Watchtower Doesn't Believe 'The End' Is Coming - How I Know

Watchtower's public relations arm, JW Press Room, recently announced an 18-part dramatized life of Jesus called The Good News According to Jesus. Over 3,000 trained volunteers contributed to the production. The set spans 5.5 acres in Australia, took five years to build, and meticulously recreates the first-century world. The series is being translated into more than 450 languages, and the first three episodes have already been downloaded or streamed more than 60 million times — on JW.org.

Three thousand volunteers. Five and a half acres. Five years. Eighteen episodes. And a press office inviting journalists to tour the set. That is not a congregation describing its worship. That is a studio announcing a franchise. I was a Jehovah's Witness for 40 years, so I understand why current witnesses might hear that announcement and feel something like devotion. Hold that word. By the end of this piece, it is going to flip.

The Claim That Makes All of This Matter

Most churches will tell you they are a path to God. Jehovah's Witnesses tell you they are the only path. Their entire identity rests on one assertion: out of every religion on earth, they alone are the real thing — the modern-day restoration of the congregation of Jesus and the apostles from the first century. Other churches, in Watchtower theology, are not merely mistaken. They are a ruse created by Satan to lure people away from the one true religion. Inside Jehovah's Witnesses, you do not even call your faith a religion. You call it the Truth, capital T.

That claim has a consequence. If you say you are the restored first-century congregation, you have handed the world the measuring stick. You do not get to crown yourself the one true copy of something and refuse to be measured against the original.

What the First-Century Congregation Actually Did

We do not have to guess what that original congregation looked like. It is described in their own New World Translation of the Bible and in their own literature. Watchtower gave us the standard.

The first-century Christians did two things. The first was preaching — relentless, direct, face-to-face preaching. Watchtower's own publications describe those early disciples as having:

made great efforts to reach as many people as possible with the good news of the kingdom.

That model of zeal has been the entire justification for knocking on your door on a Saturday morning for over a hundred years.

The second thing is the one Jehovah's Witnesses talk about far less, but it sits plainly in their own Bible. The first-century Christians physically took care of one another. When someone in the congregation was in need, others closed the gap. Acts chapter 2 states:

The believers were together in having all things in common, selling their possessions and distributing the proceeds so that nobody among them went without what they needed.

This was not an occasional impulse. It was an organized system. When Greek-speaking widows were being overlooked in the food distribution, the apostles did not shrug. They appointed men specifically to run what the Bible calls the daily distribution of food — a standing food program for widows, built into the structure of the congregation.

And when word came that famine was about to hit Judea, congregations elsewhere collected relief and sent it to believers they had never met. That is the texture of the original congregation. Not a broadcast. Not a product. People moving money and food toward suffering, by hand.

Watchtower's own magazine The Awake made this explicit, quoting James chapter 1 in the February 2013 edition: "Clean worship means to look after orphans and widows in their tribulation." Then The Awake adds in its own voice:

the early Christians came to the aid of one another.

And it points to that exact famine relief for Judea as the evidence.

So that is the baseline — drawn entirely from Watchtower's own sources. The one true congregation of the first century spent its hours preaching and physically caring for the people in it. Not talking about it. Not filming it. Doing it with hands and hours and money.

A Film About the Mission Instead of the Mission

Now hold that picture alongside the announcement.

On one side: an organization claiming to be the only true Christianity on earth today — the rebuilt first-century congregation that preached relentlessly and ran a daily food program for its widows.

On the other: that same organization taking 3,000 of its people, five years, and five and a half acres in Australia to build a movie set — making a film that depicts Jesus preaching and feeding people instead of actually preaching and feeding people.

Watchtower has no charitable arm. No food banks, no homeless shelters, no hospitals. Stories abound of Jehovah's Witnesses who fell on hard times and received nothing from Watchtower — many of them had to turn to other churches with actual charities to find help. The five years, the 3,000 people, the budget: all of that went into the depiction of the mission rather than doing what they depict Jesus doing. The recreation became the main event. And for five years on that five-and-a-half-acre set, the only multitude reliably being fed were the people in the lunch line at the studio.

I am not saying Watchtower shut down the door-to-door work in order to make these films. They did not. Field service went on. What I am saying is that the finite discretionary resources an organization actually chooses where to aim — all of that went into the picture of the mission.

The Clock That Only Runs for You

This is also an organization that tells its members the end is so close they should not waste their time on almost anything other than preaching and working for Watchtower. A recent publication told witnesses that because:

the time left is reduced

— they should not even continue a Bible study that is not producing a convert. For decades, Watchtower warned young people away from higher education. The years a degree would cost them could not be spared.

So hold those two messages side by side.

An unproductive Bible study is too expensive a use of the final hours of this system of things. But five years on a film set for 3,000 volunteers is not. The clock is real enough to cost a teenager a college degree and somehow not real enough to cost the organization a movie.

And notice how the series is framed: translated into more than 450 languages for global accessibility — evangelism language, the language of the door-to-door mission. Except it is not on Netflix, not in theaters, not on YouTube where the algorithm might surface it to someone who has never heard of Jehovah's Witnesses. It is on JW.org, the platform built for and used almost exclusively by current members.

Sixty million streams sounds significant. Watchtower claims nine million Jehovah's Witnesses. A YouGov poll found that 23% of TV viewers rewatch the same season of a show at least twice, with nearly half watching three or more times. If viewing patterns for this content are anywhere near comparable, the number of actual unique viewers is well below the number of Witnesses Watchtower claims — meaning the series is almost certainly being watched by people who are already true believers, and hardly anyone else.

Who Paid for the Picture

Notice also who funded it. Watchtower runs a series on JW.org called How Your Donations Are Used, and this film series has its own article there. The production was not only built on 3,000 sets of unpaid hands — it was funded from the donation boxes of the rank and file. Many of them the same members being told to live simply because the end is so close.

The first-century congregation pooled what it had so the person in need got covered. Here, the members are pooling their money and their labor to produce a television series. The production value is high. That means it was not cheap.

A Jehovah's Witness will point to Watchtower's disaster relief as a counterexample, and that is worth addressing. When a hurricane or earthquake hits a community of witnesses, they do organize relief. However, multiple sources have attested that the Watchtower representative asks for the homeowner's insurance money even when all the labor was contributed free by volunteers. If that is accurate, Watchtower is breaking even or turning a profit on disaster relief rather than absorbing any real cost.

But even granting every disaster relief effort as fully legitimate and entirely at Watchtower's expense, it still does not answer the argument here. The first-century congregation did not run mutual aid only as an emergency button pressed after a catastrophe. The Bible describes it as a daily distribution — a standing habit — so that in a completely ordinary week, with nothing on fire and no hurricane in the news, there was not one in need among them. That is the identity Watchtower claims to have restored. When they had five years, 3,000 people, and a real budget to point at something, that is not where they pointed it.

How many impoverished Jehovah's Witnesses could have been fed for the budget used to produce a series showing Jesus feeding people on screen?

Devotion to a Picture

I flagged the word devotion at the top.

Here is the flip. This film is devotion. Five years of it. Three thousand lives of it. Just not devotion to the Christian mission. Devotion to a picture of the mission.

An organization always tells you what it actually worships by how it uses its money and its time. The metric of the first-century congregation was that there was not one in need among them. Watchtower's metric, right there in the press release, is 60 million downloads.

You do not pour half a decade into lovingly recreating what you used to be while you are still busy being it. You build the monument when the engine underneath — the door-to-door growth, the hand-to-hand mission — has quietly stalled, or in the case of the hand-to-hand part, never existed in the first place. You need something polished enough to hold the people still inside. This film is not the move of an organization that is winning. It is the move of one that is managing a decline it will not discuss.

If you are still in and you loved this series, I am not asking you to feel foolish for that. I am only asking one question: who in your congregation is assigned to make sure the widow down the street ate dinner this week? If you know the answer, good. If you realize nobody is, you have just felt personally the exact gap this is about.

The first-century congregation had a man whose job was to know that answer. Watchtower has a streaming platform.