Requirement to Report Ministry Hours No More

October 7th, 2023

The Annual Meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses was held on October 7th, 2023 at the Newburgh New York Assembly Hall.

Governing Body member Sam Herd announced that Jehovah’s Witnesses will no longer be required to submit a monthly Field Service Report to local congregation elders, effective November 1st, 2023.

For 103 years, Jehovah’s Witnesses have been required to fill out a monthly report that included the number of hours they spent in the “preaching” or “witnessing” activity. Members of the religion were also required to report the number of “placements” of Watchtower literature, including magazines, books, booklets, and other printed material. In recent years, the Organization’s headquarters also required the notation of the number of “views” of videos shown to the public during conversations with non-Witnesses.

The information collected by Jehovah’s Witnesses for more than a century has played an integral role in the management of congregations for more than a century. Among the requirements to occupy the position of Ministerial Servant and Elder within the church has always been maintaining a minimum number of hours spent in the ministry each month.

Men have always been expected to maintain the “national average” of hours spent preaching within their home country, or they would not be considered good candidates for positions of responsibility. In the United States, that average has always been close to 10 hours per month. Prospective Servants and Elders were expected to exceed that number and maintain it.

Speculation has already begun to spread among the Jehovah’s Witness and Ex-Jehovah’s Witness communities regarding the reasons and implications for this surprising announcement.

As the weight of litigation presses down on the Organization worldwide, it is noteworthy that JW leaders are increasingly inclined to disconnect official church policy from the “personal ministry” of individual members. Since members have always answered to the policies of the Organization, this has placed the Corporate Headquarters’ Branch Offices in greater legal peril. By removing the requirement of all Witnesses to “turn in their hours,” the Church distances itself from the month-to-month routine of reporting to local Elders, who in turn report this raw data to the centralized databases maintained by the Watchtower Corporations.

The increasing proliferation of child sexual abuse lawsuits within the Jehovah’s Witnesses has had a profound financial and reputational impact on the Church. In both Civil and Criminal lawsuits filed against the Church and its members, attorneys for the Witnesses continually insist that their appointed men are not “agents of Watchtower.”

Time will tell how much of an impact this decision will have upon the Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses. When given the opportunity to maintain personal privacy regarding the number of hours spent in the preaching work, it seems clear that most members would like to keep this information confidential.