I think it depends on what you see as increasing or fading and that there is no precise answer. I do believe things are different from my perspective that might be an odd one.
You see, I come from a religiously diverse household. Mainly Catholic and a family that was large and that often included cousins and friends who are still treated like relatives. We had Pentecostals, Mormons, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses. Imagine being in a Catholic school and church during the week, Mormon family nights on Monday, Kingdom Hall twice during the week, Pentecostal Sunday school and Mormon sacrament meetings on Sunday. We had it all!
While I did not choose to enter the JW religion as an adult, I do remember that when I was a kid in the 1970s and 80s it seemed like the Witnesses were everywhere. At least in my town. Before the 1975 debacle happened there was great excitement. I remember how proud, close-knit and happy my JW friends Ann, Robert, and Leshaun were before then. Witnesses were always going down each and every street, dressed so neatly, with their two-colored magazines called Watchtower and Awake. There were these bumper stickers on cars and placed on most of the newspaper stands around town that read: “Jehovah is coming!” I know that a lot of people say it never happened but it did. It was in the Witness books, meetings, and reported on in the news. It was official stuff but you can’t find a trace of anything anymore because most of it was destroyed after 75 disappointed so many of us. Everybody really believed the world was going to end in 1975, except for my Pentecostal and LDS family members of course and my Catholic ones who thought we were just crazy.
But things changed after 1975 came and went. Overnight my JW friends changed and we started drifting away. The Witnesses were seen on the streets less and less. The books they gave us were different too, more colorful but fewer. I remember that a 1985 convention held in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas holding some 40,000 people was to be the last of its kind in our area. And when some problems behind closed doors of our Kingdom Hall and an argument happened over whether or not Armageddon was going to come before the year 2000 and whether our family would die for having Catholics in it became an issue, well that was the end of the Kingdom Hall meetings for our family.
I never went back to a Kingdom Hall or heard from the Witnesses again for a long time. I never saw them come down my street again or even when I moved I heard or saw nothing of them. I forgot about them almost until finally, maybe after 15 years or so after I had grown and moved to another town that some came to my door. The man with his child stumbled a lot through his presentation and promised to return, but after a year of waiting for him I gave up. Before moving again a young lady had a colored sheet of paper with Jesus on it inviting me to their yearly communion meeting, but she was so nervous that with a smile and a few words explaining I was attending my own church on the same date was all it took for her to almost run away.
Things have really changed. I recently discovered that the Witnesses mainly distribute their message on the Internet and that now they do it on Internet tv like Roku. In the 70s and 80s we were taught that television evangelism cheapened the message of the Bible and that the Witnesses would never do such a thing ever. And I remember a traveling overseer coming to the Kingdom Hall and telling us that we could not stand on street corners displaying Watchtowers and Bibles on tables and expect to remain good Jehovah’s Witnesses. But I understand that is what a lot do today some 30 years after some faithful Witnesses were punished in my area for doing so.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that they have changed. I am saying it looks good and impressive. And while I am sure the message is not the same because we are now living in a year they said would never ever come, it does look like they have finally accepted to be like the other churches they use to criticize and condemn. Their website is flashy and sleek but it looks like stuff the Mormons have been putting out for some time on the worldwide web and the new JW logo looks like the one the White House has been using called
WH.org.
But even though we don’t see them like we used to, it interesting to see they are open to change and even do so by making 360s in the process. I don’t think we will ever see them regularly going door to door like we did before 1975 but then I also understand they are a kinder and less aggressive people today too or so I hope. It is strange that no one from the Witnesses ever came to see me after we stopped going because the Mormons still stop by to see hello even though everyone is Catholic now in my family.
Come to think of it the Pentecostals have never came by to say HI once uncle Joe and aunt Marie stopped going there too.
