Jehovah's Witnesses Are Staying Home From The Conventions

Jehovah's Witnesses are tired of attending conventions in person, and Watchtower just proved it knows this by rewriting its own elders' manual. A new sentence appeared in the 2025 edition of Shepherd the Flock of God that has never appeared in any prior edition — and the timing lines up exactly with what rank-and-file Witnesses are now saying openly.

Shepherd the Flock of God is the elders' rule book, off-limits to ordinary Jehovah's Witnesses and especially to women. The current, 2025 edition contains this line:

Publishers should be encouraged to attend the convention in person as an expression of their faith.

That sentence does not appear in the previous edition, or the one before that, or the one before that, or the one before that. Five editions were checked going back to 2019, and this is the first time the paragraph it sits in even mentions conventions at all. The word simply wasn't there before. Something changed, and a Reddit post from a man in Ontario, Canada, points to what.

An Ontario Family Says They're Done

He posted a couple of days ago that his wife and her family had just come home from the three-day convention in Kitchener and told him it was the last time they would ever attend one in person. This wasn't a case of waking up to what the organization is about — by his description, they are diehard, fully invested Jehovah's Witnesses. They were simply done with the hassle: getting up early, fighting horrendous traffic, and sitting through long days of the same material without anything new of substance. Going forward, they said, they'll just watch the stream.

None of the specific complaints are new — getting up early, the traffic, the boredom — those gripes go back decades among Witnesses. What's new is that people are saying it out loud, consequences be damned. That Reddit post has more than 500 upvotes and over 100 comments, and nearly every comment describes some version of the same experience.

What Attending a Convention Actually Costs

A regional convention is three full days, not three evenings. Attendees are expected to be seated before the music starts and the day runs until late afternoon. For many families that means driving an extra hour or paying for a hotel. Attendees dress formally — suit and tie, or dress and heels — even in summer heat. Lunch is packed from home, since eating on-site was phased out decades ago. Talks and symposiums fill most of the day, occasionally broken up by a compelling speaker, but sessions have largely been replaced with pre-recorded video. On top of sitting through it, many attendees volunteer for parking, cleaning, or acting as attendants — including cleaning bathrooms in dress clothes.

None of this is optional in any meaningful sense; it's presented as the high point of the Witness calendar, and missing a day gets noticed. It's also expensive: travel, fuel, hotels, and meals, on top of donations collected under the claim that there's always a shortfall. Watchtower in fact requires a set amount per person in attendance, and pressure continues until that amount is collected. That is the cost the Ontario family concluded they no longer wanted to pay, since the stream gives them the same program without it.

Tracking the Manual's Wording Across Five Editions

Shepherd the Flock of God has a section on broadcasting and video conferencing that spells out who is permitted to tie in remotely instead of attending a congregation meeting in person. Comparing five editions shows a clear pattern.

The 2019 edition states:

Congregations may use conferencing systems for the benefit of isolated or homebound publishers and those otherwise unable to attend in person.

The 2020 and 2022 editions barely change the wording, still limited to isolated or homebound publishers and interested persons — essentially those unable to physically get to their local congregation. By 2023, the phrasing shifts slightly to:

Publishers who live in remote locations or are homebound.

That shift toward "remote" made sense at the time, since Watchtower had been closing and merging Kingdom Halls, leaving some publishers with much longer drives to a congregation meeting. Across all of these editions, one thing stays constant: the list of people permitted to use remote access never expands, and none of these paragraphs mention conventions at all. The word isn't there.

The Paragraph Gets Rebuilt in 2025

In the 2025 edition, that paragraph is rebuilt from the ground up:

Congregations may use broadcasting and video conferencing systems to benefit those unable to attend local congregation meetings.

For the first time, conventions are added, followed immediately by:

Publishers should be encouraged to attend the convention in person as an expression of their faith.

The paragraph continues with instructions for leadership:

Elders and ministerial servants and their families should set an example in this area.

And closes with:

Elders should not impose arbitrary rules about who gets access to the live program nor provide access to the live program indiscriminately.

The effect of that wording is specific: attending in person is now framed as evidence of faith, which makes the alternative — watching the identical program from home — read as a lack of it. The stream itself isn't banned; using it is simply made to imply something negative about the person doing it, unless they fall into one of the narrow exempted categories. Elders and ministerial servants are told explicitly to be seen in their seats, and their families along with them. The last line tries to have it both ways — no arbitrary rules, but also no handing out access indiscriminately, which itself requires deciding who does and doesn't get it.

Why Watchtower Wants People in the Seats

A room full of empty seats makes the organization look like it's declining — which, in the West, it largely is — and that raises uncomfortable questions among the people who do show up about whether the organization is really thriving. It also has a social effect: once people watching the stream learn that plenty of other Witnesses stayed home too, they stop feeling guilty about doing the same. And staying home tends to lead to waking up, a pattern already demonstrated when Kingdom Hall meetings were suspended during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Rules like this tend to be reactive rather than preventive — organizations don't write a rule about something that isn't already happening. A sentence like "publishers should be encouraged to attend the convention in person as an expression of their faith" isn't written to open a door; it's written to push people back through one so it can be closed. Nobody writes that sentence while the convention halls are full. It only gets written while staring at empty seats, with no better argument available than to imply that not attending calls someone's faith into question. And it wasn't published anywhere the general membership would see it — not in the Watchtower, not on JW Broadcasting — only in the one manual rank-and-file members are forbidden to read.

What the Attendance Numbers Suggest

The rule itself can be documented directly from the manual; the attendance decline behind it can't be proven with audited figures — only with a large, consistent body of self-reported accounts from the same Reddit thread and others like it. Venues that used to be booked for six convention weekends in a row are now booked for two. Arenas that used to fill are now at roughly a third of capacity. One convention that used to fill an entire stadium now fills about one section of it. The original poster said his venue drew around 4,000 people that year, against roughly 6,000 before COVID-19. Another commenter said that on the first day, the platform announced in-person and stream numbers separately, but by the second day, the two figures were combined and no longer split out.

None of that proves anything definitively — it's self-reported by people with a point of view, most of them still inside the religion. But the rule itself isn't self-reported; it's printed in the manual, and it appeared after six years of prior editions never once mentioning conventions, right as this pattern was being described by the people affected by it.

Believers, Not Ex-Witnesses, Are Making This Case

The people behind the original Reddit post aren't doubters, ex-Jehovah's-Witnesses, or "PIMOs." They defend the doctrines, the policies, and the governing body. What changed their minds about attending in person wasn't doctrine or scandal — it was traffic, congested parking lots, uncomfortable seating, and the realization that a screen at home delivers the identical information without any of it. That's what it looks like when the urgency drains out of a religion.

One data point from further back: my wife's mother, an elder's wife and a pillar of her congregation since the elder arrangement began, was already saying years ago that they needed to stop claiming the end was coming. If someone that invested was saying it then, it's worth asking what less-invested rank-and-file members were thinking at the time — and what they're thinking now. Pew Research found that roughly two out of three people raised as Jehovah's Witnesses do not remain Witnesses as adults. That figure is a decade old and remains the most recent retention number Pew has published for the religion.

One commenter on the original Reddit post summarized the likely trajectory: people will stream the convention the first year, half-pay-attention the next, be completely checked out by the third year, and be gone from the religion by the fourth. The pattern already showed itself during the years without in-person Kingdom Hall meetings — people who stop attending in person get the time to think, and thinking tends to lead them away.

A Contradiction Buried in the Exemption List

The manual's list of legitimate reasons to stay home includes infirmities, advanced age, or other circumstances. Watchtower placed being old on the list of acceptable excuses, in the same paragraph that frames being in the room as evidence of faith. There's no way to know the exact age profile of who's still attending in person, but the fact that advanced age made the exemption list says something about the organization's long history of promising the end within the current generation's lifetime.

Watchtower is going to lose this argument — not because Witnesses will openly fight it, but because the ones who might want to are tired, and the ones coming up behind them were never convinced of the organization's authority to begin with.