Jehovah's Witnesses

Heritage

Grew from the Bible study circles of Charles Taze Russell in 1870s Pittsburgh and the Watch Tower magazine he began in 1879. Joseph Rutherford reorganized the movement after Russell's death, and it took the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931, from Isaiah 43:10. World headquarters, long in Brooklyn, is now at Warwick, New York.

Theological family

Non-trinitarian and restorationist by self-description: Witnesses hold that God's personal name is Jehovah, that Jesus is God's first creation and appointed King, and that God's kingdom is a real government that will restore the earth. Trinitarian churches do not recognize this theology as their own, and the Witnesses would agree — they understand themselves as restored first-century Christianity, not as a denomination among others. This record describes; it does not adjudicate.

Who decides what

Highly organized and centralized: a Governing Body directs the work worldwide, congregations are led by appointed unpaid elders, and there is no clergy class or clergy pay. Congregations are grouped in circuits visited by traveling overseers.

What a first-time visitor would find

A first-time visitor to a Kingdom Hall would find an unadorned room, a Bible talk and a question-and-answer study of Watch Tower publications, songs, and prayer — no collection plates passed, no crosses or images, no holidays or birthdays observed. The public ministry — the door-to-door and cart witnessing everyone has seen — is the signature practice, and baptism is by full immersion.

What it has always cared about

The sanctity of God's name; neutrality in politics and war, refused even under persecution; a global preaching program in over a thousand languages; abstention from blood, including transfusion, on scriptural conviction.

Its gift to the wider church

Whatever a tradition makes of their theology, every American congregation worships more freely because of them: Jehovah's Witnesses fought and won dozens of Supreme Court cases in the 1930s and 40s — flag-salute, leafleting, sound-truck and license cases — that built the modern First Amendment law of free exercise every church now stands on.

Commonly confused with

With Latter-day Saints, constantly, because both movements evangelize door to door — different theology, different scriptures, different origin entirely. Also with the Bible Student groups that continued separately after 1931, which still exist and are not Jehovah's Witnesses.

Range of views inside it

Less internal doctrinal range than almost any body in this taxonomy — unity of teaching is itself a core value, maintained through the Governing Body's publications. Individual experience varies most around the boundaries of the community, including the practice of disfellowshipping, which former members describe very differently than the organization does; both descriptions exist and we assert neither.

Where Jehovah's Witnesses churches are on the map

1,963 Jehovah's Witnesses congregations appear on The Church Map, across 51 states.

• New York — 217
• California — 215
• Texas — 117
• Florida — 97
• Michigan — 83
• Illinois — 82
• Washington — 73
• Iowa — 68
• Oregon — 67
• Ohio — 64

Moments this body was part of

• 1879–1931 — The Bible Students and Jehovah's Witnesses

  Charles Taze Russell began publishing Zion's Watch Tower in Pittsburgh in 1879, and the Bible Student movement that grew around it took the name Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931 under Joseph Rutherford. The Witnesses describe themselves as restoring first-century Christianity rather than as a denomination among others; their US Supreme Court cases in the 1930s–40s established free-exercise and free-speech protections all American churches now rely on.

  Whatever a tradition makes of their theology, every American congregation worships more freely because of legal battles the Witnesses fought.