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This might be a bit of a contentious topic...
Back in the 1990s barely a month would go by without the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking at front doors in my neighbourhood to preach about Armageddon then drop off a couple of their Watchtower and Awake magazines to entice you to join their movement. My mother’s very effective way of getting them to move on was to bring me to the front door where I would ramble on endlessly about the internal details of a technical subject like the Lego model I was building or a science book I was reading whilst showing it to them. It did the trick.
Since 2005 the number of times the JW have prowled my neighbourhood are so few that I can actually count them on my fingers. Their average interval between knocking on the same front door has decreased from about a month to nearly three years. I doubt that my neighbourhood is unique because almost everybody I have discussed the JW with in recent years shares a similar experience that the frequency of door knocking has fallen from months in the 1990s to years since 2005. The JW also appear to have given up prowling neighbourhoods with a high proportion of Muslim residents. Another noteworthy point is that the Watchtower and Awake magazines they handed out in the 1990s contained 32 pages but those from more recent years are slimmed down to just 16 pages.
Is this indicative that the JW are declining as a movement in Britain and no longer have the membership to knock on front doors anywhere nearly as frequently as they did in the 1990s, or is something else going on?
Back in the 1990s barely a month would go by without the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking at front doors in my neighbourhood to preach about Armageddon then drop off a couple of their Watchtower and Awake magazines to entice you to join their movement. My mother’s very effective way of getting them to move on was to bring me to the front door where I would ramble on endlessly about the internal details of a technical subject like the Lego model I was building or a science book I was reading whilst showing it to them. It did the trick.
Since 2005 the number of times the JW have prowled my neighbourhood are so few that I can actually count them on my fingers. Their average interval between knocking on the same front door has decreased from about a month to nearly three years. I doubt that my neighbourhood is unique because almost everybody I have discussed the JW with in recent years shares a similar experience that the frequency of door knocking has fallen from months in the 1990s to years since 2005. The JW also appear to have given up prowling neighbourhoods with a high proportion of Muslim residents. Another noteworthy point is that the Watchtower and Awake magazines they handed out in the 1990s contained 32 pages but those from more recent years are slimmed down to just 16 pages.
Is this indicative that the JW are declining as a movement in Britain and no longer have the membership to knock on front doors anywhere nearly as frequently as they did in the 1990s, or is something else going on?
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