AUSTRALIA
ABC – The Drum
OPINION
By Paul Grundy
The Royal Commission into child abuse has highlighted a number of flawed areas within the Jehovah’s Witness Church. It’s time for the elders to instigate real change from within, writes former Witness Paul Grundy.
I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and for many years followed the doctrine of the religion.
I believed the teachings of the religion’s guiding magazine, Watchtower, and thought I was never going to die. I didn’t even expect to finish school before Armageddon – where God would kill the billions of people who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses and leave the few million witnesses to live on this planet forever.
According to the teachings of Watchtower:
Only Jehovah’s Witnesses, those of the anointed remnant and the “great crowd”, as a united organization under the protection of the Supreme Organizer, have any Scriptural hope of surviving the impending end of this doomed system dominated by Satan the Devil.
In my teen years I “pioneered” – meaning I devoted 20 hours a week to preaching – and at 21 I moved to the Bethel Watchtower headquarters, where I spent three-and-a-half years as a volunteer worker.
I personally came to know a number of the people who have recently been called for interview before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Terry O’Brien, the Australian Branch coordinator, was in my pioneer training school in the 1980s. Geoff Jackson, one of the religion’s governing body, lived in Tasmania, and his wife’s family brought my family into the religion in the early 1970s. Vincent Toole, the Bethel lawyer, was someone I knew well and looked up to.
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