The August 2009 edition of the “Awake!” magazine contains an article entitled “Should There Be a Clergy-Laity Distinction?” This article is rife with inaccuracies and generalizations. I will attempt to cover these in a series of posts. In this first post, we will look how Jehovah’s Witnesses view the clergy of Christendom.
When I was a Jehovah’s Witness, I viewed those who were assured of their salvation as being very presumptuous. Looking back now, that only makes sense because I did not have the testimony of the Holy Spirit.
Nov 282006
Here’s another quote that really hit me: As long as Jesus is one of many options, he is no option. As long as you can carry your burdens alone, you don’t need a burden bearer. As long as your situations brings you no grief, you will receive no comfort. And as long as you can [...]
Nov 262006
I’ve been reading Shane Claiborne’s book “The Irresistible Revolution” lately. In it, he quotes Soren Kierkegaard: “The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christian are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, [...]
Nov 232006
I’ve been reading and listening to some interesting views on what it means to be a Christian lately. Here’s one example “A friend of mine says much of the evangelism and witnessing done by Christians today is a pyramid scheme. The purpose is to acquire the product, i.e. salvation, sell it to others and then train [...]
Jan 172006
Trust is a big issue for many former Jehovah’s Witnesses. After investing a lot of trust in the organization and having that trust violated, most of us are more careful about trusting anyone or anything. The poem below shows in whom we can trust and why.
Has the Watchtower Society ever lied to its readers?
Aug 132005
I’ve been thinking, reading, meditating and praying about the subject of God’s omnipresence and His presence in us a lot lately. This was started by an ongoing online discussion between some Jehovah’s Witnesses and some ex-Witnesses. A person who is studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses wrote the following on a forum during a discussion of Jesus’ [...]
Aug 102005
For years the Watchtower taught that the great crowd served God in the figurative “courtyard of the Gentiles” of the temple of God. Then, suddenly, in 1998 that teaching was changed.
Living just south of Kennebunk Maine as I do, I often heard the story of how a mob, irrate over Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal to salute the flag, attacked and burned the Kingdom Hall there on June 9, 1940. As is the case with so many things, there is more to the story.
