These differences aren’t about music or dress or atmosphere. The first one is about who Jesus Christ actually is, and once that question is settled everything downstream follows from it. Both sides open a Bible, both will sit and talk about it for hours, and the fair place to start is with what Jehovah’s Witnesses teach in their own words rather than a version of it built by their critics.
How Jehovah’s Witnesses Put It Themselves
They use the name Jehovah on purpose, holding that God’s personal name belongs in the text and in worship. They teach that Jesus is God’s Son and the first thing God created, and they identify Him with Michael the archangel. They also hold that the holy spirit is not a person at all, but God’s active force. They expect 144,000 to reign with Christ in heaven while a great crowd lives forever on a restored earth. Christ’s return, they hold, is an invisible presence that has already begun. Their Governing Body sets teaching and practice for congregations everywhere, and they read from a translation of their own, the New World Translation.
That’s how they’d say it, and we’d rather hand you their own framing than a cartoon of it. They take the Bible seriously, they’ll knock on a stranger’s door to talk about it, and they immerse believing adults instead of sprinkling infants.
The Question Everything Else Hangs On
Here is the fault line. John opens his Gospel by placing the Word squarely on God’s side of it: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Not the first thing made. God.
One more thing is worth saying plainly, since a reader with a New World Translation in hand will notice it right away. Their Bible renders that last phrase differently: “the Word was a god.” The reason nearly every other translation doesn’t say that comes down to Greek word order. In the original, “God” sits before the verb and carries no article — a construction the New Testament regularly uses not to introduce a second, lesser deity but to describe what someone is by nature. John reaches for the identical construction three chapters later: “God is spirit” (John 4:24). Nobody takes that to mean God is one spirit among many. The same grammar carries the same weight in John 1:1.
Thomas arrived at the same place by a rougher road. He’d flatly refused to believe without seeing the wounds, and when he finally stood in front of the risen Christ the words came out of him: “Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’” (John 20:28). Jesus let it stand. A faithful Jew who had just called a created thing his God would’ve been stopped mid-sentence.
Paul leaves no wiggle room either: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). What we hold here at Christians in Honesdale is that Jesus is fully God, and that this isn’t a fine point for specialists. It decides what happened at the cross, and it decides who a Christian is actually trusting with his soul.
A Body, Not a Ghost
The second difference grows straight out of the first. We hold that Jesus came out of the grave bodily, and we hold it because He’d gone to some trouble to settle it for men who were sure they were looking at a ghost. “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). Then He asked them for something to eat.
A Crowd Nobody Could Count
Here is a pleasanter one. It is about hope. Scripture never describes a small quota admitted into God’s presence while the rest are kept out at a distance. John saw a crowd: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands” (Revelation 7:9). That is every nation, standing at the throne.
Nobody Hands Us a Ruling
People are often surprised to learn there is no head office anywhere above us. Our congregation would have its own elders based on qualifications from 1 Timothy 3, drawn from among our own members, caring for people whose names they know (1 Peter 5:2; Acts 14:23). No committee reviews a lesson before it’s taught, assigns us literature, or tells us what position to take. The Bible is the only authority we answer to, and we answer to it directly.
We are an independent congregation with no denomination and no headquarters standing behind us, which means we can’t speak for anybody but ourselves, and nobody speaks for us either.
Check It Against the Text Yourself
That cuts our direction too, and it should. If someone has been studying with you, the kindest thing you can do for both of you is to slow down and read the passages in context, in a Bible you’ve already got and already trust. The Bereans were praised for doing exactly that to the apostle Paul (Acts 17:11). Do it to us. Start with the first chapter of John and the last chapter of Luke, and give it the unhurried time a question this size deserves.
Sit With Us and Read It
If you’d like company while you work through it, we’d be glad to open the Bible with you and go at whatever speed suits you, with your questions setting the agenda. There’s nothing to join and nothing to buy. Ask us for a free Bible study, read a little about who we are, or send us a message first.
Our schedule:
Our building sits at 416 Main Street, Suite D, Honesdale, PA 18431. Park at the rear and use the back entrance.