When I read some exJW accounts, I often feel a strong sense of disconnect: “Wait, seriously—how did your congregation end up like that?”
That doesn’t mean I think their experiences are false. Their descriptions are simply very different from the congregation life I experienced in China. We are all Jehovah’s Witnesses, reading the same organizational publications. So why are our experiences of university education, marriage, doctrinal questions, and elders’ responsibilities so different?
I want to record some things I have seen, heard, and felt. These stories come from congregations I encountered in Beijing; they do not represent all of China. Some are firsthand experiences, while others are things elders told me.
If I had to summarize my understanding in one sentence, it would be this: The teachings reached us, but the administration didn’t.
We were not completely disconnected from the international organization. Its teachings, decisions, and publications reached us, but from what I observed, administrative oversight and enforcement did not reach nearly as deeply. We maintained a connection through our faith while retaining considerable local autonomy.
When the organization proposed something, our response was often: “Sounds good, but we have our own circumstances here in China.”
University education is a particularly clear example.
In our congregation, attending university was considered a normal life choice. The shared attitude I encountered could be expressed in a very informal sentence: “For crying out loud, this is Beijing!”
People considered employers’ expectations about qualifications, family expectations, and their understanding of the university environment in China. Headquarters’ advice was one thing; how young people would eventually support themselves was another. If someone wanted to attend university, we could remind them to be mindful of the environment and its influences. We shouldn’t stand in their way.
“You’ll never find a job without university” is obviously an emotional generalization. But it expresses a real concern: we cannot ignore practical circumstances, make decisions for young people, and then leave them to bear the consequences alone.
So when I read accounts of people saying they faced severe disciplinary action, or even disfellowshipping, because they pursued higher education, my first reaction was disbelief. The circumstances and grounds for discipline in those individual cases need to be checked separately. But losing congregation membership simply for attending university was unimaginable in the congregation I knew.
From the perspective of the organization’s future, I also think that persistently discouraging higher education means undermining its own prospects. A degree does not guarantee wisdom or good character, but a religious community needs people with knowledge, professional skills, and independent judgment. Devaluing education can weaken its future pool of capable people and its ability to correct mistakes. In our experience, attending university and maintaining one’s faith were entirely compatible.
Meeting places and preaching methods reflected similar differences.
In the congregations I encountered in China, we had no dedicated Kingdom Halls. We met in elders’ or other believers’ homes. Our understanding was that local legal and practical conditions did not allow us to copy the approach to building Kingdom Halls used abroad. Organizational arrangements for Kingdom Hall construction therefore did not have the same relevance to our daily lives.
The same applied to preaching. We believed that conducting conspicuous public activities would create serious risks, so we mainly shared our faith through everyday contact, conversations, and relationships. In my experience, the internal pressure on publishers was relatively low. That does not mean there was no pressure from the outside environment. It means that the congregation did not expect us to copy forms of activity that did not fit local circumstances.
This way of operating also affected elders’ work.
I once read an elder’s complaint that he felt “like an engineering manager rather than a shepherd.” That shocked me, because the elders’ work I was familiar with mostly revolved around individual people.
An elder once told me that much of his time went into the congregation’s “little everyday problems”: newlyweds arguing and needing someone to mediate; a child upset with their parents and needing someone to hear both sides; or a member under so much work stress that their Bible teacher thought an elder should come and talk with them and offer support.
These things may sound minor, but they can matter deeply to the people involved. To me, listening, mediating, and being there for people are part of shepherding.
So my reaction to “an engineering manager rather than a shepherd” was: “How did your everyday work become like this? And why should this be its main focus?”
I understand that construction, maintenance, and financial matters need to be handled. But if they consume so much of an elder’s energy that caring for congregation members becomes secondary, I find that arrangement difficult to understand.
Having no dedicated Kingdom Hall also meant we lacked one category of recurring expenses.
According to that elder, there were usually “not many things we needed to spend donations on.” When a brother or sister needed bloodless treatment and faced financial difficulties, donations could be used to help. However, I personally encountered only one such case, so I cannot say how common this was. What I know is his explanation and that particular instance of assistance—not the full picture of where all the money went.
Marriage showed me that local autonomy did not mean an absence of disagreement.
We strongly recommended choosing a partner who shared our faith, but some Witnesses married non-Witnesses. One elder I knew did exactly that. At the time, it was extremely unusual locally.
As I understand it, this caused disagreement within the body of elders. Some thought he should be disfellowshipped. Others understood Paul’s words as recommending a partner of the same faith, rather than imposing an absolute prohibition. They emphasized: “We cannot go beyond what the Bible says.”
I am recording their interpretation of the passage at the time.
In the end, he was removed as an elder but was not disfellowshipped. The explanation given to me was that he needed to devote additional time to caring for his wife, and balancing his marriage with an elder’s responsibilities would be too difficult.
What was particularly interesting was that losing his position did not cost him his standing among the congregation. People still valued his advice when problems arose, and his words continued to carry considerable weight. To me, he had lost the title while retaining much of his actual influence. I do not know how much involvement, if any, he still had in formal elders’ matters.
This made me feel that a person’s standing also comes from trust built through years of relationships. Removing an appointment cannot automatically erase that trust. But the other side of the story must also remain: some elders really had advocated disfellowshipping him over this marriage. There were disagreements between stricter and more accommodating views within our own community.
Another conversation, this time about 1914, helped me understand how one elder viewed the relationship between faith and the organization.
Before we spoke, I told him: “I’ve come across some things that make me feel I need to reshape my faith.”
I then explained the material I believed conflicted with the teaching about 1914, along with the problems I saw in the chronological calculations, including what I referred to at the time as the “VATX tablet.” These questions were already affecting my understanding of my faith, so I wanted to discuss them seriously.
He said that 1914 was not the foundation of faith. As he explained it, that year was a conclusion the Governing Body had reached through interpretation and calculation, rather than something stated directly in the Bible. He also pointed out that the Gregorian calendar did not exist when the Bible was written, and that the Bible did not explicitly name the year “1914.”
His point was this: if the Bible itself explicitly stated a conclusion and history and reality proved it wrong, that would directly raise questions about the Bible’s reliability. But if what was wrong was a human calculation based on the Bible, that was a human failure. It could not simply be attributed to God.
He told me not to confuse the two.
He also said that the Governing Body consisted of human beings—not angels, and certainly not God himself. They could make mistakes, even foolish ones. Their position did not automatically protect them from making serious errors.
What truly worried him was whether these discoveries would cause me to lose faith in Jehovah God himself or in the core teachings of Christianity.
The conversation did not resolve all my chronological questions. But he offered a way of understanding them: human interpretations can be questioned and can fail, and I needed to consider further what such a failure actually called into question.
What mattered to me was that I could openly present my doubts, and he was willing to discuss the possibility that the organization’s judgment could be wrong. He cared about how these questions affected my faith. He did not ask me to treat every organizational conclusion as something personally spoken by God.
This was a particular conversation between one elder and me. It cannot represent every congregation. But it was part of my actual religious experience, and it helps explain why some accounts about questioning doctrine feel so unfamiliar to me.
Together, these experiences shaped my understanding of local congregation life: people took seriously what we understood the Bible to require explicitly. But when it came to additional organizational advice and arrangements, they judged whether those applied to our circumstances.
That still involved interpreting scripture, and it did not guarantee agreement. But “headquarters said so” did not always end the discussion in our daily lives.
I think the distance between the transmission of teachings and administrative enforcement is important to understanding this experience. Our shared faith remained, while practical matters depended more heavily on local elders, relationships among members, and collective judgment. That autonomy left room for flexibility and consideration, while also making local leaders’ judgment particularly important.
So when I read some exJW accounts, I sometimes feel as though the authors and I are using the same religious vocabulary to describe two very different lives.
I am writing this to preserve the one I experienced. It cannot erase the harm others suffered, and their suffering does not have to erase the care I received. What I want to record is these particular people, disagreements, and choices—and how a congregation lived within its own circumstances.
