My Long Journey of Faith

Rich and Suzanne

"For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Romans 8:38-39 (Ignatius Study Bible)
For thirty-five years I was active as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I was an appointed Elder for over thirty years and a Pioneer for two years. I spent seven years at the organization's world headquarters in Brooklyn, New York — known as Bethel — where I was appointed a Bethel Elder and worked in the Service Department as secretary to Harley Miller, the Service Department Overseer. I gave circuit- and district-convention talks to audiences as large as forty thousand people in Tiger Stadium (Detroit, Michigan) and the SilverDome (Pontiac, Michigan). I contributed to articles in The Watchtower and Our Kingdom Ministry. After Bethel, I served for years as Accounts Overseer for circuit assemblies and News Service Overseer at district conventions. I even served on one occasion as a temporary circuit overseer. All this simply to say that what follows cannot be dismissed as the complaint of an outsider who never understood the religion: my standing as one of Jehovah's Witnesses was, by any internal measure, unimpeachable. What's more, neither I nor my wife Suzanne were ever disfellowshiped even after ceasing association with the religion in 2000. (We did, however, lose friends and family.)
We left because, after honestly analyzing the teachings and practices of the Organization, we concluded that “the Truth,” as Witnesses call their faith, was not authentic historic Christianity — nor, in fact, the truth — but simply another man-made “restorationist” sect, of a kind with the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh Day Adventists, and others born of the same era and the same impulse. The Protestant Reformers, whatever one makes of their reforms, set out to correct a Church they believed had gone astray. Restorationists, on the other hand, begin with the premise that Jesus did not preserve His Church at all, but allowed it to become totally corrupt, leaving it to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bible readers or 'prophets' to finally restore what He had not managed to protect. The consequence is visible in the record. Doctrines assembled by human reasoning must be revised whenever that reasoning shifts — or when a previous teaching simply becomes untenable .
I have noticed over the years that young people raised as Jehovah's Witnesses very often leave the religion as adults and became agnostics or atheists. Their faith was cultivated in an organization rather than in Jesus Christ, and once they lost faith in the organization, they were left in effect, “inoculated“ against Christianity itself. And, worst of all, they knew nothing about the grace of God that The Watchtower never revealed to them. (See also sanctifying grace and actual grace .)
The purpose of this website is to point Witnesses and others to the source of grace, Jesus Christ, offered in the Church He founded and which He and the Holy Spirit have sustained down through the centuries. It is my particular hope to help those dear souls among Witnesses and former Witnesses for whom the Watchtower "poisoned the well" with respect to the Catholic Church and the Christian faith.
I invite your engagement with me on the questions below. Please bear in mind that I do not have the perfect answer for every question — in some cases I may have an answer but not the best wording for it. And in some cases I may not have an answer at all; that does not mean none exists, any more than a person's refusal to accept an answer makes the answer inadequate. People are not always convinced by good arguments or the truth — often our will overrides our reason, and we select what we choose to believe ... not all the time, but sometimes. So I realize that even the best arguments and facts may not convince one of Jehovah's Witnesses or a skeptic to set aside their confirmation bias or fear of change and give honest consideration to what follows here. But I feel committed to present what years of honest and prayerful investigation have proven to me.
You may leave comments or questions below, but be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

The Watchtower vs The Catholic Church

Are Jehovah's Witnesses the restoration of first-century apostolic Christianity, as they claim — or a man-made religion, of the kind they themselves say the Mormons and Seventh-day Adventists are? The answer turns on a handful of specific questions. Each is worth asking honestly, and each is examined in its own place on this site:
  • Did the apostles warn of a coming 'great apostasy' so complete that the entire early Christian Church was eradicated, needing to be restored in modern times? Or did they simply foretell coming heretics who would threaten the Church but not destroy it? And if the Church truly was lost, what of Christ's own promise — that the gates of hell would not prevail against it? Did Jesus and the Holy Spirit abandon the early Church to a corruption so complete that authentic Christianity vanished from the earth and had to be reconstructed nineteen centuries later?
  • Did Jesus prophesy a future "faithful and discreet slave" class that would be given authority to govern His people — and is today's Governing Body that class? Or did He simply give a teaching parable to illustrate the need for every Christian to be prepared at all times for His return?
  • In eternity, before creation, was God an isolated lonely monad with no one to love? Or is his very being relational, an eternal communion of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? And could the whole early Church, taught by the apostles themselves, have come to misunderstand within a few decades of Jesus' death the very nature of the God it worshiped and to whom it prayed?
  • Did Jesus foretell two classes of Christians — one class, a "little flock," to rule in heaven, and another class, "other sheep," to live on a paradise earth ruled by the first? Or did He foretell that a "little flock" of Jewish Christians would be joined by Gentile "other sheep" to become one flock under one shepherd?
  • Is heaven restricted to only 144,000 redeemed humans? Or is the number 144,000 symbolic of Jewish Christians as distinct from Gentile Christians? Is the great crowd of Revelation redeemed humans who are not in the "New Covenant"? Or are they simply another way of viewing the Gentile Christians as distinct from the Jewish Christians?
  • Did the "last days" begin in 1914? Or did the apostles say they were already living in "last days" initiated by Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit?
  • Is the Kingdom of God a heavenly government that began ruling invisibly in 1914? Or did Jesus declare after his resurrection that "all authority in heaven and on earth" had been given to him, and hence his disciples should go to all nations, teaching and baptizing new subjects of that now present Kingdom?
  • Is the New World Translation a faithful rendering of Scripture? Or is it translated to fit the Watchtower Organization's doctrines?
  • Does using the divine name "Jehovah" — inserted even into the New Testament, where no Greek manuscript contains it — mark the one true religion? Or did the apostles, writing in Greek and reading the Septuagint (which renders the divine name as "Lord"), take Old Testament passages that speak of the LORD and apply them directly to Jesus — confessing him as the very One the Hebrew Scriptures called by that name?
These and other questions are taken up, one by one, in the pages herein. My hope is only that each is weighed honestly — on the Scriptures, on the historical record, and on the plain sense of Jesus' own words — and that an unbiased mind, asking them in good faith, will find that the questions very nearly answer themselves.

Atheism vs Christianity

Beneath the question of which church is true lies a deeper one: which worldview better explains the world we actually live in — the Christian one, or the materialist one that says matter and energy are all there is? Belief in God is often dismissed as a leap in the dark, contrary to reason. But is it? Each of the following questions is worth asking honestly, and each is taken up in its own place on this site:
  • Why is there something rather than nothing ? Does a universe that need not have existed at all — and that did not always exist — explain its own being? Or does its existence point beyond itself to a cause that must exist of its own nature?
  • Why is the universe finely balanced for life, in ways that grow more striking the closer we look ? Is such exquisite calibration better explained by blind chance, or by a Mind that intended it?
  • Why does the cosmos make sense to the mind — orderly, intelligible, written in the language of mathematics — and why are we the kind of creatures who can read it? Is that a happy accident, or just what we should expect if reason stands behind the world?
  • Are right and wrong real ? Most of us know that cruelty is genuinely wrong, not merely unfashionable. But can objective good and evil, real meaning and real purpose, be grounded in a universe of mere particles? Or do they point beyond matter to their source?
  • Has God acted in history ? The Christian claim is not only philosophical but historical: that God revealed himself, supremely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus — events with real evidence behind them, recorded in documents we have good reason to trust . Is that evidence better explained by a risen Christ, or explained away?
  • And what of the honest objections — above all the problem of suffering and evil? Do they overturn belief in God? Or, weighed fairly, do they trouble the believer without dissolving the reasons for belief?
None of this is meant to belittle the honest doubter; I take the hardest questions seriously and weigh them in these pages too. I simply find that, taken together, the world we actually meet — its existence, its order, its moral weight, and the figure of Christ at the center of history — is better accounted for by a reasonable Christian faith than by materialism. The pages in this section make the case.

Summary

Adult converts to Jehovah's Witnesses are generally very impressed by the apparent biblical knowledge of the Witness who conducted a 'Bible study' with them. The convert likely had very little knowledge of the Bible and orthodox Christian teaching, so they find 'discoveries' like Psalm 83:18 (the name "Jehovah") and logical assumptions such as 'how could a loving God condemn people to an eternity in hell?' convincing. But these 'discoveries' are in fact very superficial and ignorant of the theological depth of traditional Christian teaching.
In fact, Jehovah's Witnesses are like your local postal carrier. Just as a postal carrier knows the addresses and associated names along a route, but knows little about the people living at those addresses, so Jehovah's Witnesses know all the Bible verses they can 'cherry-pick' to support their beliefs (as these inevitably change), but they are ignorant of the Scriptural and historical context of those verses. The postal carrier may believe that Mrs. Jones of 1547 Main Street is a senior because she receives mail from AARP, but he knows little else: he does not know, for example, that Mrs. Jones has been a widow for five years, has three adult children living in other states, and her late husband's name was Arthur. He does not know Mrs. Jones' actual age or her interests in life. (Okay, he may know she likes quilting because she receives monthly issues of "Quilting Today" magazine.) But you get the point: he knows only superficial things about the people to whom he delivers mail. What he thinks he knows about Mrs. Jones is merely his human reasoning based on limited information, and nothing more. If Jesus founded a Church and gave the Holy Spirit to enlighten and direct that Church, then what that Church believes and teaches does not have to change and can rightly be said to be "infallible" since neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit can err or lie.
Most Witnesses who have been to Bethel (Brooklyn) know of the Bethel Library and the Gilead Library. But few are aware that there was a third library, located near the Writing Department that was 'off-limits' to the Bethel Family and Gilead Students. This was a library containing hundreds of Christendom's commentaries, which were only to be read and used by the Writing Department. The Watchtower writing staff have always used Christendom's Biblical commentaries, simply picking and choosing those findings that align with the organization's current beliefs and practices. They have little to no genuine scholarship of their own.
In other words — and as I can testify, having worked at Bethel in the Service Department and in contact with the Writing Department during those years — the only correct understanding Jehovah's Witnesses have of Christianity are those beliefs that align with mainstream Christian doctrines, while those beliefs that are peculiar to Jehovah's Witnesses are contrary to Scriptural and historical truth.
I believe an honest investigation leads inevitably to the conclusion that Jehovah's Witnesses are a man-made religion born of fallible human interpretation and a superficial understanding of Scriptural and historical context, a natural product of its time and human reasoning similar to other 'restorationist' sects such as Latter Day Saints ("Mormons") and Seventh Day Adventists.