I went to a Jehova’s Witness service today… It was fine, I guess. Everyone was really quite friendly and interested in me, the outsider. :) The service reminded me a little of those at Mormon wards, though that could just be because of the formality of it all; the women were in skirts/dresses and the men all wore suits.
The first part was a talk given by a person from the congregation. I thought it was well organized and the guy had a good speaking voice. The whole tone, though, was a little patronizing… The second part was what they call Watchtower study. Basically, everyone follows along as a man reads out of a magazine that the church puts out. It seemes as though everyone reads this selection before the sunday morning service; in fact, the people next to me had already written out their answers for the questions from each paragraph. At the end of each paragraph, there’s a question that is posed to the body and people have an opportunity to put in their two cents. This part was the most off-putting thing about the whole experience because there was no thoughtful input involved; people basically just parroted what was written in the magazine as “answers” to the questions. Hardly any of the questions actually got answered because the method mentioned is vapid and shallow at best; nobody did any critical thinking about what the passage was trying to communicate. Based on this, my estimation of this religion and its adherents is that it’s all rather superficial.
I’m planning to go back a few times just so I can learn a little more about the religion and its basic tennets.
