What the May JW Broadcast is REALLY About (it's not what they say)

The man who opens JW Broadcasting's May 2026 episode is Jody Jedele, a Governing Body member appointed in October 2024. According to Google's image matching, he delivers his talk about Jehovah's fatherly love while wearing a Rolex watch valued somewhere between $17,000 and $45,000, depending on the exact model. Jedele is also an officer of a real estate corporation in Charlotte, North Carolina — despite being under a vow of poverty that prevents rank-and-file headquarters workers, called Bethelites, from any outside work or external business interests.

I was a Jehovah's Witness for 40 years. I used to believe men like him were God's appointed servants. Now I see him as a man under a vow of poverty wearing a watch worth more than many Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide earn in a year. What follows is a segment-by-segment walk through JW Broadcasting episode 137 — the way someone inside hears it, and the way someone outside hears it. The two are not the same.

Episode 137 is roughly an hour long with eight segments. Jedele delivers the opening talk. Governing Body helper Tony Snyder delivers the most substantively loaded segment of the program. There is a personal experience from sister Beth Overdish, two new series launches, a translator vignette, a Nahum discussion, and a country postcard from Gabon. As you go through it, watch for three things: words doing extra work, the moments the broadcast pivots from emotion to an ask, and what it assumes you already know without ever saying it aloud.

Jedele's Opening: Emotional Reset Before the Ask

Jedele's talk makes three points: Jehovah cares for us, Jehovah lets us communicate with him through prayer, and Jehovah works hard for his family.

The talk opens by acknowledging that some listeners had difficult or absent fathers. Then:

What comes to your mind when you hear the word father? A loving, affectionate man with deep concern for his family? Or an absent, neglectful, perhaps even abusive man? A lot depends on what kind of man our father is or was.

The first move is to clear the emotional ground. Whatever comes next about Jehovah lands as a gift, not as a comparison the listener might fail. It is a standard rhetorical setup — there is nothing technically wrong with it — but once you notice it, you will see it repeated throughout the broadcast. Emotional reset, then an ask.

The talk builds through Isaiah chapter 64, verse 8:

But now, oh Jehovah, you are our father. We are the clay, and you are our potter. We are all the work of your hand.

And through 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 3 and 4:

Praise be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of tender mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our trials.

The accumulation lands on the claim that Jehovah is personally, intimately involved in your life — comforting you, caring for you, working hard on your behalf for thousands of years. The evidence offered for that hard work: sunsets, delicious meals, music, fragrant flowers, time with friends and family, spiritual provisions.

The Bus Crash That Hard-Working Father Missed

Here is what that theology looks like when it is tested.

In February 1996, 26 Jehovah's Witnesses boarded a bus in southern Spain. They were returning from a day trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Three miles from home, a car crossed into their lane. There was an explosion. The back of the bus filled with smoke. 26 people died — four full-time ministers, several children, nearly a quarter of an entire congregation.

Watchtower covered this in the August 22nd, 1996 Awake! magazine, in an article titled "Overcoming Tragedy in Jehovah's Strength." Here is how their own publication explained what happened to those 26 people who had spent their lives serving the father who works hard for his family:

Clearly, accidents caused by time and unforeseen occurrence can affect Jehovah's people the same as everyone else.

Time and unforeseen occurrence. That is the explanation.

So there are two theologies occupying the same religion. Jehovah is a father who works hard every day for his family — until the moment that working hard would have meant stopping a bus from going up in flames. At that point, the same religion tells you he was not on duty. He was just letting it happen.

What does Jehovah's hard work actually consist of, then? It consists of things that happen for everyone, not just Jehovah's Witnesses. Sunsets, flowers, friends being kind to each other. Those are beautiful things. But if God gives those things to everyone and does nothing distinguishable for Jehovah's Witnesses — like preventing a bus wreck that killed over two dozen of his people — then where is the evidence that they are the only true religion on earth, which is exactly what they claim?

The Families the Broadcast Won't Name

Toward the end of his opening talk, Jedele says:

If your parents or other family members have rejected you because of your faith, remember you're a part of Jehovah's family. Around the globe, literally millions of Jehovah's worshippers love you.

If you have never been a Jehovah's Witness, you might miss what is happening here. He is addressing people whose families have rejected them for their faith, and offering millions of Witness brothers and sisters as compensation.

Think about who actually gets rejected by family for faith reasons in this religion. The dominant case — the one happening at scale — is the opposite of what the broadcast implies. It is the people who have left this religion who are being shunned by their Witness families. Parents who will not speak to their children. Siblings who have cut off contact. Adult children who know that maintaining any relationship risks losing their congregation, their friends, and in their own understanding, their God. Watchtower's social structure creates that outcome.

And then a Governing Body member opens his arms to the rejected and says, come to us, we will be your family. The people who actually need that consolation are the ones his organization is actively shunning. He just cannot name them.

That opening talk did three things. It softened the emotional ground. It established Jehovah as a constant, invisible, hard-working father. And it offered the religion as a substitute family without ever acknowledging who really needs one.

Beth Overdish's Story and the Unfalsifiable God

The next segment features a personal experience from sister Beth Overdish. She was 22 when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor while waiting for a Bethel assignment. She had two surgeries, the tumor was removed, she married, moved to Bethel, had two children, and then lost a third in the second trimester.

This is a real woman who lost a real child. The critique here is not of her. It is of how Watchtower frames what she went through.

Her husband held the family in a tight circle and told the children directly. Friends came out to the car where she was sitting, held her hand, and listened. Other friends came on Friday evenings to have dinner and talk about ordinary things. That support carried her through. It is genuinely beautiful.

But here is the broadcast's framing:

Jehovah was right by our side. He provided friends in the congregation, ones who we knew were very busy, but they would take their Friday evening and come over and have dinner with us and just sit and talk about silly things.

That is the same logic that ran in the opening talk. When something good happens — a friend brings dinner — Jehovah gets credit. When something bad happens — the baby dies in the second trimester — that is time and unforeseen occurrence. Heads, Jehovah wins. Tails, Jehovah is not on duty. It is an unfalsifiable theology. Every outcome confirms it.

There is no possible event in Overdish's life that Watchtower's framing could not absorb. If she had had ten healthy children, that would be Jehovah's blessing. The fact that she lost one is also somehow Jehovah's blessing, because look at the friends he provided afterward. Friends bringing dinner after a loss is one of the most human things people do. It does not require divine intervention. It is people loving each other. Watchtower takes that human kindness, attributes it exclusively to their God, and uses it to reinforce that staying in the religion is what makes the kindness possible.

But the kindness was hers. The friends were hers. Her husband was hers. None of it required the Governing Body's permission to happen. The same kind of human care happens everywhere, for people who have never heard of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The broadcast also implies that all Witnesses experience this level of belonging. I have spoken with enough former Witnesses to know that is far from universal. A man I spoke with recently — someone who came into the religion as an adult — said the early warmth was real. It faded. When he told an elder he could not get people to spend time with him, the elder told him to put himself out there. That elder had himself never responded to this man's invitations. The former Witness eventually concluded that his friendships before joining were better than anything he found inside the congregation. Watchtower's answer to experiences like his is always that the individual was not faithful enough, never that the institution has a structural problem.

If a Witness finds warmth and belonging, that is God's blessing. If they do not, that is the individual's fault. There is no outcome that disproves the claim. That is the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, and Watchtower relies on it constantly.

Full-Time Unpaid Labor, Packaged as Spiritual Growth

The broadcast launches a new series: Full-Time Service Builds Christian Qualities. It features brothers and sisters in the LDC — the Local Design and Construction group that builds Kingdom Halls and Assembly Halls worldwide. The pitch is that volunteer construction work cultivates love, refines character, and makes you a better Christian. The segment closes with:

We hope this new series will motivate all of us to consider whether we can make ourselves available for full-time service assignments.

There it is. The ask. And since this is a new series, that ask will be repeated episode after episode until it ends, if it ever does.

What is actually being recruited here is unpaid skilled labor. Construction work that in any other context would be performed by paid contractors at market rates. Watchtower uses volunteer labor to build out a global real estate portfolio worth billions of dollars. The brothers and sisters who do this work are not paid. They sign vows. They are told it is a privilege to work for God, which is worth more than money can buy — except perhaps for a $45,000 Rolex.

Every emotional appeal in this broadcast — the loving father, the family that will not reject you, the comfort in suffering — is structurally building toward a single ask: the way to truly accept Jehovah as your father is to give the organization more of your time, your unpaid time, your skilled labor, your career, your savings, your years, your life.

Tony Snyder and the "Reminder" Framing

The most loaded segment of the broadcast is delivered by Governing Body helper Tony Snyder. His text is 1 Peter chapter 2, and his framing is that Jehovah's reminders to his people are different from ordinary ones — not new instructions, not new doctrine, just reminders.

That framing matters enormously. If you grew up a Jehovah's Witness, you were trained to track something called new light. New light is when the Governing Body announces a doctrinal change. The formula is that Jehovah is progressively revealing his truth — the path of the righteous grows brighter until full daylight.

But new light has a problem that has gotten louder over the past two decades. Every new light reveals the old light was wrong. Using your own stored blood in surgery is acceptable now — it was not before. Beards are permitted now — they were not before. Shunning has been modified, slightly, in various areas. Glass clinking, going to college, treatment of returning members. Every time new light comes, someone disfellowshipped under the old rules is sitting at home asking why their family will not speak to them over a policy that no longer exists.

So the Governing Body developed a preferred alternative framing. When they need to change something without admitting they changed anything or did anything wrong, they call it a reminder. Reminders are not new. Reminders are just the old truth repeated, because Satan is pressuring you and you might forget. That is what Snyder is setting up.

He reads the text:

For the Lord's sake, subject yourself to every human creation, whether to a king as being superior or to governors as sent by him to punish wrongdoers, but to praise those who do good.

He then translates that verse as neutrality. But the verse says subjection. Those are not the same word. A Spanish ex-JW commentator made this point, and he is right. Subjection is obedience to authority. Neutrality is staying out of conflicts between authorities. Watchtower has spent decades using these two words interchangeably, even though they describe entirely different postures.

The Unnamed Country That Cannot Be Verified

Snyder then gives an example of neutrality paying off. In some unnamed country, a civil war broke out. Witnesses stayed neutral and subject to the government. After the war ended, the government passed a law requiring couples to participate in a flag ceremony when registering their marriage. The brothers explained their neutral stance during the war. Government officials said, "We don't want to do this to you," and the law was rewritten.

The country is not named. The civil war is not dated. The law is not cited. The flag is not identified. The officials are not named.

I went looking for this story. I searched post-civil war marriage registration laws. I searched African, Latin American, and Eastern European civil wars. I searched specifically for laws involving national flags at marriage ceremonies. I checked Watchtower's own yearbooks for Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Bosnia, and El Salvador. I could not find the country. Maybe the story exists — I cannot prove it does not. But here is what is revealing.

In this same broadcast, when Watchtower wants to tell you about Beth Overdish, they give you her name, a date — April 22nd, 1990 — and the publication, Awake! They want you to be able to verify the story. But when they want to tell you about something Jehovah supposedly did to change a national law in their favor, the country has no name, no date, no specific law, and no named officials. "We don't want to do this to you," said by whom, exactly?

When the evidentiary standards drop, that tells you something.

Chile: Where Kingdom Halls Flew the Flag

There is a country where we do have verified, photographed evidence of Watchtower's actual position on flag ceremonies.

Chile has a national celebration called Fiestas Patrias on September 18th and 19th. By Chilean law, every public building during those two days must display the national flag or face a fine. Ex-Witness investigators photographed at least two Kingdom Halls in Chile prominently displaying the Chilean flag at the front of the building, right next to the jw.org logo. The most recent photograph I have seen was from 2018.

Watchtower magazine, January 15th, 1977:

Jehovah's Witnesses do not share in flag ceremonies.

Under that doctrine, in Malawi in the 1960s and 1970s, faithful Witnesses were beaten, raped, tortured, and murdered for refusing to buy a 25-cent ruling party card. They died for neutrality.

In Chile, Kingdom Halls flew the Chilean flag because otherwise the branch would have had to pay a fine. Not the brothers themselves — just the building.

Same religion. Same doctrine. Different enforcement when institutional money is on the line. No broadcast covered either case.

The Norway Court Ruling Watchtower Called Jehovah's Reminder

Now comes the moment everything in Snyder's talk has been building toward. He lists what he calls recent reminders the Governing Body has sent. Among them:

We were given the reminder of how Jehovah views those who have sinned or strayed away from worship to him. And what we can do to cooperate with Jehovah in welcoming them back.

If you do not know the backstory, that sounds pastoral — even loving. Open arms, Jehovah welcomes back the strayed.

But that was not a reminder. That was a change. And it would not have happened without what occurred in Norway.

On March 4th, 2024, the Oslo District Court ruled against Watchtower. The court revoked Jehovah's Witnesses' registration as a recognized religious community in Norway, cutting off approximately half a million dollars in annual state funding and revoking the legal authority for Witness elders to perform marriages. The court acted specifically because of Watchtower's shunning practices toward minors — children baptized as young as 10 or 12 who later wanted to leave and were then cut off from their families.

Eleven days later, on March 15th, Governing Body member Mark Sanderson released Governing Body Update number two for 2024. He announced that the word disfellowship would no longer be used — the practice would now be called being removed from the congregation. He announced adjustments to how baptized minors would be handled. Returning members could be acknowledged with a simple greeting at the hall.

Eleven days. Court ruling, policy change.

Shunning itself did not change. Family members are still expected to limit contact with anyone removed from the congregation. Judicial committees are still in place. The mechanism is intact; the wording moved. The only substantive adjustment was that minors could no longer face judicial committees without their parents present, and parents were given authority over their children until adulthood — at which point the standard process presumably resumes.

The case eventually went to Norway's Supreme Court, where Watchtower won, with two of the five judges dissenting. But that change still happened. And now in May 2026, Snyder calls that episode a loving reminder from Jehovah — a reminder of how Jehovah views those who have strayed.

It was not a reminder. It was a legal retreat. In the eleven days between the district court ruling and the policy change, Watchtower's lawyers and the Governing Body did the math on what was at stake: registration, funding, marriage authority, and likely cascading consequences in other countries if the ruling was upheld.

A Brazilian ex-Witness commentator put this exactly right: if Jehovah's Witnesses want to thank anyone for changes that have softened in recent years, they should be thanking the dissidents in Norway. Without those people and that external legal pressure, the policy would not have changed. The Governing Body does not grow brighter — they get sued, and then they change what they need to change to get out of trouble.

The broadcast will not tell you that. The broadcast tells you Jehovah was reminding them. Snyder is repackaging an institutional retreat, driven and validated by a court, as divine guidance. It works because most viewers have been trained their whole lives to process this kind of language in only one direction. That is what theological gaslighting looks like from the inside.

When Watchtower Bends, Follow the Money

Eight years of research after leaving this religion has demonstrated one consistent pattern: Watchtower only ever changes a doctrine or policy, or gets lax about enforcement, when staying rigid is going to cost the institution money.

If a congregation has to pay a fine, the branch receives less in donations that month. If they lose state funding — Norway — they adjust the shunning rules, barely, and modify the procedures around minors. If their tax-exempt status in Australia is threatened, they sign on to that country's national redress scheme for survivors of institutional child sexual abuse — but only after that threat materialized, and only after refusing initially.

When it is you who gets hurt, when it is you who go to prison, when it is you who get beaten or punished for your faith, Watchtower calls that obedience to God. When it is their finances on the line, they fold fast. And in both cases, the result is framed as faithfulness to Jehovah.

The Governing Body admitted in the Watchtower magazine in 2017 that they are neither inspired nor infallible. That means every doctrine they teach, every policy they enforce, every change they make — those are all opinions of men on social, political, and moral issues. And since Watchtower teaches that every institution outside its walls is ruled by Satan the Devil, when courts and governments caused them to modify those doctrines and policies, they allowed Satan — by their own theology — to pressure them into changing the only true Christian religion on earth. Because that is what they claim to be.

The Nahum Segment: Slow to Anger, Except When You Disagree

The broadcast includes a discussion of the book of Nahum and the destruction of Nineveh. A scholar is quoted describing Assyrian cruelty:

Boys and girls were burned alive, men were impaled, flayed alive, blinded, or deprived of their hands and feet, of their ears and noses.

The discussion focuses on Jehovah being slow to anger but great in power. The message is not to fear frightening enemies, because Jehovah will eventually destroy them.

It is remarkable how slow to anger Jehovah turns out not to be, however, when a Witness speaks out against the duplicity of Watch Tower leaders — or disagrees with a doctrine, or takes a blood transfusion to save their life. In those cases, vengeance is Watchtower's and they repay it swiftly by removing your family and your friends through shunning. But if the wider world acts against God's people without God responding, that is just because he is slow to anger. The theology is applied selectively, and always in the direction that protects the institution.

The Gabon Story Contradicts Snyder's Talk

The broadcast ends with a country profile of Gabon. In April 1970, the Gabonese government banned the preaching work, expelled the missionaries, and prohibited meetings. The broadcast describes what happened next:

During the ban, our brothers and sisters showed exceptional zeal. They held meetings and entire convention programs at night in secret.

Hold that against Snyder's talk. Subject yourself to every human creation. Stay neutral. Be obedient to the governments Jehovah has placed in authority.

When the Gabonese government banned the preaching work, the Witnesses there did not subject themselves to that government. They preached in secret. They held conventions in open defiance of the law. The broadcast praises them for it.

When Norway took away Watchtower's registration and funding, they adjusted their shunning policy eleven days later.

Subjection and neutrality turn out to be flexible concepts. When the law you are asked to obey would shut down the publishing operation or cost the institution money, you defy — and it is called exceptional zeal. When the law forces a policy retreat, you comply and call it Jehovah's loving reminder. In both cases, the action is described as faithfulness to God.

That is not neutrality. That is loyalty to an organization, framed as obedience to God.

What This Broadcast Is Actually Doing

Taken as a whole, episode 137 does something specific. The stated topic is what kind of father Jehovah is. The actual function is to soften the membership's emotional ground around three specific organizational pressures.

First: a recruiting need for full-time unpaid labor, addressed twice in this single episode — through the LDC series launch and the Bethel translator vignette. That concentration is unusual.

Second: ongoing legal exposure around shunning, which Norway forced a partial retreat from in 2024, and which Snyder is now reframing as Jehovah's loving care. All while the closing Governing Body update on neutrality declares:

The Governing Body shares these important reminders because Satan is pressuring Jehovah's people to take sides.

Third: the need to keep the membership disengaged from moral and social conversations happening in the wider culture — neutrality as an internal control mechanism.

A Brazilian ex-JW commentator has a useful framework for how Watchtower discourse operates. He calls it the Watchtower Trinity: Jehovah, the organization, and the Governing Body, presented as though they are the same thing. Inside the religion, criticizing the Governing Body is treated as criticizing Jehovah. Leaving the organization is treated as abandoning Jehovah. Returning to the organization is treated as returning to Jehovah.

Run that lens over this broadcast. Every time Jehovah is described as caring for you, the agent actually doing the caring turns out to be the publications, the elders, the friends in the congregation, the spiritual food from the faithful and discreet slave. Every reminder Jehovah sends comes through Governing Body updates, not directly from the Bible. Every theocratic assignment is presented as Jehovah training you, not Watchtower extracting your free labor. Every comfort is delivered through the institution.

The broadcast tells you Jehovah is your father. The mechanism it gives you for receiving that fatherhood is the organization. That is the design.

What This Broadcast Doesn't Say

Here is what episode 137 does not say.

It does not name the country in the neutrality anecdote. It does not name Norway or the court ruling that produced the shunning policy adjustment. It does not address the bus crash in Spain, or any other tragedies that befell Jehovah's Witnesses while the father who works hard was, presumably, working hard. It does not name the people leaving the religion. It does not name the families being separated by its shunning policy. It does not name what those families are going through every day.

When a one-hour broadcast about Jehovah's love for his family cannot find time, in any of its eight segments, to name the families the religion is actively breaking, that absence is what you really need to pay attention to.

Jody Jedele, if you genuinely want to help Jehovah's Witnesses, sell that watch and give the proceeds to the Bethelites who were sent home in 2017 without a dime to their name.