{"id":45652,"date":"2014-09-30T07:00:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T14:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/?p=45652"},"modified":"2015-03-19T22:21:15","modified_gmt":"2015-03-20T05:21:15","slug":"sitting-down-jw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/2014\/09\/30\/sitting-down-jw\/","title":{"rendered":"Sitting down with a Jehovah’s Witness"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, as many of you know<\/a>, a couple of weeks ago\u00a0I had Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) scheduled to visit my home. I had already received\u00a0two rounds of visits from them but\u00a0had not yet managed to get them across my threshold. However, on their previous\u00a0visit they had promised that next time they\u00a0would\u00a0have time to come in and have a proper chat.<\/p>\n

I had received my first visit about a month earlier when two female JWs had called. During our\u00a0discussion on the doorstep,\u00a0I had spoken a little bit\u00a0about my reversion\u00a0to Catholicism and about how the question of the canon<\/a>\u00a0had played an important part in my return, being rather unimpressed with\u00a0the various Protestant explanations as to the Bible’s Table Of Contents. Since JWs are distinctly set apart\u00a0from\u00a0Protestants, I asked the ladies on my doorstep how\u00a0they<\/em> would justify the contents of the Biblical canon. They had no explanation, but said that they would find out and get back to me.<\/p>\n

Several weeks\u00a0later, two gentlemen rang my doorbell, saying that they had heard from their associates that I was interested in knowing about the “hidden” books of the Bible. I explained that my question was not about the deuterocanon\/apocrypha per se, but rather\u00a0about the Biblical canon as a whole. How did they know the right books were in the Bible? How did they know that there were no wrong ones included and no books missed out? Unfortunately, they\u00a0said that they didn’t have time to talk with me there and then, but they\u00a0booked an appointment for the following week.<\/p>\n

In today’s blog post I’d like to explain what happened on this next visit and the rather interesting turn of events towards the end…<\/p>\n

\"Tea_Feature\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Knock knock…<\/h2>\n

As those of you who have been visited by\u00a0Jehovah Witnesses will know, they typically go door-to-door in pairs. I was rather surprised, therefore, that when the time for my appointment rolled around, I opened the door to find a solitary figure\u00a0standing\u00a0there, the older of the two gentleman who had visited me the previous week.\u00a0For the sake of this blog post, I’ll be calling\u00a0“Jim”…<\/p>\n

I invited Jim\u00a0into my house and offered him a cup of tea, which he\u00a0politely declined. We spent the first ten minutes or so partaking in some\u00a0polite small talk. I got to know a little bit about him and his family and he got to hear a little bit of the story as to how an Englishman ends up living in southern California. I had heard that JWs were well trained in evangelism\u00a0and I thought he demonstrated this training well by\u00a0spending some\u00a0time establishing a little bit of a relationship with me, learning a little bit about me and building\u00a0a good rapport before<\/em> jumping into some\u00a0hard-hitting theology.<\/p>\n

The canon<\/h2>\n

As the small talk drew to a close, Jim turned to the subject of his visit. He handed me a folder with several pages of material, saying that I didn’t have to read it now, but that it was a summary of his research. I quickly flicked through through the folder and unfortunately\u00a0it rapidly\u00a0became clear that Jim had only really prepared to discuss the subject of the deuterocanon\/apocrypha.<\/p>\n

I explained that if he were\u00a0only able to speak to the deuterocanon\/apocrypha, that was fine, but I reiterated some of the questions<\/a> I had asked him and the others on their previous\u00a0visits. For example, I told him that Luther didn’t think the Epistle of James was Scripture and that he tried to take it out of the canon – why was he wrong?<\/p>\n

There were several times during our discussion where I noticed Jim go slightly off-topic, and I’m pretty sure he dropped into an often-repeated explanation of some JW doctrine (the use of the name “Jehovah”, the belief\u00a0that Jesus was crucified on a stake, …). This didn’t bother me; I’m sure I do the same thing when it comes to explaining my own faith. However, whenever Jim did this, I did my best to get him back off that well-worn path. I wanted to try and get him to think about some things he’d probably never before considered. \u00a0I figured that was going to be of more value than simply having him repeat speeches he’d have given a hundred times before.<\/p>\n

The deuterocanon<\/h2>\n

So, in the absence of being able to speak about the New Testament and the canon in general terms, we turned to\u00a0the subject of the deuterocanon. I could describe our exchange in detail, but honestly the\u00a0arguments presented were\u00a0pretty much the run-of-the-mill Protestant objections, all of which have solid rebuttals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jim said that he’d stop by again at some point to see\u00a0what I made of the material he gave me. \u00a0I’ve heard from others<\/a> that JWs are not allowed to accept religious material from others, especially if it is critical of the Watchtower or their teachings.\u00a0To get around this, what I’m going to do is go through the folder and annotate the sheets with my rebuttals. This way he can read my critique of the arguments\u00a0presented there without breaking the rules!<\/p>\n

In total, we spent about half the time of Jim’s visit talking about the canon. Despite the pleasant and congenial nature of our discussion, I have to admit I was rather disappointed with the exchange up until this\u00a0point. I hadn’t expect him to come so\u00a0ill-prepared to discuss my\u00a0question and I was also rather disappointed with the rather uninspired(!) arguments he presented concerning the deuterocanon. However, I found the remaining portion of Jim’s visit was far more enlightening…<\/p>\n

…and for the rest of the time….<\/h2>\n

Jim told me a little bit about how Jehovah Witnesses operate. He\u00a0said that he was enrolled in formation classes as a child at his Kingdom Hall and that from this “school” he will never graduate. This confirmed what I had heard about their group taking religious education very seriously. Can you imagine what the Catholic Church would look like if Sunday School continued even for adults?<\/p>\n

Jim recounted the words of a Catholic priest he once knew, who said “If I had ten people in my parish who were as evangelistic as you Jehovah Witnesses, we’d convert the entire city”<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span>It turned out that Jim was a fan of \u00a0the Second Vatican Council document,\u00a0Apostolicam Actuositatem<\/a>, a document from the Second Vatican Council concerning the\u00a0apostolate of the laity. When Jim was settling in and\u00a0I was pouring my tea, I asked him how many hours he spent evangelizing. He replied that he typically spent\u00a0twenty hours per week going door-to-door! This was a man in his seventies! I’ve heard from other people that this is not at all that unusual and younger people do even more. Can you imagine what the world would look like if the Catholic Church had that kind of zeal for evangelism?<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting points that\u00a0Jim\u00a0made concerned the size of JW congregations. He said that their congregations grow primarily through evangelism and that when a congregation reaches a certain size, they purposefully split and form two new congregations. This has the effect of keeping their congregations small. This keeps congregation mission-focused. It also ensures\u00a0that the congregations remain a tight-knit family, rather than suffering from the parishioner anonymity which plagues mainline Christian congregations.\u00a0(This is a really interesting topic that I hope to talk about in another post)<\/em><\/p>\n

Following on from this, Jim asked me about my experience<\/em> of the Catholic Church. I’m sure he has heard many less-than-inspiring stories of Catholic parish life. I told him a little bit about the love I have for my parish<\/a>, but I also took some time to talk a little bit about my turbulent years<\/a> and my eventual\u00a0wholehearted return<\/a> to the Church. I shared\u00a0about how I came to see the Church as a hospital for sinners<\/a> rather than a museum of perfected saints. I spoke about how the music may vary in quality, the preaching may differ in fervor, but that at every liturgy, Jesus comes to us in the Eucharist, our greatest prize.<\/p>\n

Since we moved into doctrinal territory, Jim enquired about some of the teaching of the Catholic Church. He didn’t try and argue\u00a0with anything I said, he really appeared just to want to know. In particular,\u00a0he asked me about the Catholic teaching concerning Protestants in the Final Judgement. Having done a little bit of reading about Jehovah’s Witnesses, I knew that in Watchtower theology the outlook for non-Jehovah Witnesses isn’t that rosy<\/a>. Because of this, it was wonderful to be able to speak about the Catholic hope of salvation. This then led me into a general explanation of salvation in Catholic theology. Honestly, this was my favourite moment in our hour-and-a-half meeting. I got to explain in broad strokes the covenantal story of salvation history, ending with a kerygmatic proclamation of the love of Christ and the invitation to enter into God’s family (1 Timothy 3:15<\/a>) and participate in the very life of God (2 Peter 1:4<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The Indictment<\/h2>\n

Towards the end of our time together, Jim asked me “Do you know 1 Peter 3:15?”<\/em><\/span>.\u00a0This is the classic<\/a> Scriptural apologetic text which I had actually prayed earlier that day, so I quoted it:<\/p>\n

\u201c… Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect\u201d<\/em> \u2013 1 Peter 3:15<\/span><\/p>\n

What he said next was really touching:<\/p>\n

“You did that for me today. Believe me, I’ve knocked on a lot<\/strong>\u00a0of doors over the years and you’re the first Catholic who’s done that. Now, I say that as both a compliment and an indictment…”<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

I found this extremely humbling and kinda astounding, given the number of doors that this\u00a0septuagenarian would have knocked on in his life. Clearly, we Catholics need to do something about this. We spent the rest of the time talking about bringing about renewal in the Catholic Church, which was really quite beautiful.<\/p>\n

Farewell<\/h2>\n

I showed Jim to the door. He asked me to look over the material he gave me and I said I would. I encouraged him to ask around and try to come up with an answer to my questions which had thus far not received an answer. I also encouraged him to spend some time reading the Early Church Fathers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I hope he comes back at some point.\u00a0I’ll be praying for him in the meantime and, if you’ve made it to the bottom of this post, I’d invite\u00a0you to pray for him too. He shared with me that he has a heart murmur and will probably have to have surgery at some point.<\/p>\n

It was a productive dialogue, I think. I had gently presented him with some questions\u00a0which he couldn’t answer and during our time together he had reminded me of the lackluster reputation of Catholics. We clearly have a lot of work to do.<\/p>\n

St.\u00a0Th\u00e9r\u00e8se of Lisieux, patron of the missions, pray for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, as many of you know, a couple of weeks ago\u00a0I had Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW) scheduled to visit my home. I had already received\u00a0two rounds of visits from them but\u00a0had not yet managed to get them across my threshold. However, on their previous\u00a0visit they had promised that next time they\u00a0would\u00a0have time to come in and have a proper chat. I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[2549,171,1886,2969,1589,295],"class_list":["post-45652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","tag-canon","tag-evangelism","tag-evangelization","tag-featured","tag-jehovah-witnesses","tag-preaching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45652"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46884,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45652\/revisions\/46884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/restlesspilgrim.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}