Former (or Current) JWs and funny things while door knocking

[b_justb]

As a former, I have a million door to door stories. Here’s one to kick us off:

I was door to door witnessing with a sister who was a little weak in witnessing. So, I did all the talking. We’re into it for more than an hour and I go to use a door knocker on this guys door and it comes off in my hand after I had already rat-a-tat’ed. Her eyes got all big and I say, “Great!” and toss the broken door knocker into the bushes next to the door just as dude of the house opens the door. He didn’t see and I just opened up into my scripted spiel. I thought the gal that was with me was going to pee her pants (well skirt, the gals always wore skirts going door to door, but you get the idea).

OK next, lay the stories out here.

 

[carol_marie]

I’m working out in service with an elderly “sister.” I knock… a guy comes up to the screen door… I start my presentation… he seems very interested (ie: didn’t tell me to get the blank off his property) The woman I’m with grabs my arm & says “Let’s go!!” I look at her so while she hightails it down his driveway. I turn back to him and apologize saying, “I don’t understand… ?” He smiles and shrugs and it’s then that I notice he’s wearing only what looks to be a tiny dish towel.
Sure enough… before I leave… wa-la. Off comes the towel.

Needless to say, I didn’t add him to my “back call” list.

 

[Jaded27]

This first one didn’t happen to me, but to my ex husband. He was out with another guy going door to door and they came up to this perfectly ordinary looking house in the Worcester area. It wasn’t Worcester itself, but if you live in MA you know Worcester. It can get weird.

They go up to the door and the guy who answers is very excited to invite them in and talk about Armageddon. They’re thinking “Okay, he sounds interested. Can’t be that bad.” So they go in. the guy had guns all over the place and proceeded to pull out his map of the world to show my ex and his friend exactly where God was going to strike first. He pointed to places on the map and explained why they would be among the first to go and all this. Thank god he didn’t lock the door. The two guys scrambled out of there pretty quickly.

My experiences have ranged from a guy telling me and my friend when we were 12 years old that he was going to shoot us if we didn’t get off his property in ten seconds to being invited in for tea and cookies.
One time that’s sort of in the middle was going out in service with my mom, a couple other adults in the hall, and a good girl friend of mine. They let us go to a door by ourselves since we were like 15 at the time. We got to choose which house of two we wanted to do. There was one that was BRIGHT pink with crosses all over the outside of it. Well, she and I were in a weird phase and we thought “hey, that might be fun” and chose the pink one. So we knock, an older woman (maybe in her 50’s) answers and invites us in and says she’d love to chat.

As we step in she LOCKS the door behind us and says “I don’t want the cats getting out.” Um, lady? Can your cats open doors? I don’t think so!
She was pretty nice and offered us food but it was just one of those houses where you knew better you know? And no, not because she was Catholic, but just because we got a weird vibe. Anyway, we were there for about 45 minutes talking about religion and such. That’s great and all, but we had people waiting for us and the woman was slightly creepy. We are FINALLY inching our way towards the door and my friend, who was a music major, saw a keyboard in another room and got distracted. We were then there for another 15 minutes as the woman explains she’s in a Christian rock band and her friend is coming over to practice soon and MY friend asks her all sorts of questions about what type of keyboard it is. I could have killed her!

There are more where that came from, but this is already way longer than I intended.

 

[mumto5]

I remember going to a house that had one of those doors that is basically just a frame with frosted glass. The lady I was with was giving her speil and this guy was asking questions, seeming interested. I was about 15 and I could see through the glass that this guy was stark naked but I thought, ok, maybe he is a bit not all there and isn’t thinking about the fact we can see through the door, after all, he is standing behind it and just peeking out around it. A couple of minutes later the guy starts to fiddle with himself. Eventually he opens the door all the way and the woman I was with decides to run off. I was amused but she made me promise not to tell anyone as she was embarassed.

Another day we had a woman in a transparent nightie…

Then there was the guy who wanted to take me out to lunch and bring me back to his place and …well, you know… I was about 16 then and the girl I was with was a good couple of years younger or so. Down a long driveway, out of sight. I felt a bit nervous.

I have to say that if my children decided to join the JWs they would be forbidden from the door to door work. From what I’ve seen I just feel it’s not safe for them.

 

[b_justb]

mumto5:

I remember going to a house that had one of those doors that is basically just a frame with frosted glass. The lady I was with was giving her speil and this guy was asking questions, seeming interested. I was about 15 and I could see through the glass that this guy was stark naked but I thought, ok, maybe he is a bit not all there and isn’t thinking about the fact we can see through the door, after all, he is standing behind it and just peeking out around it. A couple of minutes later the guy starts to fiddle with himself. Eventually he opens the door all the way and the woman I was with decides to run off. I was amused but she made me promise not to tell anyone as she was embarassed.

Another day we had a woman in a transparent nightie…

Then there was the guy who wanted to take me out to lunch and bring me back to his place and …well, you know… I was about 16 then and the girl I was with was a good couple of years younger or so. Down a long driveway, out of sight. I felt a bit nervous.

I have to say that if my children decided to join the JWs they would be forbidden from the door to door work. From what I’ve seen I just feel it’s not safe for them.

Holy ****! That’s quite the deviant report.

 

[deb1]

I was reading these posts and I couldn’t help but be surprised at how young some of the posters were when they were allowed to go alone door to door. Isn’t this dangerous?

 

[catsrus]

Yes, it IS dangerous, especially these days.
When I was going to their meetings, a constant story was about “the” jw who was subjected to attempted rape. “She called on jehovah and the rapist backed off saying, ‘had I known you were a jw, I never would have attempted to rape you’”.
Also the stories of jws who refused blood transfusions and were miraculously cured upon refusal.
These type of stories are drummed into their heads as “proof” that they will be protected from the wicked “system of things” that, itself , is “proof” we are living in the last days.

 

[b_justb]

deb1:

I was reading these posts and I couldn’t help but be surprised at how young some of the posters were when they were allowed to go alone door to door. Isn’t this dangerous?

I was raised in it and by age 8 was with other boys younger than I alone at doors. The JWs rarely go door to door alone, as in a single person by himself. It is usually in pairs, for safety as well as biblical example of Jesus sending out people in pairs as mentioned in Luke.

When I was in and doing all this if 2 sisters went into a house one of them would leave her book back out on the front stoop so the otehrs in teh group could tyell where they were if things looked like it was going south.

 

[Jaded27]

b_justb:

I was raised in it and by age 8 was with other boys younger than I alone at doors. The JWs rarely go door to door alone, as in a single person by himself. It is usually in pairs, for safety as well as biblical example of Jesus sending out people in pairs as mentioned in Luke.

When I was in and doing all this if 2 sisters went into a house one of them would leave her book back out on the front stoop so the otehrs in teh group could tyell where they were if things looked like it was going south.

Good idea. And yea, I’d just like to reiterate that you would NEVER be encouraged to go to a door alone. Whether you’re five or fifty years old. NEVER EVER would we be told to go to a door alone.

 

[scylla]

I have been following this and some of these are some pretty interesting stories, there are a lot of weirdos out there and I do worry about people I see going door to door sometimes. Sometimes we have had kids going door to door selling candies or doing fundraisers and this brings up the good point, no matter what we should travel in pairs when we are doing anything like this. If it is sharing our faith or doing a fundraiser we should always be with a friend when out and about.

God Bless
Scylla

 

[deb1]

scylla:

I have been following this and some of these are some pretty interesting stories, there are a lot of weirdos out there and I do worry about people I see going door to door sometimes. Sometimes we have had kids going door to door selling candies or doing fundraisers and this brings up the good point, no matter what we should travel in pairs when we are doing anything like this. If it is sharing our faith or doing a fundraiser we should always be with a friend when out and about.

God Bless
Scylla

Yes, not only should people do this in pairs but children should be accompanied by an adult.

 

[mumto5]

deb1:

Yes, not only should people do this in pairs but children should be accompanied by an adult.

I guess the thing is that my parents, had they known, wouldn’t have been happy either. But I didn’t tell them and I’d gone of and joined the JWs all on my own at the age of 14. They knew we were working with other people - I was sensible enough not to work alone - but working with others often meant working ‘house over house’ and that offers limited supervision.

I don’t think I was aware of the real risks myself. I know I never had similar experiences when selling fundraisers!

 

[the_phoenix]

Wow! This is a thread that allows for fascinating insight, though the unpleasant aspects of confronting the unexpected yet very real potential dangers described is sobering.

I wonder if I can contribute to the thread? Am not a former or current JW, and am not sure how funny this is, but I have in fact knocked on a few doors in my time.

When I was 8 years old, it’s possible I was aware of Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons going door to door, but what I knew for sure was that I was distantly related to a Catholic missionary priest in Ghana, Africa and the Bible clearly stated that we should “Go out and teach all nations.” So I figured if I couldn’t quite make it to Africa like Father Charles, I could at least do my best to convert my next door neighbor’s family, because the boy I played with didn’t go to church.

So one day, armed only with faith and what I hoped was a cute smile, I knocked on my neighbor’s door. When the lady of the house answered, I asked, “What religion are you?” When she replied Protestant, I thought ‘good, that’s Christian, I can work with that.’ Then I asked, “And what religion is your husband?” When she replied “Atheist,” it came as such a complete shock that someone I knew did not believe in God that I was literally scared speechless. That was the first and last door I ever knocked on when it came to Catholic evangelization.

My door-to-door campaign to save souls thus unceremoniously ended, I decided, still at the age of 8, to go into politics instead. My political career lasted for two entire doors. At the first door, the neighbor across the street simply stood in stunned silence as I chanted a cheer in which my chosen candidate was praised and the other candidate was … well … not. * grins * Remembering my brief religious evangelization career, I carefully skipped my next door neighbor’s house and went to a different one. Well, it turned out that a hippie lived in the second house I knocked at! He was a very kind hippie, but finding myself unable to answer his response to my cheer, that ended my door-to-door political campaigning.

~~ the phoenix

 

[Subrosa]

mumto5:

I remember going to a house that had one of those doors that is basically just a frame with frosted glass. The lady I was with was giving her speil and this guy was asking questions, seeming interested. I was about 15 and I could see through the glass that this guy was stark naked but I thought, ok, maybe he is a bit not all there and isn’t thinking about the fact we can see through the door, after all, he is standing behind it and just peeking out around it. A couple of minutes later the guy starts to fiddle with himself. Eventually he opens the door all the way and the woman I was with decides to run off. I was amused but she made me promise not to tell anyone as she was embarassed.

Another day we had a woman in a transparent nightie…

Then there was the guy who wanted to take me out to lunch and bring me back to his place and …well, you know… I was about 16 then and the girl I was with was a good couple of years younger or so. Down a long driveway, out of sight. I felt a bit nervous.

I have to say that if my children decided to join the JWs they would be forbidden from the door to door work. From what I’ve seen I just feel it’s not safe for them.

You know, there are some very disrespectful people out there. This is just wrong!

 

[b_justb]

I’ll add another one. When I was 5 or 6 I went to Denver, CO with my older brother to spend 30 days of that summer with my biological father; who was not a JW, my mom and he divorced prior to her joining the JW’s. He lived in this huge apartment complex built in a courtyard fashion. I went to the very farthest upstairs door and knocked on it and did my little kid JW script, only I used “invisible magazines.” What I was looking to do was to get some coin, and of course the lady of the apartment knew it. She listened politely and then said hold on a minute. She returned to the door to pay for my invisible magazines with invisible money.