David_A_Reed
March 4th 2006, 09:50 PM
My youthful exposure to religious services was limited. During grade school I had attended a Baptist Sunday school on no more than half a dozen Sundays. Then during my junior high school years I regularly attended Sunday school at a Unitarian church, where I found an official publication that said, "Some Unitarians believe in God, and some do not."
I began reading books by Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Huxley, Harlow Shapley and others who combined science with atheistic reasoning. Religion began to seem old-fashioned and naive.
By the time I was fourteen, I had decided that religion was "the opium of the people" -- a choice convenient for an adolescent who preferred not to have God watching him all the time. I became an outspoken atheist, debating for that position in high school classes and informally later in the freshman dining hall at Harvard University.
However, atheism disappointed me. I thought it through to its logical conclusions: a pointless existence, followed by death. After all, if humans were nothing more than the last in a series of chemical and biological accidents, then any meaning or purpose we might try to find in life would just be self-deceptive fiction, a product of our own imagination. In an atheistic universe nothing really mattered.
Atheism also failed to explain the higher qualities displayed occasionally in humankind. Mozart, Ghandi and Albert Schweitzer I found hard to explain by evolutionary survival of the fittest and natural selection. Blind evolution from the swamp failed to explain Jesus and Einstein. I began to think about God again.
Coincidentally (?) at this time a Jehovah's Witness was assigned to work alongside me at my job -- a boring manual job that allowed a lot of time for talking with coworkers. He was a talkative fellow who seemed to have two subjects he wanted to talk about: religion and his girlfriend. Hearing about his girlfriend quickly proved tedious. Since God was on my mind, I began asking him questions about his beliefs.
Surprising to me, he had an answer for every question. And his answers often involved quotes from Scripture. This prompted me to begin reading the Bible. My JW friend amazed me with well-thought-out answers that put everything into a tight logical framework. His answers made sense. Before long, he was conducting a twice-weekly study with me in the Watchtower Society's new (1968) book The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life.
In no time I became a zealous Witness myself. I attended Kingdom Hall meetings regularly, got baptized, and soon began serving as a "pioneer" who devoted full time to preaching from house to house and conducting Bible studies using Watchtower literature.
I kept on pioneering until 1971, when I married Penni who had been raised a Witness and who also "pioneered."
After a few years I was appointed an elder in my local congregation. In that capacity I taught the 150-odd people at Kingdom Hall on a regular basis and served frequently as a Sunday morning speaker in nearby congregations. At times I received assignments to speak to audiences ranging in the thousands at periodic Jehovah's Witness assemblies.
I also served on judicial committees set up to deal with cases of wrongdoing in the congregation -- Witnesses who were caught selling drugs at Kingdom Hall, smoking cigarettes, wife swapping, assaulting others violently with or without weapons, and having Christmas decorations in the home. We either put such offenders on probation or disfellowshipped them -- expelling them from the congregation and forbidding faithful JWs from having social contact with them.
Although the financial responsibilities of marriage and running a household prevented Penni and me from continuing to pioneer, we remained zealous in field service and continued to conduct Bible studies with many prospective converts. We put "the Kingdom" first in our lives, living in an inexpensive three-room third-floor apartment without central heat, so that we could keep the need for secular work to a minimum. Of the dozens of studies we conducted many bore fruit, and we brought more than twenty people into the organization as baptized Witnesses.
I served as an active Witness "in good standing" for thirteen years, and as a JW elder for eight years. What put an end to this? Jesus!
Penni and I were at a large Watchtower convention where we saw a handful of opposers picketing outside. One of the signs they carried read, "Read the Bible, not the Watchtower!" We felt no sympathy for the picketers, but did feel convicted by this sign to start reading the Bible again. Prior to that we had been faithfully following the organization's official study program, which added up annually to over three thousand pages of magazines, books, lessons, and study articles compared with less than two hundred pages of straight Bible reading. We had been diligent to get it all done, but we knew that most Witnesses were so bogged down by the organization's literature that they never got around to reading the Bible itself.
Becoming immersed now in personal Bible reading, we began to focus more on Jesus. We didn't even think of questioning the Watchtower Society's teaching that Jesus was a mere created angel who took on human flesh to carry out an assignment. But we were really impressed with Jesus and his teachings. We wanted to follow him more perfectly.
Especially we were struck with how Jesus responded to the hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees. I read over and over again the accounts relating to Pharisees objecting to Jesus' healing on the sabbath, his disciples' eating with unwashed hands, and other actions that violated the leaders' traditions. How I loved Jesus' response: "You hypocrites, Isaiah aptly prophesied about you, when he said, 'This people honors me with their lips, yet their heart is far removed from me. It is in vain that they keep worshiping me, because they teach commands of men as doctrines.'" (Matthew 15:7-9, New World Translation.)
Commands of men as doctrines! That phrase Jesus used began to trouble me. I began to realize that, in my role as a JW elder, I was perpetuating some such man-made doctrines myself. For example, we elders were the enforcers of all sorts of petty rules about dress and grooming. We enforced specific requirements to prevent JW women from wearing dresses that were too long or too short. We told men -- especially young men -- how to comb their hair, how to trim their sideburns and what sort of flare or taper they could wear in their pants. Moustaches and beards were forbidden. We told such individuals that they could not please God if they failed to conform. I enforced such teachings myself, but it began to remind me of the behavior of the Pharisees.
My own dress and grooming conformed to the letter. I wore a short "theocratic haircut" and always wore dress shirt and tie, suit or sportcoat and slacks to Kingdom Hall and out in service. But I ran into problems with some of the young men I conducted home Bible studies with when I began bringing them to Kingdom Hall. Instead of telling them to purchase a white shirt and sport coat, and to cut their hair short, I told them, "Don't be disturbed if people at Kingdom Hall dress and groom a little on the old-fashioned side. You can continue as you are. God doesn't judge people by their haircut or their clothing." Then they would come to the Hall and would feel out of place, or uncomfortable because they looked so different from everyone else. Or someone at the Hall would tell them to get a haircut or offer to give them a white shirt. Some of them felt too uncomfortable to return.
Two high school-aged young men I had brought to a JW circuit assembly, a gathering of several congregations in a large auditorium, left soon after the program began, objecting that the audience of men in suits and ties and women uniformly wearing dresses seemed "wierd" to them and kept them from taking the program seriously.
Shortly after that my wife brought to Kingdom Hall a young woman she had been studying with, a well-educated Jewish woman who worked as a scientist and spoke several languages. She came wearing a pantsuit. After the meeting this woman confronted my wife, "Why didn't you tell me I needed to wear a dress?" Penni told her that God had no such requirement. But her student said that the organization obviously did, since every Witness woman wore a dress. This was a problem for this woman, because she did not own any dresses -- only pantsuits that she wore to work and to professional gatherings. She went out and bought a couple of dresses, so that she could continue attending meetings.
This bothered me, because I believed these people's lives depended on joining "God's organization." If we Witnesses acted like Pharisees, enforcing our own non-biblical petty rules for dress and grooming, to the point of driving young people away from the only way to salvation, their innocent blood would be on our hands. Talking to the other elders about it didn't seem to help. They felt that the old styles were inherently righteous. But I saw that we were erecting unnecessary obstacles for the people we were trying to save.
Then Jesus' example came to mind:
And he went on from there, and entered their synagogue. And behold, there was a man with a withered hand. And they asked him, "Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?" so that they might accuse him. He said to them, "What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath." Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand"... (Matthew 12:9-13, RSV)I decided to follow Jesus' example. I personally let my hair grow a half an inch over my ears and collar. My reasoning was that the other Witnesses couldn't hassle newcomers or young people over a style that one of the elders (myself) was also wearing.
How did the other elders react? Just as the Pharisees did when Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand. Scripture says they "went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him." (Matthew 12:14 RSV) Before long the other elders actually put me on trial over that extra half an inch of hair. There were extended formal hearings that lasted many hours, with witnesses called in to testify, followed by appeal hearings with elders from out of state sent in as judges, plus meetings with circuit and district overseers, and official correspondence with Watchtower headquarters -- all over half an inch of hair.
Grooming was not the real issue, however. For me it was a question of whose disciple I was. Was I a follower of Jesus? Or an obedient servant of a human hierarchy? The elders who put me on trial knew that was the real issue, too. They repeatedly asked, "Do you believe that the Watchtower Society is God's organization? Do you believe that the Society speaks as Jehovah's mouthpiece?" At that time I answered YES, because I still did believe it was God's organization -- but that it had become corrupt just as the Jewish religious system at the time of the Pharisees had become corrupt.
I managed to survive the trials over my haircut, but I began to feel obligated to speak in harmony with what I read in the Bible, and this got me into deeper trouble. I was still an elder, so, in one of my assigned fifteen-minute talks at the Thursday night Theocratic Ministry School meeting, I encouraged the audience to read the Bible. I told them, "If you don't have enough time to read both The Watchtower magazine and the Bible, read the Bible instead of The Watchtower, because the Bible is the inspired Word of God, whereas The Watchtower is written by men and has taught errors that have had to be corrected over the years." A hush fell over the audience. I was allowed to finish the talk, but I was never allowed to speak from the platform again.
In the audience participation portions of the meetings, I was still able to answer questions from my seat. During the study sessions based on The Watchtower or other JW publications, Witnesses were expected to answer in their own words, but not in their own thoughts. When I began giving answers the elders didn't like, they stopped recognizing my raised hand.
It was at this time that The Watchtower of December 1, 1981 featured an article that included this statement: "Jehovah God has also provided his visible organization ... Unless we are in touch with this channel of communication that God is using, we will not progress along the road to life, no matter how much Bible reading we do." (page 27, paragraph 4)
I really objected strongly to those men elevating themselves above the Bible like that. Since I could no longer speak out at JW meetings (which I still attended faithfully) I started publishing a newsletter that I named Comments from the Friends. (Witnesses refer to themselves as "the friends.") I wrote in it some brief articles questioning what the organization was teaching, and I signed with a pen name as "Bill Tyndale, Jr." -- a reference to sixteenth-century English Bible translator William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for questioning the rulers of his church at that time. To avoid being put on trial for writing this, I drove across state lines and mailed a thousand newsletters from out-of-state post offices, addressing them to local Witnesses and to hundreds of Kingdom Halls whose addresses I had looked up at the library.
Penni and I knew we would soon be leaving the Witness organization, but we felt like people who must abandon a burning apartment building: we wanted to warn others, and to help them escape, too. We felt an obligation to help our families, as well as the "students" we had brought into the organization.
A few weeks later a friend discovered that I was the author of the newsletter, and reported me to the elders. They wanted to put me on trial for writing it, but I had had enough of their trials and refused to attend. One young JW phoned our home and threatened to "come over and take care of" me if he received another copy of my newsletter. Another Witness left a couple of scary death threats on our answering machine. At this time Penni and I stopped attending Kingdom Hall, for our own safety and well being. The elders tried us both in absentia, and disfellowshipped us.
It was the end of our association with the Watchtower organization, but the beginning of our investigation of the real meaning of Scripture and the nature of the Church, the body of Christ. We had already rejected some doctrines peculiar to the Watchtower, such as their teaching that Christ had returned invisibly in 1914 and selected their organization to be the channel of communication from God, and their teaching that the "great crowd" of believers since 1935 should not partake of the communion loaf and cup. But we were only beginning to examine other doctrines.
We did know, however, that we wanted to follow Jesus, and that the Bible should be our guide. So we devoted ourselves to Bible reading and to prayer. We also invited our families and friends to meet in our living room on Sunday mornings instead of going to Kingdom Hall. As many as fifteen attended.
As we read the Gospels without wearing Watchtower-tinted glasses, we began to grasp the message of salvation through Christ alone. When I realized from reading Romans 8 and John 3 that I needed to be "born of the Spirit" I was afraid at first. JWs believe that born-again people, who claim to have the Holy Spirit, are actually possessed by demons. And so I was afraid that if I prayed out loud to turn my life over to Christ, I might get a demon. But then I read Jesus' words at Luke 11:9-13. In a context where he was teaching about prayer and casting out unclean spirits, Jesus said:And I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (NKJV)After reading that, I knew I could confidently ask for Christ's Spirit. (Romans 8:9) So, in the early morning privacy of our kitchen, I proceeded to confess my need for salvation through Christ, and to commit my life to him as my Lord and Savior.
This was the beginning of a walk with Christ that has grown ever closer over the years. During my years as a JW I recall being troubled by the realization that we only studied about the close relationship with God experienced by characters in the Bible -- we didn't experience such a relationship ourselves. Now I have come to realize that Jesus is directly involved in the lives of those who belong to him, just as during the first century.
The Watchtower had instructed us to pray "in Jesus' name" but never to talk to Jesus. But Scripture revealed to us that the early disciples did talk to the risen Christ. For example, Stephen did so at Acts 7:59-60. (NOTE: This passage is deliberately distorted in the JW New World Translation -- check an interlinear translation to see the original meaning of the text.)
Jesus' invitation to "Come to me..." (Matthew 11:28) certainly was not limited to the three and a half years of his earthly ministry.
I have never regretted choosing to follow Jesus instead of following the Watchtower Society.
David
I began reading books by Charles Darwin, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Huxley, Harlow Shapley and others who combined science with atheistic reasoning. Religion began to seem old-fashioned and naive.
By the time I was fourteen, I had decided that religion was "the opium of the people" -- a choice convenient for an adolescent who preferred not to have God watching him all the time. I became an outspoken atheist, debating for that position in high school classes and informally later in the freshman dining hall at Harvard University.
However, atheism disappointed me. I thought it through to its logical conclusions: a pointless existence, followed by death. After all, if humans were nothing more than the last in a series of chemical and biological accidents, then any meaning or purpose we might try to find in life would just be self-deceptive fiction, a product of our own imagination. In an atheistic universe nothing really mattered.
Atheism also failed to explain the higher qualities displayed occasionally in humankind. Mozart, Ghandi and Albert Schweitzer I found hard to explain by evolutionary survival of the fittest and natural selection. Blind evolution from the swamp failed to explain Jesus and Einstein. I began to think about God again.
Coincidentally (?) at this time a Jehovah's Witness was assigned to work alongside me at my job -- a boring manual job that allowed a lot of time for talking with coworkers. He was a talkative fellow who seemed to have two subjects he wanted to talk about: religion and his girlfriend. Hearing about his girlfriend quickly proved tedious. Since God was on my mind, I began asking him questions about his beliefs.
Surprising to me, he had an answer for every question. And his answers often involved quotes from Scripture. This prompted me to begin reading the Bible. My JW friend amazed me with well-thought-out answers that put everything into a tight logical framework. His answers made sense. Before long, he was conducting a twice-weekly study with me in the Watchtower Society's new (1968) book The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life.
In no time I became a zealous Witness myself. I attended Kingdom Hall meetings regularly, got baptized, and soon began serving as a "pioneer" who devoted full time to preaching from house to house and conducting Bible studies using Watchtower literature.
I kept on pioneering until 1971, when I married Penni who had been raised a Witness and who also "pioneered."
After a few years I was appointed an elder in my local congregation. In that capacity I taught the 150-odd people at Kingdom Hall on a regular basis and served frequently as a Sunday morning speaker in nearby congregations. At times I received assignments to speak to audiences ranging in the thousands at periodic Jehovah's Witness assemblies.
I also served on judicial committees set up to deal with cases of wrongdoing in the congregation -- Witnesses who were caught selling drugs at Kingdom Hall, smoking cigarettes, wife swapping, assaulting others violently with or without weapons, and having Christmas decorations in the home. We either put such offenders on probation or disfellowshipped them -- expelling them from the congregation and forbidding faithful JWs from having social contact with them.
Although the financial responsibilities of marriage and running a household prevented Penni and me from continuing to pioneer, we remained zealous in field service and continued to conduct Bible studies with many prospective converts. We put "the Kingdom" first in our lives, living in an inexpensive three-room third-floor apartment without central heat, so that we could keep the need for secular work to a minimum. Of the dozens of studies we conducted many bore fruit, and we brought more than twenty people into the organization as baptized Witnesses.
I served as an active Witness "in good standing" for thirteen years, and as a JW elder for eight years. What put an end to this? Jesus!
Penni and I were at a large Watchtower convention where we saw a handful of opposers picketing outside. One of the signs they carried read, "Read the Bible, not the Watchtower!" We felt no sympathy for the picketers, but did feel convicted by this sign to start reading the Bible again. Prior to that we had been faithfully following the organization's official study program, which added up annually to over three thousand pages of magazines, books, lessons, and study articles compared with less than two hundred pages of straight Bible reading. We had been diligent to get it all done, but we knew that most Witnesses were so bogged down by the organization's literature that they never got around to reading the Bible itself.
Becoming immersed now in personal Bible reading, we began to focus more on Jesus. We didn't even think of questioning the Watchtower Society's teaching that Jesus was a mere created angel who took on human flesh to carry out an assignment. But we were really impressed with Jesus and his teachings. We wanted to follow him more perfectly.
Especially we were struck with how Jesus responded to the hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees. I read over and over again the accounts relating to Pharisees objecting to Jesus' healing on the sabbath, his disciples' eating with unwashed hands, and other actions that violated the leaders' traditions. How I loved Jesus' response: "You hypocrites, Isaiah aptly prophesied about you, when he said, 'This people honors me with their lips, yet their heart is far removed from me. It is in vain that they keep worshiping me, because they teach commands of men as doctrines.'" (Matthew 15:7-9, New World Translation.)
Commands of men as doctrines! That phrase Jesus used began to trouble me. I began to realize that, in my role as a JW elder, I was perpetuating some such man-made doctrines myself. For example, we elders were the enforcers of all sorts of petty rules about dress and grooming. We enforced specific requirements to prevent JW women from wearing dresses that were too long or too short. We told men -- especially young men -- how to comb their hair, how to trim their sideburns and what sort of flare or taper they could wear in their pants. Moustaches and beards were forbidden. We told such individuals that they could not please God if they failed to conform. I enforced such teachings myself, but it began to remind me of the behavior of the Pharisees.
My own dress and grooming conformed to the letter. I wore a short "theocratic haircut" and always wore dress shirt and tie, suit or sportcoat and slacks to Kingdom Hall and out in service. But I ran into problems with some of the young men I conducted home Bible studies with when I began bringing them to Kingdom Hall. Instead of telling them to purchase a white shirt and sport coat, and to cut their hair short, I told them, "Don't be disturbed if people at Kingdom Hall dress and groom a little on the old-fashioned side. You can continue as you are. God doesn't judge people by their haircut or their clothing." Then they would come to the Hall and would feel out of place, or uncomfortable because they looked so different from everyone else. Or someone at the Hall would tell them to get a haircut or offer to give them a white shirt. Some of them felt too uncomfortable to return.
Two high school-aged young men I had brought to a JW circuit assembly, a gathering of several congregations in a large auditorium, left soon after the program began, objecting that the audience of men in suits and ties and women uniformly wearing dresses seemed "wierd" to them and kept them from taking the program seriously.
Shortly after that my wife brought to Kingdom Hall a young woman she had been studying with, a well-educated Jewish woman who worked as a scientist and spoke several languages. She came wearing a pantsuit. After the meeting this woman confronted my wife, "Why didn't you tell me I needed to wear a dress?" Penni told her that God had no such requirement. But her student said that the organization obviously did, since every Witness woman wore a dress. This was a problem for this woman, because she did not own any dresses -- only pantsuits that she wore to work and to professional gatherings. She went out and bought a couple of dresses, so that she could continue attending meetings.
This bothered me, because I believed these people's lives depended on joining "God's organization." If we Witnesses acted like Pharisees, enforcing our own non-biblical petty rules for dress and grooming, to the point of driving young people away from the only way to salvation, their innocent blood would be on our hands. Talking to the other elders about it didn't seem to help. They felt that the old styles were inherently righteous. But I saw that we were erecting unnecessary obstacles for the people we were trying to save.
Then Jesus' example came to mind:
And he went on from there, and entered their synagogue. And behold, there was a man with a withered hand. And they asked him, "Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?" so that they might accuse him. He said to them, "What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath." Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand"... (Matthew 12:9-13, RSV)I decided to follow Jesus' example. I personally let my hair grow a half an inch over my ears and collar. My reasoning was that the other Witnesses couldn't hassle newcomers or young people over a style that one of the elders (myself) was also wearing.
How did the other elders react? Just as the Pharisees did when Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand. Scripture says they "went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him." (Matthew 12:14 RSV) Before long the other elders actually put me on trial over that extra half an inch of hair. There were extended formal hearings that lasted many hours, with witnesses called in to testify, followed by appeal hearings with elders from out of state sent in as judges, plus meetings with circuit and district overseers, and official correspondence with Watchtower headquarters -- all over half an inch of hair.
Grooming was not the real issue, however. For me it was a question of whose disciple I was. Was I a follower of Jesus? Or an obedient servant of a human hierarchy? The elders who put me on trial knew that was the real issue, too. They repeatedly asked, "Do you believe that the Watchtower Society is God's organization? Do you believe that the Society speaks as Jehovah's mouthpiece?" At that time I answered YES, because I still did believe it was God's organization -- but that it had become corrupt just as the Jewish religious system at the time of the Pharisees had become corrupt.
I managed to survive the trials over my haircut, but I began to feel obligated to speak in harmony with what I read in the Bible, and this got me into deeper trouble. I was still an elder, so, in one of my assigned fifteen-minute talks at the Thursday night Theocratic Ministry School meeting, I encouraged the audience to read the Bible. I told them, "If you don't have enough time to read both The Watchtower magazine and the Bible, read the Bible instead of The Watchtower, because the Bible is the inspired Word of God, whereas The Watchtower is written by men and has taught errors that have had to be corrected over the years." A hush fell over the audience. I was allowed to finish the talk, but I was never allowed to speak from the platform again.
In the audience participation portions of the meetings, I was still able to answer questions from my seat. During the study sessions based on The Watchtower or other JW publications, Witnesses were expected to answer in their own words, but not in their own thoughts. When I began giving answers the elders didn't like, they stopped recognizing my raised hand.
It was at this time that The Watchtower of December 1, 1981 featured an article that included this statement: "Jehovah God has also provided his visible organization ... Unless we are in touch with this channel of communication that God is using, we will not progress along the road to life, no matter how much Bible reading we do." (page 27, paragraph 4)
I really objected strongly to those men elevating themselves above the Bible like that. Since I could no longer speak out at JW meetings (which I still attended faithfully) I started publishing a newsletter that I named Comments from the Friends. (Witnesses refer to themselves as "the friends.") I wrote in it some brief articles questioning what the organization was teaching, and I signed with a pen name as "Bill Tyndale, Jr." -- a reference to sixteenth-century English Bible translator William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for questioning the rulers of his church at that time. To avoid being put on trial for writing this, I drove across state lines and mailed a thousand newsletters from out-of-state post offices, addressing them to local Witnesses and to hundreds of Kingdom Halls whose addresses I had looked up at the library.
Penni and I knew we would soon be leaving the Witness organization, but we felt like people who must abandon a burning apartment building: we wanted to warn others, and to help them escape, too. We felt an obligation to help our families, as well as the "students" we had brought into the organization.
A few weeks later a friend discovered that I was the author of the newsletter, and reported me to the elders. They wanted to put me on trial for writing it, but I had had enough of their trials and refused to attend. One young JW phoned our home and threatened to "come over and take care of" me if he received another copy of my newsletter. Another Witness left a couple of scary death threats on our answering machine. At this time Penni and I stopped attending Kingdom Hall, for our own safety and well being. The elders tried us both in absentia, and disfellowshipped us.
It was the end of our association with the Watchtower organization, but the beginning of our investigation of the real meaning of Scripture and the nature of the Church, the body of Christ. We had already rejected some doctrines peculiar to the Watchtower, such as their teaching that Christ had returned invisibly in 1914 and selected their organization to be the channel of communication from God, and their teaching that the "great crowd" of believers since 1935 should not partake of the communion loaf and cup. But we were only beginning to examine other doctrines.
We did know, however, that we wanted to follow Jesus, and that the Bible should be our guide. So we devoted ourselves to Bible reading and to prayer. We also invited our families and friends to meet in our living room on Sunday mornings instead of going to Kingdom Hall. As many as fifteen attended.
As we read the Gospels without wearing Watchtower-tinted glasses, we began to grasp the message of salvation through Christ alone. When I realized from reading Romans 8 and John 3 that I needed to be "born of the Spirit" I was afraid at first. JWs believe that born-again people, who claim to have the Holy Spirit, are actually possessed by demons. And so I was afraid that if I prayed out loud to turn my life over to Christ, I might get a demon. But then I read Jesus' words at Luke 11:9-13. In a context where he was teaching about prayer and casting out unclean spirits, Jesus said:And I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (NKJV)After reading that, I knew I could confidently ask for Christ's Spirit. (Romans 8:9) So, in the early morning privacy of our kitchen, I proceeded to confess my need for salvation through Christ, and to commit my life to him as my Lord and Savior.
This was the beginning of a walk with Christ that has grown ever closer over the years. During my years as a JW I recall being troubled by the realization that we only studied about the close relationship with God experienced by characters in the Bible -- we didn't experience such a relationship ourselves. Now I have come to realize that Jesus is directly involved in the lives of those who belong to him, just as during the first century.
The Watchtower had instructed us to pray "in Jesus' name" but never to talk to Jesus. But Scripture revealed to us that the early disciples did talk to the risen Christ. For example, Stephen did so at Acts 7:59-60. (NOTE: This passage is deliberately distorted in the JW New World Translation -- check an interlinear translation to see the original meaning of the text.)
Jesus' invitation to "Come to me..." (Matthew 11:28) certainly was not limited to the three and a half years of his earthly ministry.
I have never regretted choosing to follow Jesus instead of following the Watchtower Society.
David