Jehovah’s Witnesses Have Much to Celebrate Entering Holiday Weekend
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The upcoming weekend is one of the biggest of the year for practicing Christians, who will celebrate Good Friday and Easter, and Jews who will come together on Friday for the first night of Passover.
The same is true for Jehovah’s Witnesses, a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination. On Friday, they will commemorate the death of Jesus Christ.
For the first time in three years, the critical day on the calendar will in person, at Kingdom Halls around the world welcoming back millions of worshippers for in-person observance. Jehovah’s Witnesses began encouraging congregations around the world to return to in-person worship on Apr. 1.
Robert Hendriks, the U.S. spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses based in Warwick, Orange County, said the decision to return to live meetings was made as a larger percentage of people are vaccinated and people increasingly are more knowledgeable how to navigate COVID-19.
Like most other religious organizations, the pandemic has forced its practitioners to adapt to virtual worship but also how to spread the word without going door to door.
In March 2020, Jehovah’s Witnesses suspended its public ministry in the United States. Instead, letters were written, phone calls were made and virtual meetings were held twice a week.
For arguably the most public religious organization in the world, or the one that relies most on in-person interaction, Jehovah’s Witnesses reinvented itself.
“There has been a number of lessons. One is spirituality is not about a building and it’s not about in-person meetings and it’s not even about in-person ministry,” Hendriks said. “As much as we love those things and as much as it enhances our worship, we have prevailed despite that.”
“I think we have found a way to be resilient and as a result of that resiliency, we have found a way to wrap our arms around more people, different ones, people who we may not have been able to reach before, (and) people who may have been in the dark,” Hendriks added.
The twice-weekly virtual meetings drew an average attendance of 1.5 million people in the United States across the roughly 13,000 congregations in the United States, even though there are only about 1.3 million people in America who identify as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Although this month marked the return of in-person meetings, there is still the live-stream option for those not ready to crowd into a Kingdom Hall, Hendriks said.
Last summer, before the Omicron variant took hold late in the year, Jehovah’s Witnesses experimented with holding live meetings at about 10 congregations in Puerto Rico and four or five more in Connecticut, when at the time infection rates were low and vaccination rates were high in those locations. It was sort of a dry run for what some would call hybrid meetings.
“The beauty of this is if you’re not comfortable in coming back to a meeting, whether you live in Scarsdale or in South Africa, if you’re not comfortable you can stay home and still have the beautiful experience over Zoom that we’ve had for two years,” Hendriks said.
Hendriks dispelled a widely held but inaccurate belief that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in vaccines. Similar to people in every faith, there are those who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves but that is a personal decision, not a religious mandate.
In fact, in many areas the rates of vaccination among Jehovah’s Witnesses are higher than the general population, Hendriks said. The teachings are to love life and your neighbor, and by believing in medical treatments, including vaccines, Jehovah’s Witnesses are able to demonstrate that, he said.
“We love the medical profession, we believe in science and we believe in the science of the vaccine,” Hendriks said. “We’re appreciative of the medical community. We try to make that clear all the way through.”
Currently, the Jehovah’s Witnesses haven’t scheduled resumption of the door-to-door ministry, but when it’s the appropriate time to do so that decision will be made, Hendriks said.
Meanwhile, they’re looking forward to the big holiday weekend, and for many congregants, it will be their first time worshipping in person in more than two years.
“We know resuming in-person meetings will bring us even closer together. We’re anxious to see one another again,” he said.
Martin has more than 30 years experience covering local news in Westchester and Putnam counties, including a frequent focus on zoning and planning issues. He has been editor-in-chief of The Examiner since its inception in 2007. Read more from Martin’s editor-author bio here. Read Martin’s archived work here: https://www.theexaminernews.com/author/martin-wilbur2007/
