Sally, I have a friend and a neighbor who is somewhat inactive JW. She seems burnout, curious about my church, and has asked me several questions. I'm wondering, should I approach her differently than I would a non-believer or the large number of the nominal Christians who live around me? Okay, thank you. That was a very good question, Sally. And I was glad to hear that. Being a former Jehovah's Witness myself. And her question was a little longer. She described some of the things that she's doing.
And I'd say that is the best thing you can do is building a relationship with a Jehovah's Witness or a former Jehovah's Witness. Witnessing with words is probably not going to normally be the most effective, but building a relationship where they can see Christ in your life. I mean, that was one of the things that affected me because one of the things they were teaching when I was a witness was that nobody had agape love except Jehovah's Witnesses.
Well, we had been received a lot of kindnesses from our neighbor who was a Baptist. And she did many things for us. And I remember thinking, well, if this isn't love, Christian love, it certainly looks a lot like it. You know, I guess I decided to just look like it for a long time. But then, yeah, when I left the witnesses, I realized just how much love we had received, not just from her, but from a lot of people. So that's the best way you can witness to a Jehovah's Witness.
But now you do mention that she seems to maybe be burned out in that, which is a lot. Jehovah's Witnesses, according to Pew Research, have the highest dropout rate of any denomination, any religion, any group. And I can well believe that that a lot drop out. Now, they're still growing because they also are very effective at evangelism.
So you're going to meet a lot of witnesses who've left or a lot who just they've quit believing, but there's such a high penalty paid if they leave because they're going to be shunned, and particularly if they have family members who are gung-ho JWs, then they're going to be shunned by them, won't speak to them at all as a normal rule. And so, yeah, a lot of them just hang in there and sort of die spiritually. But each JW is different.
I mean, you might be dealing with someone who is maybe leaving, but this person has been an elder or maybe is the wife of an elder. Maybe they've been strong Jehovah's Witnesses for many years. They know their Bible really well and all of that. And when you interact with them, it would be different than maybe someone who was maybe only a witness for two years or something. And hardly, you know, even understood fully JW doctrines, let alone their whole Bible and that sort of thing.
So that person would be more like a nominal Christian you might be witnessing to. So maybe you can ascertain a little bit just in the course of conversations with this person just how deep her Bible knowledge is and that sort of thing. If you do it in a non-threatening way, I mean, if she thinks you're fixing to try to push your church onto her, then she might sort of back off from that. But if she can sense that you're just interested in her as a person and all that, yeah, you might be able to see where she's at.
If she was someone who was a very strong witness who knew her Bible well, then the worst thing you could do would be to treat her as a non-believer or a nominal Christian. My wife and I experienced that in a lot of places where we went after we left Jehovah's Witnesses. And it was a really big turnoff to be treated that way. And I realized the people didn't know any better. They just assumed a lot of them thought Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe in Jesus. They do have an erroneous understanding of Jesus.
Don't misunderstand me. But yeah, I mean, we believed in Jesus. We knew He was the Son of God. We knew He was our Creator. We knew that He died for us, that our salvation is through faith and His shed blood. I mean, we understood all of those things. So there were things we had wrong, but what really helped us the most was people who could accept us, yeah, where we were. And over time, yeah, we could see errors that JW's had, errors that we were maybe still holding on to.
But yeah, to be treated as a fellow believer instead of," Oh, yeah, you're just a non-believer who doesn't know anything." Yeah, you'll end up just alienating your neighbor. Like I say, if she's somebody who is a strong witness or used to be a strong witness and, you know, has a pretty thorough knowledge of the Bible.
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