Ex-JW Elder, Now Catholic: Thank You, Catholic Church!

[LennyFL]

EX-JW here… started studying as a teenager, was baptized… then left in my early 20s. Loved being a JW - attending meetings, going out in service, and attending the district conventions. Loved my brothers and sisters. When I began to see the holes in their theology - all the false prophecies - I was literally sick to my stomach. Leaving the organization was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I became a Christian a few years later - thanks be to God. And I became Catholic in my late 30s. It made sense to me because I never stopped believing that God had an “organization” or Church He was guiding by the power of the Holy Spirit. I recognized that all religions - especially Christian ones, may be partly true - but only one could be completely true.

Thankful I found the truth in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Pray for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Most are wonderful people who are very devoted to serving Jehovah. It’s so sad that they’ve been brainwashed and have bought into the lies. May God remove the scales from their eyes…

This was the same for me. Ever sense I started believing in God I knew there was an organization. The Catholic Church and the witnesses have the one true organization on common. One has lasted nearly 2000 yrs and created by Christ, and the other for a little over 100 yrs. The Church is the only Church that has any authority at all to interpret scripture. This is without any doubt the True Church. I have gained a sense of belonging and comfort knowing I no longer have to question my religion. As a JW we were taught that every single teaching had to be backed by scripture, this led to the misunderstanding and the misuse of scripture to try to make people believe in their misguided religious beliefs.
This happens in Protestants all the time. The JWs are great people, the religion is just strict and misguided. It is hard to leave due to the guilt you get when you leave, but believe me, the Church is worth is.
God Bless

 

[yellowbird]

This was the same for me. Ever sense I started believing in God I knew there was an organization. The Catholic Church and the witnesses have the one true organization on common. One has lasted nearly 2000 yrs and created by Christ, and the other for a little over 100 yrs. The Church is the only Church that has any authority at all to interpret scripture. This is without any doubt the True Church. I have gained a sense of belonging and comfort knowing I no longer have to question my religion. As a JW we were taught that every single teaching had to be backed by scripture, this led to the misunderstanding and the misuse of scripture to try to make people believe in their misguided religious beliefs.
This happens in Protestants all the time. The JWs are great people, the religion is just strict and misguided. It is hard to leave due to the guilt you get when you leave, but believe me, the Church is worth is.
God Bless

 

[Tasmaniac]

It is hard to leave due to the guilt you get when you leave,

For me there was no guilt in dissociating myself from them. When I wrote & sent in my DA letter I saw it as me disfellowshipping the Watchtower Society from my life. All I felt at first was anger at them & myself for allowing them to dupe me for 20 years. My wife is still in it 110% & I’ve been outta there for a year & a half now. Best decision I ever made.

 

[adf417]

For me there was no guilt in dissociating myself from them. When I wrote & sent in my DA letter I saw it as me disfellowshipping the Watchtower Society from my life. All I felt at first was anger at them & myself for allowing them to dupe me for 20 years. My wife is still in it 110% & I’ve been outta there for a year & a half now. Best decision I ever made.

Congratulations for your new found life, prayers for journey, and welcome to CAF Tasmaniac. :extrahappy:

From 1 Chronicles 4:10
… “Oh, that you may truly bless Tas and extend his boundaries! May your hand be with him and make him free of misfortune, without pain!”…

 

[Tasmaniac]

Thank you so much

 

[pacloc]

For me there was no guilt in dissociating myself from them. When I wrote & sent in my DA letter I saw it as me disfellowshipping the Watchtower Society from my life. All I felt at first was anger at them & myself for allowing them to dupe me for 20 years. My wife is still in it 110% & I’ve been outta there for a year & a half now. Best decision I ever made.

This is great news that you have been led out of the trap. It is very sad that your wife has chosen to continue following this young and shifting religion, I’m sure you explained to her what it was that you were shown that helped free your mind.

I was a JW from the ages of 5 to 28, and have been out for 5 years now. I’m curious as to what were some of the things that led you away from them. I notice that a lot of JWs that leave become atheistic, I’m glad to see you still fear God.

God bless you in your search, He is already at work!

 

[Tasmaniac]

This is great news that you have been led out of the trap. It is very sad that your wife has chosen to continue following this young and shifting religion, I’m sure you explained to her what it was that you were shown that helped free your mind.

I was a JW from the ages of 5 to 28, and have been out for 5 years now. I’m curious as to what were some of the things that led you away from them. I notice that a lot of JWs that leave become atheistic, I’m glad to see you still fear God.

God bless you in your search, He is already at work!

I tried several times to speak to her about it but she would just get angry & very defensive of the organisation. In the end I just said “That’s it, I’m done with it all”. Wrote my DA letter the following weekend & gave it to her to pass onto the elders that Sunday. I’d had several earlier meetings with elders about my doubts & questioning things but they basically just fobbed me off with the usual lines they feed people. The last time I spoke to them I was told by one elder that he was not surprised I was having so many doubts as I’d become so spiritually weak. Weak in their definition because I dared to question their Almighty Governing Body whereas a strong witness complies with everything the GB tells them without question. Easy to see who the spiritually weak ones really are.

Some of the things that led me away? Well there were just a lot of areas that I began to question & no satisfactory answers could be found in WT literature so I went searching online & found the truth about the truth.

1. The ever changing “Truth”. Some years ago now there were quite a few so called adjustments in their teachings. My way of thinking was Truth is Truth. If it changes then it wasn’t Truth to begin with.
2. Their understanding of the 144000 being a literal number & also the firstfruits of Christians beginning at Pentecost. My thinking on that was that in 2000 years God hadn’t found 144000 Christians to make up that number. That’s only the size of a small city. Surely that would’ve been fulfilled in the 1st century or soon after. Also that the number of claimed annointed kept growing as time went by.
3. I always had trouble understanding how they connect Jesus to Michael the Archangel & Heb 1:5 convinced me that Jesus couldn’t possibly be an angel.
4. While I was searching the WT Library for answers I discovered an article stating that Jesus isn’t the mediator for all the other sheep. This I had never heard before nor could agree with. If Jesus isn’t our mediator then how can we approach the Father in Jesus name in prayer. If we aren’t adopted sons of God through Christ then how can God be our Father? They explained that only the anointed are adopted sons & that all the rest of us are God’s friends due to our association with the 144,000. Our Friend who art in heaven… Sorry didn’t buy it. I even asked my wife “Do you believe Jesus is your mediator?” She said that she most definitely did as I’m sure many other witnesses would agree too. I told her that she was at odds with the Society as Jesus is only the mediator for the 144000. She said she wasn’t aware of that. Her final response when I pressed the issue & she got angry & defensive again. “Well I believe everything that Jehovah teaches us through the Faithful Slave”

The more I searched the WT Library on my computer the more conflicting teachings I discovered, conflicting with what I understood & believed that is . Then moving my search online really opened the floodgates & once I knew the truth about the WTS I couldn’t remain part of it.

These 2 videos really helped convince me of their error
youtube.com/watch?v=5k0g7jL7Ums
youtube.com/watch?v=2WaAK8jroeI

I tried to get my wife to watch them but she refused. Her words “I don’t want to hear or see anything from filthy apostates”. She is so totally blinded by them & I have no doubt that if a WT or KM came out that said “JWs must separate from their apostate spouses” then I believe she would leave me based on that Truth from Jehovah.

 

[pacloc]

It definitely sounds like you never fully went full Watchtower mode, believing that their “adjustments” were proof of their earnest search for “the truth”. It helps that you were a convert and that you did not grow up with these things pounded into your developing mind. It sounds like either your wife was born into the religion or converted while still a youth. Is that the case?

As for points of discussion with your wife, I know personally the frustration that you have gone through, but with my mother. Thank God that my wife who had converted to JW only after we began dating, went along with me very smoothly as I left the cult. But my parents and siblings are still in, held together by my mom. Meaning if she wakes up, they will all follow her. Leaving the cult left me unsure where to go, I was Catholic only by my baptism that I received before my mom became a JW. I went around finding similar cults that weren’t as bad, but eventually ended up back at the Catholic Church, finally realizing that using a Christian Bible for my beliefs, but rejecting the only Church (kind of, as you might see that I have moved over to the Orthodox Church) that existed for 1500 years made no sense logically.

Anyway, my point was that I like you was just trying to point out the problems randomly to my mother. This probably never has worked on someone fully indoctrinated. I have a new plan, that I will be trying soon that will hopefully be more effective. I plan to get to the core of Christianity and have her explain how it is that salvation works according to a JW. Since I already know what the watchtower officially teaches, I have an advantage in being able to prepare for the answers that she might give that at their core really make no sense, since they are borrowed from already false Calvinist ideas of penal substitution and have been perverted even further (as you know from your point about Christ not being mediator of most JWs). Only with the mindset that maybe their whole faith, that is built on the strange idea that somehow God needs an equal payment of a perfect human’s death to balance the scales, is really unbelievable, she might be open to listening to an alternative view with an open mind, which is a more reasonable view of the Incarnation. JWs really try to put God in a box, and boldly claim what He must and can’t do, as if God has rules over himself. I think once this false idea is broken, maybe a JW can begin to look into other possibilities. The Church’s teaching that Christ has deified humanity and that we can hope to be joined to the God-Man if we so will it make a lot more sense than what JWs teach about salvation. Christ’s death has many facets, none of which are a necessary payment of life for life in a strict legal sense.