Jehovah’s Witnesses Encounter Organized Opposition to Doctrine

About 75 people braved a downpour here recently to demonstrate in front of the international headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to protest the sect’s teachings and practices.

The demonstration is an annual event, coinciding with a national conference of former members of the sect, whose official name is the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

According to the sponsoring group, Personal Freedom Outreach, the purpose of the demonstration was both to draw attention to the “Watchtower heresy” and to “proclaim salvation in the person of Jesus Christ” rather than in the Watchtower organization.

“Our greatest concern is the fact that they are teaching a gospel other than the one that is preached in the Bible,” said Kurt Goedelman, executive director of Personal Freedom Outreach. Goedelman considers Jehovah’s Witnesses to be “hostages.”

The protesters seemed small in number to go against an organization that claims a worldwide membership of 4 million, including 850,120 adherents in the United States. In virtually every city, Witnesses can be seen hawking their two periodicals, The Watchtower and Awake!, as well as going door to door on Saturdays to evangelize.

But the dissidents, who include both former Witnesses and people who have never been members of the sect, consider that their work is justified if it can help people leave an organization they consider to be dictatorial, as well as heretical.

Growing numbers have been leaving the Witnesses since 1975, when a prediction by Watchtower leaders that the world would end failed to materialize. The group’s problems were further exacerbated in 1982 when Raymond Franz, the nephew of President Frederick Franz, was “disfellowshipped” after questioning the group’s alleged legalism and having dinner with a former Witness.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are prohibited from continuing relationships with members who leave.

Personal Freedom Outreach, based in St. Louis, is one of several groups of former Witnesses and other critics of the sect. Some groups stress the Witnesses’ penchant for shunning former members, which often breaks up families, while groups like Personal Freedom Outreach also present evangelical Christianity as an alternative to the Witnesses’ doctrines.

Goedelman has never been a Jehovah’s Witness. He told Religious News Service that he first became interested in the sect when he heard about it and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, after becoming an evangelical Christian. He found that both organizations claim to be the only true Christian church and that all others are heretical.

Personal Freedom Outreach publishes more than 40 tracts that deal with groups it regards as “cults” and “Christian aberration groups.”

Goedelman contends that lectures at the conferences that deal with such topics as the bodily Resurrection of Christ and the deity of Christ have implications for members of other groups such as the Unification Church and the Worldwide Church of God, which deny such doctrines.

Although members of the Witnesses are barred from attending such gatherings, Goedelman said conference tapes often have an influence when presented to Witnesses by friends. “We’ve had people joining us who said that somebody gave them a copy of a tape from six years ago,” he said.