Interesting reading about JWs. My former neighbour was a JW convert of six years standing until her non JW boyfriend moved in with her and she was excluded. I was friendly with her and my sort of stepdaughter became great friends with her daughter. They played together and we would take turns to give them their tea. Last year she split up with the boyfriend and a couple of months after that moved out back to her old area (about two miles away). Since then I’ve tried to contact her to arrange for the two girls to meet up – sort of stepdaughter is desperate to see her friend again – but have had no replies to messages. The only conclusion I can draw is that she is back with the JWs and being forbidden contact with outsiders (or she secretly hated us). It’s very sad.
The sad thing is, my family has been Jehovah’s Witnesses for six generations now, possibly seven if you count babies. Each generation, some of the family stay, and some leave. Each time, that completely splits the family along three lines: those who cut off all contact with non-JWs, those who stay JW but maintain some contact anyway, and those who leave the religion. That way, the wounds just never heal.
The original conversion (so the story goes) was when my great-great-grandparents, immigrants from Sweden, lost a child in Minnesota around the turn of the 20th century. The Lutherans would not bury the child without money, and the family didn’t have any. The JWs kindly offered to perform a Christian burial for nothing, and thus they converted. So they got in on the ground floor, as it were, before a lot of the extra-special insanity came in.
I haven’t, not really: but a friend had to stand in front of our congregation and apologize for getting pregnant without being married. I was 12 at the time. That was my last Sunday in that church.
Many of the parents in the church I was forced to attend as a child wouldn’t allow their children to play with me for being born out of wedlock.
I wonder what that congregation would have thought about a certain other unwed mother, name of Mary.
I grew up and lived for a few years as an adult in northern Indiana, home to several plain sects (Amish, Mennonite, Dunkards, German Baptists). As an adult, I worked with a number of GB folk. Their outward appearance and some of the church rules were similar to conservative Mennonites.
One of the GB men that I worked with moved from his parents’ home at around the age of thirty. He had officially joined the church a few years before (as an adult) and was expected to follow the rules. After he got his own place, he began a bit of rebellion. He had a stereo system installed in his car (radios were not allowed; members of the church had their car radios removed upon purchase), took up smoking in public and a few other things. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was when he bought a TV and had a satellite dish installed.
Two of the church elders visited him in his home (this was the talk of the small workplace with a lot of other church members) and went through the proscribed counselling. He was given a chance to “mend his ways”; probation if you may. A few months later, the elders made the second visit, this time to disfellowship him from the church.
Although their church isn’t nearly as strict as most Amish concerning shunning, he was still not included in many purely social aspects of the group. He was edged out of the group of church members who ate lunch at work together, no longer invited to join the basketball game that was usually played the second half the lunch hour and shot down by the two church women at work that he asked out. To top it off, he had spent all of his life in a pretty sheltered group and wasn’t really a “regular” person either. Kind of sad.