The Long and Winding Road

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

The great Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” — a defense of the amateur, who does a thing himself out of love rather than leaving it to someone better qualified. I have taken him at his word, and stopped putting off composing this website out of fear of not doing it well enough.

This site is for my family and friends first, and for Jehovah’s Witnesses and former Witnesses everywhere. The years of research behind it were done out of love — not to win arguments, but so that the people I love can know my history, understand why Suzanne and I walked the road we walked, and be warned, gently, about how easy it is to be misled in the things that matter most. If what is written here spares one person years of spiritual detour, or simply helps someone I love understand our story, it will have been worth doing — even badly.

One conviction shapes everything here: we all tend to believe what we want to be true. The intellect and the will are not always on the same side — a heart that has been wounded, or that longs to belong somewhere, can lead the mind where the evidence does not point. And it is not only belief that brings solace. Disbelief can be a comfort too: walking away from everything can feel like freedom, and “there is no one to answer to” can be as soothing a thought as “someone is watching over me.” So this site asks of every reader — Witness, Christian, or skeptic — only what it asked of me: to test what we want to be true against what is true. Truth has nothing to fear from examination.

If you are one of Jehovah’s Witnesses — or used to be — know that this site was built with you especially in mind. I know what it may have cost you to open it, and nothing here will mock you, rush you, or ask you to decide anything today. The Where to Begin page explains what this site is, makes you three promises, and lays out a path through it — wherever you happen to be standing.

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 over 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. While at Bethel, I contributed to the writing of articles in The Watchtower and Our Kingdom Ministry. 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 served for years as Accounts Overseer for local circuit assemblies and News Service Overseer at regional district conventions. I served on one occasion as a substitute circuit overseer.

All this simply to say that what follows cannot be dismissed as the complaints of a disgruntled underachiever who never really understood the religion: my standing as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses was, by any reasonable measure, unimpeachable. What’s more, neither I nor my wife Suzanne were ever disfellowshipped even after ceasing association with the religion in 2000.

The purpose of this website is to visit the questions that ultimately led Suzanne and me to leave The Watchtower, and to which I eventually found answers in the Church Jesus actually founded. That Church is the one to which He promised, “behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Matt. 28:20, RSV-SB).

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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, a restorationist sect 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 page on this site:
  • Did the apostles warn of a coming ‘great apostasy’ that would eradicate the entire Church founded by Christ, leaving authentic Christianity unidentifiable until Bible students restored it eighteen centuries later? Or did they warn of heretics and lax Christians who would trouble the Church but never destroy it?
  • Did Jesus foretell 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 that every Christian should be a faithful steward, prepared at all times for His return?
  • Is the Kingdom of God a political government that began ruling invisibly in heaven in 1914? Or is it a spiritual reign, extended by preaching and making disciples wherever a soul consents to the will of God — the Great Commission Jesus could give because “all authority in heaven and on earth” had been given to Him?
  • Did Jesus foretell two classes of Christians — a “little flock” of 144,000 in heaven ruling over an unlimited number of “other sheep” on earth? Or did He foretell that a “little flock” of Jews would be joined by an unlimited number of Gentile “other sheep”, the two folds becoming one flock of Christians?
  • Did the apostles foretell a distant future “last days” to begin in 1914? Or did they believe they were already living in “the last days” of a present age that was leading to an age to come at Christ’s return?
  • Before creation, was God an solitary monad with no one to love? Or is His very nature relational, a communion of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
  • Does using the divine name “Jehovah” mark the one true religion? Or is “Jehovah” the result of a medieval mistranslation of the Tetragrammaton, which was never used in the Septuagint or by the writers of the Christian Scriptures?
  • Is the New World Translation a faithful rendering of Scripture? Or is it translated to fit the Watchtower Organization’s doctrines?
These and other questions are taken up, one by one, in the pages herein. My hope is 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 examined in its own page 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 at the constants that govern it? Is such exquisite calibration better explained by blind chance, or by a Mind that intended it?
  • Why is the cosmos intelligible to the mind, orderly and 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 objectively 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.

Summary

Adult converts to Jehovah’s Witnesses are usually impressed by how well the Witness who conducted their ‘Bible study’ seemed to know the Bible. Most arrive knowing little of it themselves and less of orthodox Christian teaching, so a verse like Psalm 83:18, carrying the name “Jehovah,” lands as a revelation, and a question like ‘how could a loving God condemn anyone to an eternity in hell?’ sounds unanswerable. Both are shallower than they look. Neither engages the teaching it claims to correct.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are like your local postal carrier. A carrier knows every address on the route and the name that goes with it, but almost nothing about the people behind those doors. In a similar way, Witnesses know every proof text that can be ‘cherry-picked’ in support of their beliefs, while remaining strangers to the historical, literary, and Scriptural context those verses came from.

Whenever a conversation turns to who Christ is, a Witness will cite Colossians 1:15, where Christ is called “the firstborn of all creation,” and treat the verse as settling it: firstborn, therefore made, therefore a creature. The citation is accurate. It is the name on the envelope, read off correctly. The household behind it is another matter. In Hebrew usage firstborn is a title of rank and inheritance rather than birth order, which is why Psalm 89:27 can call David the firstborn though he was the youngest of Jesse’s sons. The very next verse forecloses the reading the Witness has taken from it: “all things were created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). If Christ created all things, He is not among the things created. The New World Translation meets that difficulty by adding a word the Greek does not have, so that all things becomes “all [other] things.”

Colossians 1:15 is not an isolated slip. The questions herein trace the same pattern through every distinctive Watchtower teaching: what is true in it is not unique, and what is unique in it is not true. That is the mark of a man-made religion. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a “restorationist” sect — holding that the faith was lost after the apostles and recovered in modern times. The Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses all arose in nineteenth-century America on that claim, each on a charismatic founder’s private interpretation of Scripture.

Nothing here impugns the sincerity or goodness of individual Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are in the main devout, moral, and courageous in their convictions. The argument concerns the organization’s handling of evidence, not the character of its members; one may hold that a religion is man-made despite its claims otherwise, while still holding its adherents in genuine respect. “Speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15) requires both truth and love.