“But as the decades passed it began to include anyone born in that year.” “Initially, it was taught that ‘this generation’ started with people who were old enough to understand the events of 1914 ,” Franz said.
“This is a monumental change after all this time,” Franz said. “They’ve been insisting on this as a definite truth for more than 40 years,” said Franz, who left the Witnesses in 1980 in what he called “a crisis in conscience. Johnson downplayed the change, saying the 1914 timetable “has not been a cardinal doctrine of faith.” However, that was disputed by Ray Franz of suburban Atlanta, a former Witness who was on the sect’s governing board from 1971 to 1980. “Nobody has raised any questions to me,” Breneman said. Likewise, Harley Breneman of Reseda, a circuit overseer for 21 Kingdom Halls in the western San Fernando Valley, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, said that he expects no problems.
Jehovah’s Witnesses “are interested why and how this was determined,” Johnson said, “but there is no falling away that I know of, and we don’t expect to see that.” He also denied that Witness leadership was under the pressure of an aging generation to adjust its teachings. “It doesn’t change our belief that we are living in the time of the end,” Johnson said. Robert Johnson, a spokesman for Witness headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y., said that the change came about through re-examination of Scriptures. Even the youngest people alive in 1914 are now at least 80 years old, however, and their ranks are swiftly dwindling.Ī former leader of the Witnesses calls it a “monumental change” and an ex-Witness in Milwaukee who runs a national phone hot line says calls are coming in from members distressed by the move. The now-abandoned tenet was based on the sect’s interpretation of a biblical reference to a “generation” that the Witnesses connected with the year 1914, declaring that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth before this generation died off. Some ex-Witnesses predict the change will hurt the “sky-is-falling preaching” of the 4.7-million-member global organization and disturb longtime members who made personal and financial decisions based on the promise that they would soon be living in heaven on earth. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have quietly abandoned a prediction that people alive in 1914 would live to see Christ’s kingdom on earth-a major doctrine that lent urgency to the sect’s door-to-door warnings that a bloody end of the world is imminent.
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