SILER CITY — Donald Davidson, 87, and his wife Violet, 82, would rarely go more than a few days without knocking on a door or visiting a Bible student as part of their volunteer ministry. That abruptly changed in the spring of 2020 when Jehovah’s Witnesses suspended their in-person public ministry, meetings and large conventions.
Two years later, the Siler City residents are busier than ever.
“The work we’re doing now, on the phone and letter writing — it hasn’t slowed us down,” said the couple, who have served as full-time ministers for the past 45 years, and now make phone calls and write about 20 letters on average each month.
“We don’t do any copycat letters,” Davidson said. “Every letter is different.”
With this historic change, the number of Jehovah’s Witnesses grew 3% in the United States in 2021 alone, matching the organization’s most significant increase over the past decade and the second-largest percentage increase since 1990.
“Staying active in our ministry while remaining safe has had a powerful preserving effect on our congregants and communities,” said Robert Hendriks, U.S. spokesman for Jehovah’s Witnesses. “The wise decision not to prematurely resume in-person activities has united us and protected lives while comforting many people in great need. The results speak for themselves.”
For congregants like the Davidsons, the virtual pivot has meant trading their bookbags for a landline, laptop and iPad, and their walking shoes for slippers. But while their tools have changed, their message remains the same. They regularly share scriptures, cards and letters each month with dozens of community members, business owners and government officials.
“One local doctor expressed, ‘No one had ever sent me such a nice card in all my years as a dentist,’” Violet said.
Last year, the international organization reported all-time peaks in the number of people participating in their volunteer preaching work, increased attendance in Zoom meetings and more than 171,000 new believers baptized. In the past two years, more than 400,000 have been baptized worldwide.
Some whose ministry or attendance at religious services had slowed because of age and poor health said they felt reenergized with the convenience of virtual meetings and a home-based ministry.
Despite dealing with early dementia and diminished energy, Nathaniel Rhames, 82, and his wife Wilma, 79, say they are “happy to be this age.”
The Rhames use Zoom to worship twice a week with their Sanford congregation and regularly join online ministry groups to comfort neighbors and family through phone calls, letters and texts.
“I have never been a good writer,” Rhames said. “In school, the teachers would tease that I was writing in Hebrew or Greek.”
“I hated the telephone,” added Wilma.
But both are now effective and productive with these methods of reaching people. They have written to 479 people by letter alone during the pandemic.
By sharing the Bible remotely, Alaska’s fewer-than-3,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses can rapidly preach across the 586,000 square miles of their sparsely populated state.
“We’re talking to more people in a day than we did in a month,” said Marlene Sadowski of Ketchikan.
The official website of Jehovah’s Witnesses, translated into more than 1,000 languages, has also leveraged the organization’s outreach.
After starting a free self-paced Bible course on jw.org in December 2019, New Mexico resident Lisa Owen requested a free, interactive Bible study over Zoom. She was one of nearly 20,000 baptized as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses last year in the United States in private settings, including backyard swimming pools, tubs and even rivers.
“JW.ORG gave me somewhere to learn, somewhere to land, and to start living the way God wants me to,” said Owen, who lives in Moriarty. “It taught me so much.”
To start an online Bible study course, receive a visit or attend a virtual meeting locally on the Jehovah's Witnesses' website.