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 and carefully analyzing the teachings and practices of the Organization, we came to the conclusion that "the Truth," as Witnesses call their faith, was neither the authentic historic Christianity it claimed to be, nor, in fact, "the truth", but simply a man-made "restorationist" sect, of a kind with the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh Day Adventists, the Worldwide Church of God, and others born of the same era and the same impulse. Unlike the Protestant Churches which departed from the Catholic Church over presumed 'reforms', the various restorationist sects hold that Jesus and the Holy Spirit did not protect the early Church from apostasy, and consequently it was up to 19th and 20th century Bible readers to restore what God had failed to protect. They used their human reasoning to construct doctrines that then had to be revised again and again as interpretations shifted with new human reasoning — and sometimes of necessity, as a previous position became untenable.
I noticed, too, that the young people raised as Jehovah's Witnesses very often left the religion as adults and became agnostics or atheists. Their faith had been 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.
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 protected 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 investigation have convinced me of
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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? Much of 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: The Catholic Church, which historians agree is the earliest identifiable expression of organized Christianity, stands accused by the Watchtower of being an apostate Church that polluted the faith with pagan practices the moment the apostles had died. That, too, is a claim that can be examined on the evidence — and these pages do exactly that.
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. I intend to show in these pages that Jehovah's Witnesses can be likened to 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. He does not know them intimately, as if he were family. This is analogous to the understanding The Watchtower and the "Governing Body" of Jehovah's Witnesses have with respect to Scriptural and historical Christianity. 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 unique to Jehovah's Witnesses are contrary to Scriptural and historical truth.
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.

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? I have come to think the Christian picture fits the evidence far better, and not as a leap in the dark but for reasons that can be set out and examined.

That anything exists at all. Why is there something rather than nothing? A universe that began to exist, and that is finely balanced for life in ways that grow more striking the closer we look, sits far more easily with a Creator than with blind chance.

That the world makes sense to the mind. The cosmos is orderly, intelligible, and describable in mathematics — and we are the kind of creatures who can read it. On the Christian view that is exactly what we should expect; on a purely material one it is a happy accident in need of explaining away.

That right and wrong are real. Most of us know that cruelty is genuinely wrong, not merely unfashionable. But objective good and evil, along with real meaning and purpose, are hard to ground in a universe of mere particles. They point beyond matter to their source.

That God has 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.

None of this is meant to belittle the honest doubter; I take the arguments against God seriously, and weigh them in these pages too. I simply find that, taken together, the world we 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

Some will immediately accuse me here of begging the question, since I have already made the assumption that God exists and created the world (not to mention the exclusive adoption of Christianity as the true and proper relationship to God). But that is what I believe can be shown from the facts.

What I cannot show from the facts — but hope and pray — is that the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses will repent of their unwarranted arrogation of the authority given by Christ only to His Church in the First Century, and release those precious souls of Jehovah's Witnesses from a man-made religion to hear and respond to the Holy Spirit and the Bride of Christ, the Catholic Church. (Rev. 22:17)