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A chart of active Jehovah's Witnesses by year, 1931-2015. For 2024, around 300,000 new members were baptized. The Watch Tower Society reported that Jehovah's Witnesses conducted about 7.5 million home Bible studies with non-members, [1] including Bible studies conducted by Witness parents with their children.
Four official histories of Jehovah's Witnesses have been published by the Watch Tower Society. The first two are out of print. The most recent one is available online. Qualified To Be Ministers, pages 297–345 (1955) Jehovah's Witnesses in the Divine Purpose (1959) Jehovah's Witnesses—Proclaimers of God's Kingdom (1993) God’s Kingdom Rules ...
By 1900, flourishing movements included the Jehovah's Witnesses, a group that emerged from Bible tract publishing; Theosophy, whose leader claimed to be in telepathic communication with Masters of the Ancient Wisdom; Christian Science, which promised spiritual healing; and Black Hebrew Israelites, built on a revelation that African Americans ...
Few were well-educated until the mid-twentieth century, when Bible Colleges became common. Until the late twentieth century, few of them were paid; most were farmers or had other employment. They became spokesman for their communities, and were among the few black people in the South allowed to vote in Jim Crow days before 1965. [55]
Jehovah's Witnesses were considered a threat because their beliefs did not conform to socialist standards and their members sometimes had contact with the West. [371] In 2023, there was a mass shooting in Hamburg that targeted Jehovah's Witnesses, killing six people. Police were warned about the shooter ahead of time, but failed to take action.
The eschatology of Jehovah's Witnesses is central to their religious beliefs. They believe that Jesus Christ has been ruling in heaven as king since 1914, a date they believe was prophesied in Scripture, and that after that time a period of cleansing occurred, resulting in God's selection of the Bible Students associated with Charles Taze Russell to be his people in 1919.
In 1984, authors Merlin Brinkerhoff and Marlene Mackie concluded that after the so-called new cults, Jehovah's Witnesses were among the least accepted religious groups in the United States. [14] Legal challenges by Jehovah's Witnesses prompted a series of state and federal court rulings that reinforced judicial protections for civil liberties.
The rapes occurred on Saturday, January 8, 1949, after Ruby Stroud Floyd, a 32-year-old white woman, entered a black neighborhood in Martinsville, Virginia, to collect money for clothing she had sold. She had previously distributed Jehovah's Witnesses materials in the neighborhood. Residents warned her not to stay too long, noting the time as ...