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My first encounter with a Watchtower Society missionary occurred in 1969.
At the time I was young and naive, and thus assumed that the hewer of
wood, and hauler of water who came down the driveway was a fellow born
again Christian who believed in the deity of Christ. But when I talked this
over with a Protestant church elder he became alarmed; and urged me to
read a little book titled 30 Years A Watchtower Slave by William J. Schnell;
whom the Society at one time demonized as an agent of Satan. I would not
be surprised if it still does.
After getting my eyes opened by Mr. Schnell's book, I was afterwards
steered towards another book titled Kingdom Of The Cults by Walter Martin.
No doubt the Society demonizes Mr. Martin too.
Around late 1980, my wife and I attended a series of classes sponsored by a
local church titled "How To Witness To Jehovah's Witnesses". The instructor
(call him Pete) was an ex Witness who had been in the Watch Tower Society
system for near three decades and was a wide-area manager before
terminating his association with the Society; so he knew the ins and outs of
its proprietary doctrines pretty good.
Pete pioneered a small organization in San Diego dedicated to de
programming and re-educating ex Witnesses. It was a challenge. The ex
JW's with whom Pete worked were often very depressed with feelings of
betrayal and disillusionment-- not to mention the humiliation and the
despondence they were experiencing from letting themselves be duped by
the Society's ingenious sophistry --and found it nigh impossible to trust
ecclesiastical authority. Pete said that had he not been an ex Witness
himself; many of his students would never have listened to him.
Pete didn't train us to defeat missionaries in a debate because even if you
best them scripture for scripture, rebuttal for rebuttal, and refute for refute,
they will not give up on the Society. Their mind's unflinching premise is that
the Society is right even when it can be easily proven wrong. No, he trained
us to do four things: (1) don't give them a chance to launch into their spiel,
but immediately put them on the defensive with your own questions, thus
denying them control of the conversation, (2) force them to listen and pay
attention even if you have to repeat yourself to do it, (3) don't permit them
to evade and/or circumvent difficult questions, and (4) show them the Bible
not in ways they've already seen, but in ways they've never imagined.
The goal is to simply show missionaries that the Society's isn't the only
interpretation out there. In other words: the Watchtower Society's
interpretations aren't the only option; nor are theirs eo ipso the right
interpretation just because they say so.
Later on, I read a book titled Why I Left The Jehovah's Witnesses by Ted
Dencher and eventually purchased a copy of the Society's Kingdom
Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures to use in my discussions with
missionaries because it is the one Bible that they cannot challenge; nor dare
to challenge. I also read and studied the Society's little brown book titled
Reasoning From The Scriptures.
From all that vetting, study, and training I quickly discovered that although
the Watchtower Society uses many of Christianity's standard terms and
phrases, those terms and phrases mean something entirely different in
Society-speak than what you'd expect. It is genuinely a case of apples and
oranges going by the same names. So your first challenge in dealing with a
Watch Tower missionary is to scale the semantic language barrier; and that
by itself is an Herculean task.
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