7/18/25

This week, Nick and I went down to the Huntington Beach pier with some Friends, friends, and Friends-friends. We got to engage with a lot of people, many of which are professing Christians. We like to take these opportunities to "test" these Christians if they are open to it, and we often find a fairly confused understanding of what a Christian is. This week we talked with a wild spread of people from around the world and in various stages of life! We were particularly blessed by numerous very young Christians who "got the plot", as the kids say, and they joyously accepted our challenge to share their faith with three people by the end of the week! We even had one young girl pray for our time of evangelism and prayed very powerfully for us! It's no wonder that Jesus esteemed children so highly! They seem to understand what it means to trust and obey - perhaps ignorance, but likely wisdom.

On Tuesday, there was a recovery group at the beach while we were there, and we had such a great time talking with them. I am challenged, even from the little we conversed, by their genuine humility and dependance on God. They were a refreshing engagement for me after experiencing the near opposite at the JW stand twice before.

I've enjoyed, so much, my conversations with Jehovah's Witnesses in the past - whether in my neighborhood, the Irvine Spectrum, or Huntington Beach, but they don't all share that same sentiment. Many times, I've been received for long conversation and welcomed back to talk again, but other people seem to be allergic to me for some reason. As far as I can tell, there is no distinguishable difference in my demeanor or methodology from time to time, but there are certainly differences in the people I'm talking around or with. Tuesday was an example of the allergic reaction to my presence - and that was just about all I gave them to be allergic to. 

In the past, I've tried a number of different conversational approaches with JWs: divinity of Jesus, authority of the Watchtower, accuracy of the NWT, invisible return of Jesus in 1914, etc... However, I wanted to try a slightly different approach this time in light of a teaching that I'd recently heard from someone who has engaged with JWs for a while. The approach was based on receiving clarity on their position of something - for me, I wanted clarity on who they believe Jesus is and why they believe that. I know that they officially teach that Jesus is Michael the Arc Angel, Jehovah's first and greatest creations, but I genuinely don't know how they biblically support the Michael part. So, I asked them if they could help me understand why they believed that about Jesus. 

The first time I tried to engage with the people at the stand, another JW woman, who was watching from the side I guess, interjected before I could finish the question and told me to leave. A little shocked by the seemingly abrupt rejection, I tried to understand why I was not welcomed to converse, and it seems that this is the same lady that went a bit nuts on Nick and me a while back. I'm not sure what her deal is, but she seems to think that everything is an aggressive threat, and she likes to kill productive conversations. She said that I've been there before, which is very true - though it's been a while, and I guess that makes me not welcome to converse. So, after expressing my true lack of understanding on their perspective on this issue, she retreated to talk to other JWs off to the side. Trying to salvage the conversation after that "expression", I asked the two JWs who were actually on shift at the stand what they thought. The young man affirmed the teaching and was going to share with me where it's found in scripture, but he thought he had it saved but couldn't find it, so he told me to come back another time and ask again. Looking back, I regret allowing the conversation to end there as I very easily could have shifted to another, more subjective, question, but the weird initial response had everyone a bit uncomfortable anyways, so I decided to come back later.

After our time with the whiteboard on the pier, I saw that they had rotated shifts and thought I would obey the young man and ask someone else about the doctrine. Expecting to be better received, I explained my previous question and how I was told to come back later to ask another person to ask. After they affirmed their belief that Jesus is Michael the Arc angel, etc., I asked how they came to believe that. To this, I received the same beautiful answer, "because we read the Bible". So, I asked, "Is there a particular part of the Bible that teaches this about Jesus?", and they replied, "The whole Bible teaches it". At this point, the older woman who was at the stand alongside a younger woman began getting very defensive. She told me that I needed to leave and stop debating them, which was confusing because I was only asking about their beliefs thus far. I tried to clarify with her that I am not trying to debate, and have actually not even shared my opinion on anything yet, but she seemed to have already made up her mind that I was currently debating them... With my persistence in clarifying my actions, she allowed me to stay for a short while longer and ask about the specific verses that they find this teaching in. Unfortunately, they went to a verse about Michael fighting a dragon in Revelation and claimed that it was evidence of Jesus being Michael. Genuinely confused by the connection, I asked, "I don't see Jesus' name mentioned in this passage, so how does this say He is Michael?", to which she replied that only Jesus can fight dragons, therefore Michael is Jesus. 

This is a very coherent system of logic if you ignore all external facts of reality or demand reasonable cause for holding these premises, but it is internally coherent, I guess. If I assume that only Jesus can fight a dragon, and Michael fights a dragon, then Jesus is Michael. However, this is a little absurd and they seemed to know that as they got very defensive when I asked why they believed that only Jesus could fight dragons. If I were on my best game, then I could have placed them in quite a predicament by applying the same standard to Jesus and Jehovah with truly exclusive claims that can actually be found in the Bible that link their identity to one God, but I didn't think of it on the spot. Instead, I tried to keep the older JW calm enough to let me keep talking with the younger lady who was seemingly open to it. I was not successful and was given the classic commission to go to JW.org and read about Michael and Jesus... which I've done and am still a trinitarian... I find it particularly hard to avoid getting the classic evasion of questions by defaulting me to the Watchtower resources, but it's also particularly hard to do this while responding to an angry lady who is debating with me about whether or not I'm debating them. Hopefully my gentleness acted as a witness in contrast to the dramatic rejection of my presence for the younger JWs. It's very hard to engage with them productively sometimes as they are fed many lies about the outside people being malicious and evil and it seems that low levels of confrontation can be twisted to support the perverted paradigm.