A typical encounter between a Christian and a Jehovah’s Witness goes like this: The Christian shows the JW a Bible verse that contradicts Watchtower teaching. The JW then responds with another verse that he feels supports his beliefs. The Christian then counters with another verse, to which the JW replies with still another, and so forth. Such a discussion can be described as “biblical Ping-Pong.” Verses bounce back and forth, perhaps for hours on end, with no tangible results other than the sweaty exhaustion that follows a literal Ping-Pong game. And even if the Christian seems to have come off the “winner” in the debate, this carries no more weight with the Jehovah’s Witness than if it had been a mere Ping-Pong game he had lost; he is still not about to change his religion.

What is wrong with the above approach? Why does a well-planned barrage of Bible verses usually fail to make a dent in a Witness’s thinking? The reason is that this form of attack is based upon a wrong assumption. It assumes that the Jehovah’s Witness believes certain things on account of what he has read in the Bible, and that he will change his beliefs if he is shown other verses as prooftexts for a different doctrinal stance. But anyone making this assumption has already fallen victim to the sect’s propaganda: namely, the claim that Jehovah’s Witnesses are Bible-reading people who rely on Scripture as their highest authority. Actually they do little personal Bible reading aside from looking up isolated verses cited in Watchtower literature. And they base their beliefs, not on what they find in the Bible, but on what their leaders tell them the Bible says.

For example, consider what happened on one occasion when two ladies called at my door with Watchtower and Awake! magazines in their hands. I let the one taking the lead go ahead with her presentation for a minute or two, rejected her offer of the magazines, but then asked if she could answer a Bible question for me before she left. (Jehovah’s Witnesses love to “teach” people they meet in their door-to-door work by answering Bible questions—especially since they think they know all the answers.) My question was this: Where do you find in the Bible your belief that “the great crowd” of true worshipers today will be rewarded with everlasting life on earth instead of in heaven? She promptly flipped open the pages of her New World Translation and showed me Revelation 7:9, “After these things I saw, and, look! a great crowd, which no man was able to number, out of all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes; and there were palm branches in their hands.”

When I showed her the context and pointed out that the “great crowd” is pictured there “standing before the throne” of God in heaven, rather than on earth, she answered that all the earth stands before God’s throne. So I had her turn over a few pages to Revelation, chapter 19, which also speaks of the “great crowd,” and asked her to read the first verse: “After these things I heard what was a loud voice of a great crowd in heaven. They said, ‘Praise Jah, you people! The salvation and the glory and the power belong to our God.’ ”

“So, where is the ‘great crowd’?” I asked.

“On earth,” was her reply.

“Please read it again,” I asked.

She did, but this time I stopped her after the word heaven and asked again where the verse located the “great crowd.”

“On earth,” was still her answer.

Then I got her to look at Revelation 19:1 again and admit that she had read the word heaven.

“It says ‘heaven’,” she finally acknowledged, “but the ‘great crowd’ is on earth. You don’t understand,” she went on, “we have men at our headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, who explain the Bible to us. And they can prove that the ‘great crowd’ is on earth; I just can’t explain it that well.”

By this admission she revealed the true nature of the problem. She made it clear that her belief was based, not on what the Bible said, but on what her leaders said it said—even to the point that she could look at the word heaven and see earth instead. Most people would call this brainwashing.

This explains why a barrage of Bible verses can bounce off a Jehovah’s Witness like so many Ping-Pong balls, with no effect. The JW may look at the verses, but what he sees in his mind’s eye is the Watchtower Society’s interpretation of those verses. It is as if he is looking at the pages of the Bible through Watchtower-colored glasses. So the first step in your strategy must be to remove those distorted lenses. To accomplish this, you will have to get the Witness to look at the Watchtower organization itself. You will need to demonstrate that the leaders have made repeated false prophecies, have changed doctrines back and forth, and have misled followers to their harm—that is, they are not a reliable guide to follow. The Witness will then be forced to think for himself or herself; in effect, the Watchtower-colored glasses will be removed.

But this can be difficult, because JWs are trained to keep opening the Bible, bringing up prooftexts for their various teachings. And your natural response would be to answer them on each point. As long as you allow them to control the discussion in this way, though, they will never see the forest for the trees, as the expression goes. At some point you must interrupt the issue-by-issue argument to focus attention on the big issue, the organization itself.

Picture the Watchtower, for a moment, as an ancient walled fort with archers and spearmen standing guard atop the wall. Your army surrounds the fort. Your archers shoot arrows at their counterparts on the wall, and your spearmen hurl missiles. Sometimes your men score a hit, and sometimes theirs do; but the battle goes nowhere. Nowhere, that is, until a contingent of your men stop trading shots with the enemy and instead, with helmets on their heads, shields on their backs and shovels in their hands, dig around the base of the wall until it is undermined and collapses. As it falls, so do the host of archers and spearmen who stood atop it, seemingly invulnerable only moments before.

Disputing with a Jehovah’s Witness over questions of deity, theology, and the afterlife can be like the archers and spearmen exchanging shots with those on the wall. But attacking the organization itself, destroying its credibility by exposing its long history of error—this is akin to undermining the wall and causing it to topple over. When the organization falls, so do all the teachings and doctrines that depend on its authority for support.

It will take discipline on your part to ignore some of the “spears” and “arrows” thrown at you in the form of doctrinal challenges, in order to focus your attention and the attention of the Witness on the organization itself; but it will be well worth the effort. Once the organization’s authority is undermined, the doctrines will be much easier to deal with.

Before considering the ammunition to fire against the Watchtower organization, however, you would be wise to learn some techniques that work and to familiarize yourself with the tools you will need to use.