AUS Watchtower PDF files

[Jack Ryan]

Here is the complete PIX magazine from 1953 containing the entire article.

The attached file is Reduced, Searchable, and Bookmarked..note pages 41.42.43

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v5zTH7vpZtYoUn_uhU8b_m-zkINVycvH/view?usp=sharing

One of which contained an article...'What is a Jehovah's Witness? - - by Milton G Henschel

 

[Jack Ryan]

A big thanks to @Atlantis4

[JW Insider]

5 hours ago, Jay Witness said:

A big thanks to @Atlantis4

I remember pointing this out previously in a discussion of whether Sirhan Sirhan's father had a relationship with the Witnesses. (He didn't.) In the letter that the Watch Tower Society sent out to provide to newspapers who requested it, the letter made it clear that (in 1968) the governing body was the "Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society."

So notice that the Watchtower was consistent in this claim for many years. Even back 15 years earlier, in 1953, the same idea showed up here. Note that the Governing Body had 402 members. That was the number of [voting] members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.

[JW Insider]

Any nitpickers for accuracy might have wondered why this article in 1990 (among others) claimed something different from the above.

*** w90 3/15 pp. 16-18 pars. 8-13 Cooperating With the Governing Body Today ***

• Looking back in this “time of the end,” we are not surprised that the members of the Governing Body were at first closely identified with the editorial staff of the Watch Tower Society. . . . For years, the visible Governing Body came to be identified with the seven-member board of directors of this corporation established to publish the Bible study aids needed and used by the Lord’s people earth wide. The Society’s seven directors were faithful Christians. But their role in a legal corporation might have suggested that they owed their positions on the Governing Body to their being elected by legal members of the Watch Tower Society. Furthermore, by law such membership and its voting privileges were originally granted only to certain ones who made contributions to the Society. This arrangement needed to be changed. This was done at the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania corporation of the Watch Tower Society held on October 2, 1944. The statutes of the Society were amended so that membership would no longer be on a financial basis. Members would be chosen from among faithful servants of Jehovah, and these have come to include many serving full-time at the Society’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and in its branches throughout the world. Reporting on this improvement, The Watchtower of November 1, 1944, stated: “Money, as represented in financial contributions, should have no determining voice, should in fact have nothing to do with the filling of the governing body of Jehovah’s witnesses on earth. . . . The holy spirit, the active force which comes down from Jehovah God through Christ Jesus, is that which should determine and guide in the matter.” . . . Until 1971 those of the Governing Body were still identified with the seven members of the board of directors of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.

At the same time that the "governing body" was over 400 members --during those years from 1944 to 1972-- something termed a "central governing body" or sometimes "spiritual governing body" were terms that began to be associated with the decision makers in Brooklyn, New York.