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.

I have been begging her for days for her to change her mind, or to set me up with someone else if she no longer wished to study with me. She will not reply back to me at all. Worse than that, she never answered my questions or tried to show me why my viewpoint was wrong through the use of the Bible. Although she would often just give me sections of the Watchtower or Awake to read to show me why I was wrong. But those seemed to be a person’s point of view, their opinions, and not Bible backed 100%.

But how can someone ask me to accept something at face value, when they are saying it comes from the Bible, and then cannot provide the Bible verses that back up that logic they are preaching? I am not trying to be defiant, or anything like that. I just wanted to know where they got that information from within the Bible. And why did those teachings seem to contradict many other Bible verses (since the Bible is the sole source for their information on who God is)?

I even tried to get references to what was being quoted, and where they were getting information from in the Watchtower and Awake. I finally had to call the headquarters. They told me that I could write a letter, and they could mail me the entire references. But it would be too much work to tell me over the phone one by one who said what. I understand that it is backed up in a computer system at Watchtower headquarters, but I wonder how many people seek out where the Watchtower/Awake are getting their information from. To me it feels like a form of plagiarism.

I felt that it is the “blind leading the blind” in a sense, but I did want to keep an open-mind because it is easy for people to have hatred toward what they don’t understand. Yet, after my encounter I feel it is very easy to memorize Bible verses, but another thing to actually be guided by the holy spirit to know what those versus mean.

I would like to make a suggestion though for this site. It would be great to take each Q&A within a section they are teaching through their books, ant then debating these issues they bring up. I know that it has taken me hours to research a paragraph at times (I was using the NWT, NLT, and the KJV); it would be nice to have easier access to that information. I would love to send you what I have on the questions I presented to my study group for Chapter 1, the Trinity, and the Memorial (I guess that was the one that got me kicked out of my study sessions and branded me a trouble maker).

As for me, I plan to keep studying on my own. I don’t hate the lady I was studying with. I’m just sad that she wanted me to keep an open-mind, but then turned her back on me when I was able to provide a lot of documentation from her own Bible that was contradictory to what she was teaching me from the Watchtower publications – and not solely the Bible – about what the Bible says who God is.

You are not alone in your experiences having a Jehovah’s Witness “Bible” study. Like their meetings, JWs are trained that you, as the student, must accept each paragraph and scripture quotation as it is written in your study book. Your questions must be limited to just that paragraph.

In past years some lively debate and commentary was allowed and even encouraged during studies and meetings. Public talks were actually prepared by the speaker using a basic outline provided by the Society, but with room for enhanced explanation and the addition of other supporting Bible verses.

But this isn’t the case now. It’s all “read the paragraph, ask the question, answer from the paragraph only, and then immediately move on to the next paragraph.” If you come across a sentence that you think doesn’t make sense, or a scripture quote that seems not to fit the subject, you’ll find it difficult to halt the study to discuss your questions further. Do that during a Kingdom Hall study meeting and you’ll get escorted to the door. That’s because JWs are trained to stay on the path to the next paragraph, accept what is written, and keep moving.

This is why Jehovah’s Witnesses are good book study conductors, but really lousy Bible students. They claim expertise in knowledge of the Bible, but it does not take much to get a JW to acknowledge that he has to do “further research” or “go look up that answer” with even the most basic of Bible subjects.

Ask them to show you where it says in the Bible that the year 1914 marked the return of Jesus to his throne. Then ask them what visible proof is there to prove that actually happened.

Ask them to show you where in the Bible that modern people are not allowed to have blood transfusions, and yet can have most of the components of blood injected into their veins. Ask them why JWs that do accept blood transfusions are then considered to be “disassociated.”

Ask them to show you in the Bible that it is unchristian for JW men to wear beards or sideburns.

Ask them to show you in the Bible that women shouldn’t wear slacks in service or at meetings.

A simple request to “show me in the Bible where it says…” will often bring a book study or a discussion with a Jehovah’s Witness to a dead stop. Some get quite angry when asked to do that. By far the majority will ask for time to go home and look up the answer to your question. Then they will come back, not with Bible scriptures, but mostly quotations from Watchtower publications, especially older Watchtower magazines.

My experience with JWs would indicate that maybe 10-15% of them could stand up to a rigorous discussion of their teachings, while most, like your lady, will just write you off as being obstinate or a waste of their time. You quickly move from being a potential convert to an “evil person.”

Please take your time in deciding how deep you want to study the Watchtower’s teachings. More importantly, don’t be afraid to challenge your own need to follow their many unsupported and often contradictory doctrines.

My study partner was a full-time study lady whose husband was an elder. She gave up on me, even though I begged her for days not to. I even asked her to pair me with someone else who maybe could keep up with me – if she felt she was unable to. Her only answer was that I should email any further questions to the Watchtower’s NY headquarters and attend meetings at the Kingdom Hall.

From this experience I feel like the only way I would be accepted into the JW community is if I sat there like a droid, simply giving the answers the Watchtower Society pre-wrote. I feel shunned for having individual thoughts – and asking questions. I don’t feel that God or Jesus would turn people away just for asking questions, or for more explanation.

I don’t know. I am just really frustrated – and hurt.

The JW people I spoke with during my few weeks of study were constantly telling me how non-JW churches are not following God’s word, and teaching hate. But in all honesty, I attend a non-JW church, and have never – not once – heard any of the accusations they were stating about what pastors preach from my pastor. We never have bad-mouthed JWs. We never have condoned anything un-biblical, although we do have contradictory interpretations. I will admit that. Those are the scriptures I was bringing up with my study partner. I would say, “But my Bible says this, it seems these two points are not equal. Can you explain to me why?”

So yeah. I am not sure where to go from here. I want to keep studying, to make sure I what the real truth is. But I certainly can’t imagine writing a person with a desk number for a name to help me study. That’s just my viewpoint.