longdog wrote: ↑Sat Nov 28, 2020 11:52 am
Of course there is the entirely reasonable claim that evangelism has nothing to do with converting the heathen and everything to do with strengthening the dependency of the people sent out to evangelise. They are sent out ill equipped and ignorant of their own religion and get an almost uniformly bad reception. This proves that the world outside the church is hostile and the only safe place is the church... Now give us all your money.
This is very definitely the case with Jehovah's Witnesses. Until the numbers started looking bad a couple years ago, headquarters published a "Service Year Book" annually, with stats for all the countries around the world, showing how many active members of each level, how many conversions, hours of bible study and, notably, how many hours of "witnessing" were done. If you looked at the math, in the most recent one (2018, IIRC), dividing the number of baptisms by the number of hours of "witnessing" in the US yielded one baptism for every 10,000 hours of witnessing. That is five person-years of full-time employment for each new body. And when you consider that the baptism statistic includes children who grew up in the church, which probably accounts for half the total, you've got 20,000-plus hours of "witnessing" per new recruit. That's several times the effort that they used to need decades ago to drag a new member in the door.
They've increasingly moved to what they call "cart witnessing." A bunch of them will stand around a cart with a literature rack and wait for people to show interest. Of course, nobody does. And they're all talking amongst themselves, undoubtedly about how tragic it is that all the wicked heathens walking by will be consumed by hellfire in the next few years when their Vengeful Jesus returns and smites everyone except the JW's.
I also recall a few of them at the City Hall subway station every morning at 6:00 when I was on my way downtown to work. Three or four dour looking 70-something ladies standing there holding up fire-and-brimstone pamphlets which absolutely nobody even slowed down to look at. Never talked to anyone, or asked if they were interested in learning about how to achieve everlasting life.
And, of course, the press of iPhones and other internet apps have made it very difficult for those high-control groups to hang on to the young'uns. JW's lose around 2/3 of the kids raised in the religion, the highest percentage of any major Christian denomination, even with increasingly draconian requirements to engage in shunning of non-believers. Most other evangelical groups are losing high numbers, typically around half of the kids. JW membership growth in G-20 countries is flattening, after nearly a century of increase rates well above population growth, though they're still growing like gangbusters in some developing regions.
Unfortunately, the JW's also have another problem: their group is the least-educated and lowest-earning of any major denomination. Bad marketing decision on their part. They are hemhorraging money and could be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. As one data point, headquarters recently decreed that all surplus funds that were previously owned by local congregations needed to be remitted to HQ post haste. They sold their prime Brooklyn waterfront real estate for $1.7 billion (IIRC) and moved to a new cheaper facility upstate perhaps 15 years ago, and the money from that went out not long after. So some experts think they're losing $400 to $500 million annually on a donation stream of something like $1.5 billion.