An insider’s look at the organization

My name is Kay, I’m 33 years old and I am a Jehovah’s Witness — well, technically anyway. I am part of the growing number of JWs that some like to refer to as the “conscious class”.

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in a zealous household. My father was an elder; my brothers are now elders and all of them have served at Bethel. We were the kind of family that was always on the assembly platform and held up as an example (yeah, one of those families). Although I had the usual teenage thoughts of rebellion, I left school in the early 1990s, took a part-time job and pioneered (Armageddon was so close by now that it was foolhardy to consider buying green bananas, much less go to college). Read the full story

Popularity: 51%

The year is 1983. Mr. K, a kindly Jehovah’s Witness man and his wife knock on the door of a typical middle-class, suburban home. He doesn’t know that his return visit is about to ask him not to return, that Mr. B has only been being polite in taking his Watchtower magazines and nothing more. But something else is about to happen. A seemingly small event will trigger a drastic shift that will change the lives of that family forever — even two yet-unborn children. It will be a change that will tear the family apart, cause desperation and inconsolable sorrow.

It was the day that changed everything… Read the full story

Popularity: 48%

His name is Adrien.

He is a 16-year old boy, stocky, sturdy, bright and articulate, who uses my own brand of humor to disarm me when he needs me to agree with his point of view. He was born with the thoughts and feelings and longings of a boy, but the anatomy of a girl. And I am his mother. Read the full story

Popularity: 26%

My mother became a Jehovah’s Witness when I was three, left my dad for Jehovah and moved us several hundred miles away from him. Her new congregation almost immediately paired her with a young new brother and within the year, they married. He immediately attempted to get me in line with what he thought a young Jehovah’s Witness daughter should be, distancing me from my real dad and forcing me to refer to him as “dad”, and my real dad as “my father”. My mother was happy to give him the responsibility of financially providing for us and taking care of my discipline. In becoming the submissive wife, she was becoming how she thought Jehovah wanted her to be. Read the full story

Popularity: 30%