Can baptised Witnesses not attend a meeting?

Answer 1

The wording of the question makes me wonder if the impression on the part of the asker is that we are somehow required to attend all our meetings? Otherwise, am not sure what 'meeting' we are talking about.

As far as requirements to attend meetings, there is not some kind of mandate to be at the Kingdom Hall, which could never be enforced anyway. We are encouraged to be as regular as possible to the meetings, because we view our meetings as our spiritual lifeline. That is where we are fed spiritual meals. Just like a physical life loses strength and health if it does not eat physical food, we lose spiritual strength and health when we are not present to receive our intake of spiritual food.

So while a baptised Jehovah's Witness does not somehow lose his 'baptism-ship' or membership, as it were, in the congregation because he fails to attend meetings, he can to one degree or another lose his spiritual health.

As always, there are times when it is impossible for the Witness to attend meetings, possibly due to poor health. However, even in such cases, the organization has installled in many congregations, phone tie-in technology that allows members to attend via telephone, whether at home, in a hospital, or wherever there is a telephone available. In our congregation, our system supports up to 100 people attending by this method, though we seldom have more than 2 or 3 that do. This system in some cases even supports two-way interchange, so that the one who is listening will be able to make comments in the congregation, since many of our meetings involve audience participation, which includes engaging in question and answer Bible class sessions.

On a side note, the numbers that are counted in our yearly reports as far as how many JW's there are, are not based on meeting attendance, but rather those numbers are based on how many JW's there are actively engaging in the public preaching work. While many churches count how many members they have in their registry, we only count active preachers of the Good News. When we say that there are over 7 million JW's worldwide, we mean that there are that many that are going door-to-door, doing street witnessing, or whatever means of preaching that they have available in whatever country they are in.