In a Nov. 22 article published by the Associated Press (“Timekeepers no more, rank-and-file Jehovah’s Witnesses say goodbye to tracking proselytizing hours”), journalist Peter Smith reports an abrupt change in the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society’s practice of requiring its members to report their hours in door-to-door ministry.
Smith writes that the Watchtower Society has, for the past century, publicly reported the hours spent by members in door-to-door witnessing. Those hours became an indicator of a particular congregation’s spiritual health and could also be used as a metric for determining who rose to positions of leadership. But that was not the original intent for gathering this information.
In the 1920s, the Watchtower Society’s focus was to sell books that the organization had published, using members to make door-to-door sales calls. The reports they filed were simply sales tallies. The practice of gathering and submitting information continued long after the book-sales aspect of the Watchtower Society ended, but the focus was changed to become a metric for measuring a congregation’s, or an individual’s, spirituality and effectiveness.
So, as of Nov. 1, rank-and-file members need only report that they participated in ministries such as home Bible studies, sharing videos, etc. Accounting for hours spent in that ministry is no longer required. Those serving in leadership positions in the local congregations are expected to continue reporting the number of contacts and hours spent in ministry.
Why the change? Likely, the Covid-19 pandemic had something to do with it. Jehovah’s Witnesses were discouraged from going door-to-door for more than a year, and, as with other religious organizations, the return to normalcy has been slow, or even elusive. For the Watchtower, it could be that to save the embarrassment of reporting downward-trending data, they have chosen not to gather the data at all.
There’s another possible factor, however. As watchdog organizations like avoidjw.org have reported, a proliferation of child sexual-abuse lawsuits within the Watchtower has kept the organization on its heels.
In civil and criminal lawsuits filed against the Society and its members, attorneys for the Watchtower are trying to distance the governing body in upstate New York from Kingdom Hall elders and local members. So, keeping fewer records at least gives the impression there’s more distance between national leaders and local members.
In any case, mandatory reporting has been a heavy-handed tool to keep Jehovah’s Witnesses “in the faith” and, thus, in good standing with the governing body. Now that this cord has been cut, what will happen?
There’s a law in physics that says, “For every action there is an equal, but opposite, reaction.” Will The Watchtower Society experience an “equal but opposite reaction” to their decision? Time will tell.
Jim Schurke serves as president of the Missouri Baptist Apologetics Network