ROCKINGHAM, Vt. - Art Schram was 25 years old before he discovered the "Truth."
It was around Christmas in 1985 and he was working the night shift as a printer in Grafton, Vt. There was another guy on his shift and the two started talking about religion and the date of Jesus' birth. Schram had been raised Roman Catholic but had some nagging questions about his faith. His co-worker seemed to have the answers.
"I felt I had been taught different things," Schram said. "I wasn't a practicing Catholic at the time but, obviously, when he showed me in black and white..."
Schram's co-worker was a "publisher," or member, of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Schram had just received his first informal witnessing.
The two men began studying together but Schram didn't adopt the religion until six years later, after he separated from his wife and found himself with a newborn child. It was only then that he realized he wanted to make a change.
"Once I had a child, that was the motivation for me to do something good for her," Schram said. "I didn't want her growing up the same way I did as a child."
Schram was baptized into the faith in 1993.
Now in a leadership position as an "elder" with the Bellows Falls Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses, Schram has helped oversee the construction of a brand new Kingdom Hall along Route 103, the major portion of which is expected to be completed today. Over the course of the weekend, 450 skilled volunteer laborers organized through the Witnesses' regional building committee descend on the work site to construct the 4,500 square foot building in just three days. The congregation plans to meet for the first time on Nov. 6.
This "quick build" method is not simply a novelty, according to Norton True, a longtime member of the Bellows Falls Congregation. It goes to the very foundation of their work: their faith.
"The reason we are so organized in building under the quick build method is so we can get back to doing what we want to do, which is preaching the good news," True said.
Despite jokes about their door-to-door witnessing and some highly publicized scandals in recent years, the Witnesses have sustained an extraordinary rate of growth both in the United States and worldwide since their founding in Pennsylvania in the late-19th century. Rates of the newly baptized have declined in recent years, but the faith is still one of the fastest growing religions in the world.
Jehovah's Witnesses membership has seen steady increases of between 3 and 5 percent each year since 1980, according to a 1997 study on the denomination's growth. Official estimates from the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the legal and publishing arm of the Witnesses, have membership at over a million in the U.S. and 6.5 million worldwide.
Skeptics need look no further than the construction site across from the Rockingham Meeting House for evidence of success. The congregation of about 100 left its last building along Route 5 earlier this year because it outgrew the facility. Membership has plateaued in Vermont at just under 2,000 for the last 10 years, but True said he expects that to change with the increased visibility of the Bellows Falls Congregation.
"This project has been an unbelievable interest peaker in what we're doing," True said.
The Kingdom Hall "quick builds" are not the only news drawing people's attention to Jehovah's Witnesses. Congregations around the U.S. have found themselves embroiled in several highly publicized sex abuse scandals recently, one of which was before the New Hampshire Supreme Court this summer.
In that case, two sisters sued the Jehovah's Witness congregation in Wilton, N.H., for not reporting abuse by their father even though church elders were told of it many times by the girls' mother. The father, Paul Berry, is serving 56 to 112 years in prison after he was convicted in 2000 of repeated abuse against his daughter and stepdaughter in the 1980s when they were 3 and 10.
In one incident, Berry hung his daughter by her wrists from hooks on a barn wall. The girls' mother, Sara Poisson of Claremont, said church elders brushed aside her pleas for help and told her the problems needed to be worked out within the family.
"They told me I should pray more and be a better wife," Poisson said.
Poisson said her daughters, now in their 20s, were looking for an apology. They didn't get it.
"Part of the court case was about catharsis, about healing," Poisson said last week. "(Poisson's daughters) didn't want a dollar. They wanted the elders to say they were sorry."
In a split decision in July, the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision in favor of the elders and concluded that people cannot be sued for failing to report child abuse unless they have a heightened level of responsibility to the abused. Leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses did not meet that threshold, according to three of the four judges who heard the case.
Poisson and her daughters left the church years ago and were forced into poverty, living for some time out of her car, Poisson said. They lost all their friends and were shunned by Jehovah's Witnesses everywhere.
Poisson, who is now a "confirmed atheist," said she never once regretted the decision.
Matt Reimann, an elder in the Bellows Falls Congregation, said the press surrounding the New Hampshire case was sensationalized and has not affected recruitment.
"We have nothing to hide so it hasn't been a problem talking to people," Reimann said.
Jehovah's Witnesses have dealt with court cases in the past and, more often than not, come out on the winning side. Scandals, real or imagined, do not seem to have much impact on recruitment and retention of members.
The religion discourages members from reading outside material about the Witnesses and most negative information about the religion is dismissed as inaccurate, biased or the work of God's enemies, according to Jerry Bergman, author of a comprehensive bibliography on the Witnesses and professor at Northwest State College in Ohio. Bergman, a former Witness of about 20 years, said the rise of the digital age has been much more damaging to the religion.
The Witnesses control most of the information they distribute through one, church-sanctioned Web site. Members are discouraged from starting their own Web sites, resulting in a disproportionate amount of anti-Witness literature on the Internet.
"If you plug in 'Jehovah's Witnesses,' you will get hundreds of sites, some of which is pretty damning," Bergman said. "Credibility is actually a problem because people don't know what is (factual), but when you hear these stories over an over, some from people you know and trust, you start believing them."
The average number of people baptized each year into the Jehovah's Witnesses in the U.S. declined 33 percent since 1997, according to data collected by the Jehovah's Witnesses Information Center, an anti-Witnesses Web site. The data came from official numbers published in The Watchtower, according to the JWIC.
Yet, Jehovah's Witnesses congregations continue to expand, in large part because children growing up in the religion choose to stay and from recruiting friends and family members, Bergman said. The attraction to the sense of community is not to be discounted, Bergman said. The tightly knit community is, in part, what attracted people like Schram, True and even Poisson.
Congregations are generally limited to no more than 200 people before they split and become separate congregations, maintaining small groups organized around strict notions of family and neighborliness.
"It comes from their history," Bergman said. "It started out as a Bible study group. That's how (founder Charles) Russell started, with a bible study group, and they've retained that."
The Witnesses proudly point out the response to New Orleans congregations affected by Hurricane Katrina and, closer to home, in Alstead, when heavy rains flooded that town several weeks ago.
"If we knew members in Alstead, before we did anything, we found out if they were OK," True said.
The goal, not only of the Bellows Falls congregation but congregations worldwide, is to "grow as a community" as well as in numbers, True said, and the Kingdom Hall's heightened visibility along a heavily traveled road will help them do just that.
Visitors will find literature and, perhaps, a publisher willing to informally witness to them and invite them into the congregation, if that is what the person wants.
"We're all here of our own free will. Nobody's telling me what I have to do," Schram said. "We're not a cult. We're not a sect. We're just an organization trying to follow in Jesus' footsteps to the best of our ability."