February 6, 2010Jehovah’s Witnesses were nearly crushed in 1918 when the bulk of their Governing Body was arrested on false charges and sentenced to long terms in prison. Their spiritual Brothers were not yet well equipped to carry on the work without strong leadership and the barely-begun work faltered, stumbled and appeared to have been extinguished.
That was, in a sense, a good thing; as it made patently clear that this work was not going to be the work of man alone, but if it was to succeed at all, it would have to be the subject of heavenly direction.
In 1919, those arrested were exonerated. All charges against them were dropped and they walked out of the darkness of prison free men … freed to continue the work that they had been arrested for doing.
Later, the civil authorities jailed their chief accuser for filing false charges. He was NOT exonerated, but required to serve his full term.
But that was over 90 years ago.
Since then the entire focus has been on preaching the good news of God’s coming kingdom and teaching others how to do the same. With this as the focus, recent years have seen an average of ~1,000 individuals a day baptized. That’s roughly 10 new congregations each and every day. And every person is, at the moment of their baptism, an ordained minister charged with the solemn responsibility to preach to others and to teach them just as they were taught. This is to the end that the others might also seek baptism and their own solemn responsibility to preach.
Lather, rinse, repeat … what Jesus set in motion at Matthew 28:19,20 remains in motion.
The various regional and international building committees have been sore-pressed to keep up. Funds from wealthier lands assist those in less-fortunate lands to secure proper places of worship. Recognizing that not all who are baptized are builders, skilled Brothers travel from land to land on their vacations and train the local friends in the art and science of erecting sturdy houses of worship.
Some Kingdom Halls have thatched roofs and pounded dirt floors. Some have steel girders for a skeleton and carpets on concrete floors.
To date, an average of over 7 million of those ministers are active in any given month. This makes this seemingly small group of Christians the largest denomination in the world.
No other religion ordains a minister every 42 seconds. No other religion is making nearly the effort to fulfill Matthew 24:14 as Jehovah’s Witnesses are.
By the time one of Jehovah’s Witnesses emerges from the water, he/she is already adequately prepared for the rigors of a lifetime in the ministry. And still the training continues. Experience in the ministry is complemented by continuous reading and study and conferring with other ministers.
Considering that they are often laughed at or, when taken seriously, jailed, beaten or worse, the accomplishments of this group, with its humble roots in a small number of earnest Bible students who began coming together in 1870 (when C.T. Russell, the founder of the group was just 18 years old), are pretty impressive.
From their modest beginning in 1870 to 1970, they grew from a handful of people meeting in a private home to 1,187,772 ordained ministers in 197 lands. That was an average pace of just about 32 baptisms a day … starting with nearly none and gradually ramping up as Jehovah drew right hearted ones to him, replacing those who died or drifted away with ever-increasing numbers of loyal, active ones.
As they say, the first million is the hardest.
In 2009, reports were received from 236 lands showing a peak of 7,124,443 active publishers of the good news – an increase of 381% in a mere 39 years. (In three lands they face a death penalty, so there are no reports from those lands. Do not mistake that for a lack of activity.)
