I can see the point of correlating baptisms. But what happens to the trend line of the ‘hours required for additional publisher’ line if JWs begin declining overall? Wouldn’t it tend toward infinity? So what are you really measuring there? And how could it be used to compare with the outreach programmes of other churches that are in decline?
Jeffro you seem to have two basic responses to JW growth. The first is to deny that it exists and say the Watchtower data are wrong. The second is to say that even if the data are correct (the Australian census, for example) it doesn’t count because: disfellowshipping and North Korea. If you believe that Watchtower growth doesn’t count then why are you interested in tracking it anyway? If you can dismiss all favourable comparisons of JW growth with others groups as either factually wrong, or inconsequential if true, then there is no way the data can ever contradict your starting assumptions.
I have been very surprised by the continued growth of JWs over the past few decades. I became inactive in the early 2000s at a time when JWs were still reeling from the fallout of the ‘generation’ disappointment in 1995 and most western countries were in decline. In Britain the publisher number had dropped to around 122,000 from a high of 132,000 in the mid 1990s. I fully expected JWs to continue declining just as practically all other churches were in decline. If you had asked me in 2002 how many JWs there would be in Britain in 2022 I might have guessed less than 100,000. Instead here we are in 2022 and there are around 140,000 JWs in Britain, despite the fact that most other churches have continued or accelerated their decline. To paraphrase a famous quotation: when the data change I change my opinion, what do you do?
People are good at coming up with reasons why not every JW in the official count is a true believer, and the threat of disfellowshipping is indeed a good reason to suspect that not every JW is a true believer. But people raising this issue rarely seem to reflect that questions could be raised about the membership of other religious groups too. The issues may not be the same but there are obviously members of other churches who are not true believers either. For example, it is noticeable that local and national politicians tend to be members of the national church at a higher rate than the population as a whole (current and former first ministers, deputy first ministers, leaders of the opposition, local councillors and so on). Is this because politicians are an exceptionally godly bunch of individuals, or is it because membership of the national church still conveys a certain status that they find useful in their careers. Anecdotally I know of members of other churches who are members for social reasons rather than purely religious reasons. On the other hand nobody joins JWs in order to gain respectability locally or politically. So this phenomenon of non-true-believing members is not unique, or even particularly distinctive of JWs. In fact I suspect it’s probably lower among JWs because of the social costs involved in membership that don’t apply to other groups. So just as there are some factors that may inflate the membership of JWs there are factors that inflate the membership of other groups that don’t apply in the case of JWs. So to dismiss any JW growth with the wave of a hand is to ignore the wider picture of religious phenomena in general.
