What Jehovah's Witnesses believe, and how they worship
Jehovah's Witnesses are a worldwide religious movement known for door-to-door ministry and Kingdom Hall meetings, who worship Jehovah as the one Almighty God, honour Jesus as his Son, and look for God's Kingdom to restore a paradise earth.
Jehovah's Witness Kingdom Halls near Fergus
What Jehovah’s Witnesses believe
Jehovah’s Witnesses began with the Bible Students of Charles Taze Russell and took their present name in 1931. They “worship the one true and Almighty God, the Creator, whose name is Jehovah,” and “recognize the Bible as God’s inspired message to humans.” They follow Jesus as Saviour and Son of God, but hold that “Jesus is not Almighty God and that there is no Scriptural basis for the Trinity doctrine”: the Son is God’s first creation, and the holy spirit is God’s active force. Their central message is God’s Kingdom, a heavenly government under Christ that will soon replace human governments and restore a paradise earth, where the faithful will live forever while 144,000 reign with Christ in heaven. The dead are unconscious until resurrected; there is no hell of torment. Witnesses decline blood transfusions, stay politically neutral, do not celebrate Christmas or birthdays, and all preach publicly.
Worship: what a service is like
Witnesses meet twice a week at a Kingdom Hall, a plain building: a weekend meeting with a public Bible talk and a question-and-answer study of a Watchtower article, and a midweek meeting of Bible study and ministry training. No collection is taken. The one annual observance is the Memorial of Christ’s death, at which only those who count themselves among the anointed take the bread and wine.
How Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Halls are organized
Each congregation is cared for by unpaid elders; there is no clergy class. Congregations are grouped into circuits, and the whole organization is directed by the Governing Body at the world headquarters in Warwick, New York. About nine million Witnesses are active worldwide. Centre Wellington’s Kingdom Hall is on Colborne Street in Elora.
Compared with Reformed churches
Both Jehovah’s Witnesses and Reformed Christians hold the Bible to be God’s inspired word, honour Jesus as the Son of God through whom salvation comes, and expect a renewed earth. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not confess the Trinity as defined in the Nicene Creed; they teach that Jesus is a created being subordinate to Jehovah and that the holy spirit is a force rather than a person. For that reason Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, Reformed churches among them, do not regard Jehovah’s Witnesses as a Christian church in the historic sense, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in turn regard those churches as having departed from the original faith of Jesus and the apostles. Witnesses affirm that they practise the true Christianity of the first century; Reformed churches affirm the ecumenical creeds as the faithful reading of Scripture.