour day. That's 1000 hours logged for the day, and no preaching was accomplished.

  Take 2 people standing at a cart sipping coffee and looking at their phones. 6 hours logged and maybe only a conversation or two.

  All the family heads counting time doing family worship. Their wife and kids could be baptized, but they still get to count all that time, 4 hours per month.

  When one looks at the reality of it all, you can see how very little is being done. Jehovah can't bring the end until the good news has been preached in all the inhabited earth. Looks like he's gonna have to wait a few more hundred years at this rate, or maybe Jehovah will have the stones cry out!
• 

  JW GoneBad

  Hey I just thought of a new name for this religion...

  "Jehovah's Ineffective Witnesses"

  ...because they are just that...ineffective at what they do... preach!
• 

  smiddy3

  I don`t think anyone here would dispute the ineffectiveness of the preaching work of Jehovah`s Witnesses .

  If we mortal humans can see it then surely Jehovah God & Christ Jesus must be able to see it ?

  The statistics they themselves publish or used to publish in their yearbooks testify to that fact.?Does anybody have the latest statistics as to how many hours they preach and how many actual baptisms they have annually nowadays ?

  I would like to eliminate children of JW`s if possible because that would give a distorted figure.

  My personal opinion is if Jehovah /Christ Jesus look at the hours preached by JW`s to make disciples per year and the actual number of people baptized as a result of their preaching I would sack them for being incompetent .

  And give the job to somebody else .
• 

  sir82

  No to mention that there are more than a billion Chinese, more than a billion Indians, and many hundreds of millions of Muslims who have never even heard of the term "Jehovah's Witnesses", much less received a witness.

  Add in a few hundred million more who are never reached because of various reasons, and easily 1/2 of the world's population has never even seen a JW.

  Meanwhile, JWs keep calling on the same people who have, over the course of decades, rejected the JW message 10, 20, 100 times each.

  As I've posted numerous times - if there really were a "Jehovah", and he really wanted a group to proclaim a "worldwide witness", he'd have fired the JWs decades for the piss-poor hash they are making of their "work".
  
• 

  jookbeard

  I always use the analogy of if one had the chance to conduct a survey in any large city/capital of any country in the Western world where they have been successful over the decades in regards to growth in these particular countries and conduct a survey with members of the general public at say very busy train stations, shopping areas,airports,sporting events etc and ask one simple question to these hoards of people;" can you explain the kingdom of god that the Jehovah's witnesses have been commissioned to preach to the earth?" I guarantee that 99.9999999999% of any of those that answer wont have the foggiest idea, sums it up really.