We took supper at a Red Robin after the first day of the “Love Never Fails” Regional Convention in Wilkes-Barre. A child at the table just behind me, about 5 years of age (and not one of ours), began raising a horrible ruckus, screaming at the top of his lungs. His mother took him out, but when she returned, he started up anew. I turned around and asked the parents if everything was okay.
I admit that I was looking for signs of endangerment. Maybe one “parent” or the other would look shifty. Maybe the child would act as though they were not his parents. This was not like when my own teenager dragged me through a trendy clothing boutique and I cried, “Help! Help! You are not my daughter!” Here I thought it might be serious. It is a sign of the times that I should think this, but I saw nothing alarming.
There was a time not so long ago when most parents would respond in a certain way to such a tantrum, but that way is likely to land them in jail today. Jehovah’s Witnesses work with many refugee groups. They meet ones whose flight has turned their lives upside-down, and one of the most bewildering things the newcomers confront is that child-rearing customs that were absolutely routine and unremarkable back home are taboo in their new home. Do not misunderstand. I make no argument for their return. That said, it is by no means clear that today’s children are better adjusted for their disappearance.
My turning around put the parents even more on notice that they were disrupting the entire restaurant. They could hardly have not known it before, but here was a fresh reminder. The father became heated, threatening no television for an entire week and such things. Upon leaving, I said to him: “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been there. They’re kids. It happens.”
How did we come to be in Wilkes-Barre that year of 2019? For decades, those of my faith in the Upstate New York area have taken in their annual regional convention at Rochester’s Blue Cross Arena. But new management signaled new policies. “It’s not just money,” I was told, though it was that and quite a bit of it. It is also heightened security measures (another sign of the times) because no city wants to be the site of the next terrorist attack. They might have thought they had the Witnesses over a barrel because where else are they going to go at the last minute? But it isn’t easy to get the Witnesses over a barrel. With three weeks to go, when it became clear that prior verbal agreements would not be renewed, Jehovah’s Witnesses canceled that convention. They weren’t the only ones. Disney on Ice and Monster Truck Rally also canceled events that summer.
Days later came the announcement that the show would go on, something that had never been in doubt, but it would be 200 miles away in Wilkes-Barre. We made lodging arrangements and joined the excitement that most of the brotherhood accepts as a matter of routine—it is the luck of the draw if the Convention happens to be in your back yard as it had been in ours for the longest time.
The summer regional convention, in our back yard for the longest time
We settled in for what would be, according to the event program, “three days of music-video presentations, prayers, songs, addresses, symposiums, and dramatic readings from the Bible.” That year Phoenix was the keynote city. From the Convention Center at Chase Field, packed to near 40,000-seat capacity, certain highlights comprising about ten percent of the total were streamed to “daughter” conventions, Wilkes-Barre being one of them.
Witnesses are always on the alert for good press during these times. One writer for azcentral.com called Witnesses the foot soldiers of modern Christianity, the hallmark of wholesomeness, to whom he applied the same Matthew 7:70 scripture he also applied to his own LDS Church: “. . . by their fruits ye shall know them. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.” You can know a people by how they conduct themselves, is the idea.
But another writer appeared to regard the attendants as wardens and thought attendees were all brainwashed. “Attendees listened rapturously,” she observed derisively, as though they should have been expected to nod off. In fact, some of them do nod off after lunch on long afternoons—it is one of those ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ situations—and it was worse before the days of efficient air conditioning. Don’t attendees of concerts or rallies also listen rapturously? Why come if you will not?
She felt “conspicuous in pants.” Well—whose fault is that? When I invite people to conventions, I say: “You are perfectly welcome to come just as you are. But if you don’t have one of these (I flip my tie), everyone will assume you are a visitor, and they may just come to preach to you.” It’s a heads-up that brings a smile. And the “wardens,” whom anyone else would call attendants, are indeed attentive. That terrorist concern of Rochester management is not lost upon them. After a kick-off meeting of attendant volunteers, the first bit of preparation was, “That’s the last time you will ever close your eyes during public prayer again.” Mostly though, they just expedite traffic flow and seating.
Then there was one review I especially treasured because it neither gushed with praise nor signaled disapproval, but merely openness and curiosity. The fellow wrote, “Aside from the occasional door-to-door visits and that one time, which I still feel guilty about, when my brother drenched some evangelists with water balloons from our second-story bedroom window, I had never really met a Jehovah’s Witness.” (It took me two trips to the dry cleaners to get those water stains out of my suit.) He didn’t fall upon his face and do a Zechariah 8:23—'We will go with you people, for we have heard that God is with you people’—but considering his non-religious reporter background, I’ll take what he did write and thank him for it. You don’t have to quibble over every little thing.
Stadium and hospitality personnel often cannot praise JWs enough, rarely encountering such orderly and pleasant people. A reporter in Miami wishes that the Marlins could fill their own stadium to capacity as have Jehovah’s Witnesses. A shock jock in Rochester a few years back waxed ecstatic over Witnesses when he found that they categorically reject violence. “These are my people!” he gushed on air. So much was he carried away with the Witnesses brotherhood—brother this and brother that—that he even mentioned their persecution at the hands of Brother Hitler before correcting himself. Another stadium is said to accept as payment-in-full the thorough annual scouring that the Witnesses give their facility.
The public address of that Love Never Fails Convention explored a truth as self-evident as the truths Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence. In this case, it is that all instances of injustice occur and are cultivated due to a lack of love. That being so, and obvious, the question becomes: “Just who will teach love?” Will it be the university? That is not its job. It focuses on training the intellect, with the apparent assumption that moral qualities such as love will take care of themselves. As even the sloppiest purview of world headlines reveals, they do not. So who will teach it? Will it be agencies that are guided in training from the university that does not teach it? Is the quality so innate that it does not need to be taught? Again, a review of news headlines reveals the fallacy of such a notion. So who?
Training that takes its cue from humankind’s Creator will play that role. “God is love,” states 1 John 4:8. Publicizing that truth is a “treasure,” slightly dampened but also made more real because it is a treasure carried in “earthen vessels”—that is, the flawed humans that are us, just as Paul states in 2 Corinthians 4:7.
Later in the program, there was streamed the Cherokee man who grew up embittered because the white man had stolen the lands of his people. He was embittered anew when he was required to fight their war in Vietnam. When his wife began studying with two Witness women, he was sullen and unwelcoming—the last thing he wanted was the religion of the white man. When she reached the point of wanting to be baptized, he declared that he would not come. When asked who would watch his baby during the baptism, he figured that maybe he should come on that account. There, he observed the atmosphere for four days and his already softened attitude toward the Witnesses softened further.
I took a great many notes with the intent to write them up into a post or two that never materialized. Alas, they were crowded out by too many other things to do. However, when specifically asked, “What did you learn that was new at the 2019 Love Never Fails Regional Convention?”—trust me on this—he did not want anything boiler-plate, so I gave him what was not boiler-plate:
What I learned at the 2019 ‘Love Never Fails’ Regional Convention was that Brother Herd, who may not even know what political correctness is, will never reprove me for fat-shaming. He was the Governing Body keynote speaker streamed in from Phoenix. Establishing the point that it is the heart that matters, Brother Herd posed the quandary of marrying the woman—an excellent catch—with a heart of pure gold, even though she “clocks in at 200 pounds.” Is this fellow a diplomat or what?
Everybody loves Brother Herd—maybe even more so than Brother Lett, whom some secretly fear may be too over the top in mannerisms. Herd has to be the humblest man on earth. How can he not be? Born to a father, a mule-driver, in his old age, one of 8 or 9 children, he said at the convention that for the longest time he thought that “a chicken only had a neck and a back because that’s all he ever got.”
Outsiders will never ever ever get it about how such a man can become one of the Governing Body, but it harkens back to something I once posted about how that body is Plato’s dream come true: a monarchy type of governing in which the members are selected by merit, not by family line. The prerequisite modest, non-materialistic, not power hungry—such persons do exist, but the values of this world are such that they can never rise to the top. In the Witness organization, however, they can and do rise to the top—and part of their very qualifications is that they do not regard themselves as rising to the top, but only displaying a willingness to serve.
At any rate, I got a lot of mileage out of Herd when some opposer posted footage of him shaking hands with well-wishers at the airport and tried to spin it that the rank and file make him an object of worship and that he eats it all up. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about the man knows that he practically scowls at the attention, but what can he do? There they are. They love him. He loves them, so he shakes everyone’s hand. “Imagine: Who would be so nasty and petty to begrudge an old man acknowledging the well-wishing of friends?” I tweeted. It was one of my most liked tweets of all time.
He is really not even a good speaker, Sam Herd isn’t, but he is such a captivating storyteller that it doesn’t matter. His stories are so down-to-earth, so human, so involved in the day-to-day of life—very much like Jesus’ illustrations—so connected with all that is real about life, that he doesn’t have to spin erudite talks; his stories are such that everyone grasps the moral that he nowhere explicitly states. He appears in Tom Irregardless and Me as the title for chapter 2 and chapter 18. How often does that happen? He had given a talk so humble, yet so profound, that I used it to bookend the entire work.
“One thing is clear about jw.org,” a local brother said. “They don’t use paid actors.” No, they don’t. It’s a little like Anthony Morris introducing himself another year at the Atlanta convention, also streamed to different locations. “Dad, what’s a redneck?” his boys had asked him long ago on a trip down south. “You’ll know them when you see them,” he had replied. But he must have thought he had gone too far, for in a later address he spoke of the “gentle folk-wisdom of the South.” Rise, for these guys too are human.
You will never find people as unvarnished and real as are members of the Governing Body. Do not highlight people’s strengths. Highlight their weaknesses, though not in a fault-finding way, because in those weaknesses can be found God’s strength. If brilliant people carry out brilliant things—well, it is easy to see why. But if decidedly non-brilliant people carry out those things, it is not so easy to see why and the credit goes to God. Three times the apostle Paul pleaded with God to remove a weakness. ‘Nothing doing, God replied. I look better when you are a clod,’ the gist of 2 Corinthians 12:7-10.
The Wilkes-Barre convention site is plainly visible from Interstate 81, the spine running from New York to Tennessee. Just look to your right and there it is. Jehovah’s Witnesses have good relations with management and had already strung 4 or 5 conventions there back-to-back. Just throw in another two to care for the displaced New Yorkers.
It is also private property which means the dozen or so protestors eager to debate with someone are thwarted. It’s almost a tradition I miss, a ridiculous little pageant that plays out each year. Seldom do our people even look their way, often entering a human corridor so as to be unmolested, a circumstance the protestors interpret as brainwashing. There’s a yo-yo in a devil’s suit who shows up each year, pretending to be waving his disciples into the auditorium. Sheesh! Say what you will about Jehovah’s Witnesses—perhaps you’re not crazy about their visits, but they will never show up at your door dressed in a devil suit.
Even the cops have become fed up, threatening arrest when they try to physically obstruct entrance. “Why don’t you just pop them one?” one of them asked a Rochester attendant, so said the concluding speaker. One year one of them brought a small child who soon had to go to the bathroom. Her mom said she’d just have to hold it. You know how children squirm when they have to go to the bathroom. Presently an attendant said they both could enter and use one of ours. The mother forbade it! She relented only after a police officer said a refusal might constitute child abuse. Thereupon, she left her protest sign with a friend—no, we didn’t offer to guard it for her, there are limits—and ventured into the fearsome building.
But as stated, none of that happened on Wilkes-Barre private property. I parked in the lot, strode into the facility, and nobody at all had anything to say about it save for some friends who were glad to see me.
(From the book: Go Where Tom Goes)
