Us and Them - Did your congregation ever associate with other congregations

by truthseeker 8 Replies latest jw friends

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  truthseeker

  My old congregation was very stuffy, cold and unfriendly. It was said that if you bought a bucket of water into the Hall, it would be rock solid frozen after the meeting.

  Our nearest congregations were 8 miles away.

  Yeah, we'd have visitors

  Sure, we'd ahve young people from other halls

  But, did your congregation ever get to know nearby congregations? Just for fun? Just for community and friendship building? More association?

  If you shared a Kingdumb Hall with other congregations, did the elders ever arrange for get-togethers with the other elders in a cong? Or was it just an individual thing to go and visit another Hall.

  The Society says(TM) that District Conventions and Assemblies are there to encourage us and upbuild us. The illusion is given that this is somehow a large spiritual paradise(TM) where all can get together and associate.

  But when you're told not to go outside for lunch, you'd think that there would be more opportunities for you to widen out, right? Wrong. Few have been the number of people that came upto me and introduce themselves, even fewer would follow up after the convention.

  Also, when you start learning the real truth about this org, you may realize that the only thing you had in common with all those thousands of witnesses was the truth - and when that is taken away, these people are complete strangers.
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  hoodwinked

  NEVER!! It was frowned upon.
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  Leolaia

  We shared our hall with another congregation (well, actually it was their hall -- they shared it with us). It was an individual thing but it was not uncommon to go to a Sunday morning meeting if it were convenient than the usual afternoon meeting at our congregation. They were actually friendlier, partly because some members of our cong. had migrated to the other one and it was good to catch up with them from time to time.

  But I think it was unheard of to go to their meetings on Thursday or especially to a book study. That would just be weird.
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  Englishman

  When I was in Leigh Park congregation, our Sunday meetings were in the afternoon. The nearest congregation was Havant, about a mile away. Havant had their Sunday meetings in the evening.

  When the weather was sunny and warm, dozens of us would spend Sunday afternoons on the beach at Hayling Island with the intention of going to the WT study at Havant in the evening.

  Know what? I never did see the inside of Havant KH!

  Englishman.
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  Leolaia

  LOL! I really laughed out loud to that one. :) Great punchline.

  One time we drove to the morning meeting but traffic was horrendous because of a marathon. We both decided it wasn't worth fighting and so we drove back home. I was 8 years old and I still remember the wonderful feeling to looking forward to a bright, sunny, fun day -- and we had a good time singing along to "Don't Stop" playing on the radio as we drove home. Great memory of an aborted meeting! :)
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  Soledad

  the congregation I attended split 2 times in a 20 year period. the members of the former unified congregation, with their respective cliques, maintained association with the members of the new congregation to the point of alternate-attending each other's meetings on a weekly basis. What compounded the problem was that most of the members of the new congregation (such as me and my family) resided in a different city, and it seemed like the members who resided in that city were all lumped together as opposed to evenly distributing the members among both congregations--after all, we were sharing the same hall, so what difference would it have made?

  after about 2 years, a CO came to visit and noticed this phenomenon and put an end to it by sending in a few bethelites to each congregation. it worked, I don't know how and why but it did.
• 

  willyloman

  This was another reason I fell out of love with the JW organization. In three decades, I never knew a congo to show real love towards another congo. Oh, they paid lip service to brotherly love, but in practice the other congo was always inferior, always the cause of various problems, and -- if sharing the hall -- the other congo was either not holding up its end or they were not willing to share their wealth of (pick one): publishers, pioneers, territory.

  When a congo we were part of for many years finally split, the split was accomplished in shamelessly political fashion and once it was over, it was a classic case of "east is east and west is west...." The split was along territory lines, as usual, but most of the elders lived on one side of the boundary, so they were dealt out like playing cards (once the deck was properly stacked). As a result, two elders were neighbors (about three houses apart) and while their families were always doing things together before the split, afterwards they hardly ever saw one another. This was blamed on "different schedules" but the dub attitude clearly is that as soon as someone is no longer part of the congregation, they cease to exist. They are no longer your problem (or, concern)! They may mean well, but as we all know dubs are kept SOOOO busy they don't have time to take care of the social obligations that are right in front of them, to say nothing of any others.

  This was annoying as hell and stunk to high heaven where, I am sure, God must have smelled it.
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  Country Girl

  I know the teenagers did. We did stuff with the other teen-angers from the area congs. almost every weekend during the summer, and less often during the winters.

  CG
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  jws

  I was at one hall where 2 congs met. I hardly knew anyone from that hall. When they started showing up for their meeting, we knew it was time to get out of there. Some of that seperation was partially due to sharing halls, I think. Sunday afternoon is one opportunity to have a picnic, but when one congregation has meeting during that time, it can't happen.

  Even after the merge a few years later, it was sort of an us and them thing. Maybe I just imagined it, but there seemed to be a less friendly quality to most of "them". It took a few years for us to integrate a little better.

  We travelled to other halls a lot because my dad was an elder and would go give talks at other halls. He also had quiet a few friends who he had known for a couple of decades at his original hall, so we knew a lot of them and hung out with them. When his original hall built a new hall, he started going there even though it's miles further than the one we last attended.

  As far as mingling, the teens did. There was a weekly Sunday afternoon sporting activity that was softball in the summer and football in the winter. The participants were mostly from our hall, but there were people from others too.

  My parents didn't care. If I could find JW friends, they were all for it, whether they were from our hall or not. The wordly friends were probably a lot better influence on me than some of the JW ones. One friend came from a different hall, but our moms shared a hospital room when we were born. Our parents sort of thought we were destined to be friends and didn't mind that we hung out. Guy was a living combination of "Beavis and Butthead" though. A jerk and a delinquent. But because he was a JW, he was supposedly better than my "worldly" friends who were into computers, intelligent, and didn't cause trouble.