There are plenty of people who love and adore being part of the JW organisation. There are loads of people who have served as witnesses all their lives and others were willing to die for this faith in the past and even today some are willing to be imprisoned for taking a bold stand.

It is a shame you went to such length to be heard, I do pray it gives you healing. After all we do all possess the gift of free will to choose what is right or wrong. Jehovah who is Almighty still helps us to come to our own decision, why do you want to take a burden that is not yours to find fault were others don’t. It did not work for you, it does not mean it isn’t working for others, always remember that. Plenty of people want their questions answered, and in my experience we are happy with bible and non bible studies and accept that not everyone will be receptive to the word of God. Our goal is to reach people who want to know the truth.

You may be fortunate to belong to a Kingdom Hall that has a more liberal body of elders. There are many congregations out there with excellent leaders who are more flexible in their use of Watchtower Society guidelines. By far the majority, I am sad to say, tend to take a more conservative approach to study meetings and do not want a lot of embellishment by either the Watchtower study conductor or those in the audience who answer the questions. The study meetings have become a joke in most congregations.

The public talks have become so strictly outlined by the Watchtower that most brothers do little more than read the outline itself and only those Bible scriptures that the outline insists on being read.

JWs who insist on expanding their responses or modify any of the talk outlines will soon find themselves in a meeting with a local committee. This is not to say they will actually be punished for sharing their own thoughts, but they will find their participation restricted. Elders who expand or modify public talk outlines will quickly lose that privilege.

The result is that most study meetings, even at 45 minutes, will seem to go on forever and be dull as stale toast.

I invite anyone reading this article to actually go to a local Kingdom Hall and sit through a Sunday meeting set of public talk and Watchtower study. See for yourself who is telling the truth. In fact, go to two or three Kingdom Halls in your area and see how the meetings are conducted. After that, feel free to submit your comments to this article page and let us know the results. Who really tells the truth about this matter? The editor of this website? Or the writer identified as “Jehovah’s Servant”?

Maybe things are different in the UK where “Jehovah’s Servant” resides, but I doubt it. The editor can only describe the current situation in USA Kingdom Halls. Maybe the UK and Europe are far more liberal. If so, please share that information with us. If anyone wants to share an address of a Kingdom Hall where answering at the Watchtower study is wide open to additional commentary or questions, please do so. We’d love to know where those liberal Kingdom Halls are.

Unfortunately, so would the Watchtower Society…

Thank you for your comments. All this website is trying to do is to explain to someone who is unfamiliar with how the Watchtower Society works or what Jehovah’s Witnesses really believe, that what they are told about having a Bible study with JWs, may not really match reality.

JWs get so excited whenever they start a new Bible study with a potential convert. As long as the study moves along at the pace they determine and the “study” doesn’t ask too many pointed or embarrassing questions, then everything is just “rosey.” The minute they are faced with some resistance or unpleasant facts from the Watchtower’s past they get all flustered and look for ways to give up quickly. JWs do not really enjoy confrontation.

I remember, before I became a JW, that as a child I would go to Sunday School at local Protestant churches. All of us kids would get a little book to read, and we would hear the teacher tell us Bible stories. We just assumed that the teacher was telling us the truth. We’d go to Sunday School while we were kids and at some point in the future we’d be baptized and become Baptists or Methodists, or something. We never asked questions – never argued with the teacher. Never looked things up to see if we were being told the truth. We just accepted what we were told at face value.

That’s the way that Jehovah’s Witnesses want to conduct “Bible” book studies with adults. Don’t ask questions. Don’t do research. Just look at the pretty pictures and accept what they say at face value.

Adults don’t like to be treated that way, not if they have adult level intelligence. We like to ask questions. We want to dig deeper. We want to explore contradictions or gaps in logic.

Jehovah’s Witnesses will bail out on anyone who really makes them work at conducting a real intense Bible study. You found that out and so have a couple of others who have commented on the above article.

One of the things I want to point out for Thinking Christians. Many active JW’s come here and say mean and nasty things about this site and the people who run it, calling them apostates or being in league with Satan. However not a one of them, when confronted with evidence from their own magazines and books can refute the information. They use Bible verses (which can also be applied back to the Watchtower teachings) to “prove” we’re mean nasty people who are only bent on “taking” them away from God. No one can take you away from God except yourself. Also it must be noted that historically the Jews in the Bible were God’s people, yet Jesus and the Apostles were considered Apostates because of their teachings. Oddly enough their teachings didn’t refute Judaism or seek to overthrow them, but rather the teachings of Jesus showed that the leaders of the religion “had made the Law of their God invalid because of their tradition”. The same thing has happened with the JW’s. They look to men rather than the Holy Spirit for guidance. In the 10 years I have been out of the organization I have learned more about my Bible than at any time I was a JW. It is one thing to be told what a Bible verse means and a very different thing to know for yourself through the Holy Spirit what a Bible verse means. JW’s have yet to learn this lesson.