On May 8, 1980, Franz was told that he had been implicated as an apostate. This statement, which placed blame for the disappointment about 1975 on Raymond Franz as the former chairman of the writing committee, precipitated a purge of that committee.
The Maissue of The Watchtower issued a statement of regret that its assertions of probability of Armageddon arriving before 1975 had "apparently overshadowed the cautionary ones and contributed to a buildup of expectation already initiated." It told disappointed Jehovah's Witnesses, "including persons having to do with the publication of the information that contributed to the buildup of hopes centred on that date" to "concentrate on adjusting his viewpoint". Staff were also questioned about comments Franz had made that may have contradicted Watch Tower doctrine.
The following month, a committee of the Governing Body raised concerns about "wrong teachings" being spread by headquarters staff and began questioning staff about their beliefs. In March 1980, Franz and his wife took a leave of absence from the world headquarters for health reasons and moved to Alabama, where he took up laboring work on a property owned by a fellow Witness. įrustrated by what he viewed as the Governing Body's dogmatism and overemphasis on traditional views rather than reliance on the Bible in reaching doctrinal decisions, Franz and his wife decided in late 1979 they would leave the international headquarters. I have since come to appreciate the rightness of a quotation I recently read, one made by a statesman, now dead, who said: "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest-but the myth-persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." I now began to realize how large a measure of what I had based my entire adult life course on was just that, a myth-persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. It was those final years that were the crucial period for me. The last fifteen years I had spent at the international headquarters, and the final nine of those as a member of the worldwide Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses.
#RAYMOND FRANZ FULL#
I had spent nearly forty years as a full time representative, serving at every level of the organizational structure. In his personal memoir, Franz said that at the end of 1979 he reached a personal crossroad:
On Octohe was appointed as a member of the Governing Body. Īccording to Franz, he began working in the organization's writing department and was assigned to collaboratively write Aid to Bible Understanding, the first religious encyclopedia published by Jehovah's Witnesses. Both returned to the Dominican Republic in 1961 to evangelize for four more years and were then assigned to Watch Tower headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of 37, Franz married his wife, Cynthia, who joined him on missionary work. Franz became a representative of Jehovah's Witnesses throughout the Caribbean, traveling to the Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic, until at least 1957 when Jehovah's Witnesses were banned in the Dominican Republic by dictator Rafael Trujillo. In 1944 Franz graduated from Gilead, the religion's school for training missionaries, and temporarily served the organization as a traveling representative in the continental United States until receiving a missionary assignment to Puerto Rico in 1946.
Raymond joined the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1938, and became a baptized member in 1939. His father associated with the Bible Student movement (from which Jehovah's Witnesses developed) and was baptized in 1913. His uncle, Frederick Franz, was influential in the religion's development, practices and doctrines.
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