'I've been looking forward to this day,' said one Jehovah's Witness memer. 'When I rang the first doorbell this morning, a total calm came over me. I was back where I needed to be.'
Dan Sideris is reflected in a front storm door Thursday as he and his wife, Carrie Sideris, of Newton, Mass., return to door-to-door visits as Jehovah's Witnesses in Boston. After more than two and a half years on hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, members are reviving a religious practice that the faith considers crucial and cherished.
In the Jamaica Plain neighborhood on the south side of Boston, Dan and Carrie Sideris spent a balmy morning walking around knocking on doors and ringing bells. Dan Sideris said he had been apprehensive about evangelizing in person in"a changed world," but the experience erased any traces of doubt. Jehovah's Witnesses suspended door-knocking in the early days of the pandemic's onset in the United States, just as much of the rest of society went into lockdown too. The organization also ended all public meetings at its 13,000 congregations nationwide and canceled 5,600 annual gatherings worldwide — an unprecedented move not taken even during the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide.
Even in pre-pandemic times, door-knocking ministry came with anxiety because Witnesses never knew how they would be received at any given home. In 2022 that's even more the case, and evangelizers are being advised to be mindful that lives and attitudes have changed.The organization is not mandating masks or social distancing, leaving those decisions to each individual.
But getting back to door-knocking, considered not just a core belief but also an effective ministry, is a big step toward"a return to normal," Hendriks said. Gomas and his wife and two daughters have all learned Hmong in order to better reach out to members of that community, and residents are often pleasantly surprised to open their doors to fluent speakers of their language.In Acworth, Georgia, Nathan Rivera said he has greatly missed seeing people's faces and reading their expressions.
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