Jehovah's Witnesses are a worldwide preaching community expecting God's Kingdom under Christ to end this system at Armageddon, worshipping Jehovah alone, refusing blood transfusions, military service, and political involvement.
Jehovah's Witnesses grew from the Bible Student movement of Charles Taze Russell in the 1870s, organized under Joseph Rutherford, who gave them their name in 1931 and their distinctive discipline. Known in nearly every country for door-to-door preaching with The Watchtower, they have also been banned, imprisoned, and sent to camps for refusing military service and political salute — a record of neutrality maintained under Nazi, Soviet, and many other regimes.
Ultimate Reality
Jehovah is the one true God, the Creator, whose name the Witnesses restore to the center of worship; Jesus is his first creation, Michael the archangel, God's agent in creation and now reigning king; the holy spirit is God's active force, not a person. The Trinity is rejected as unscriptural — a doctrine this movement reads as the mark of Christendom's apostasy.
The Human Condition
The dead are unconscious, awaiting resurrection; there is no immortal soul and no hell of torment — the wicked face annihilation. Since 1914, in the movement's chronology, Christ has ruled invisibly from heaven and Satan has been cast down to the earth, which explains the world's troubles as the last days of a system about to be replaced.
Knowledge and Truth
The Bible, in the movement's New World Translation, is God's inspired word; its understanding is dispensed progressively through 'the faithful and discreet slave' — the Governing Body in Warwick, New York — whose publications channel 'the truth' to the congregations. Light gets brighter (Proverbs 4:18), so teachings may be adjusted, and loyalty to the organization is the form obedience takes.
Right and Wrong
The Kingdom's subjects are trained now: preaching is every Witness's duty, meetings are study, and conduct excludes blood transfusions (on the ground of the biblical command to abstain from blood), military service, voting and office, birthdays and the festivals of Christendom, and association with disfellowshipped persons, including family — the movement's most costly discipline.
Human Destiny
Armageddon will destroy the present system; 144,000 anointed Christians reign with Christ in heaven, while a great crowd of others survive into, or are resurrected onto, a paradise earth to live forever under the Kingdom. A thousand-year reign will perfect humanity, after which death itself is abolished and Jehovah's sovereignty stands vindicated before the universe.
The Conversation
Witnesses ask trinitarian Christians to produce the doctrine from Scripture in so many words, and they press all churches on Christendom's wars: how can Christians kill Christians across a border and call it faithfulness? Other Christians ask in return about the movement's own dates, its discipline of shunning, and whether authority concentrated in one body can survive its own claim that light keeps getting brighter.