About This Forum

February, 2016

The purpose of Beroean Pickets – JW.org Reviewer is to provide a place for honest-hearted Jehovah’s Witnesses to gather to examine the published (and broadcast) teachings of the Organization in the light of Bible Truth.  This site is an off-shoot of our original site, Beroean PIckets (www.meletivivlon.com).

It was established in 2012 as a Bible Research forum.

I should pause here to give you a little background.

I was serving as the coordinator of the body of elders in my local congregation at the time.  I am in my late sixties, “raised in the truth” (a phrase every JW will understand) and have spent a significant portion of my adult life serving where the “need was great” (another JW term)  in two countries in South America as well as a foreign language circuit back in my native land.  I have worked closely with two branch offices and understand the inner workings of the “theocratic bureaucracy”.   I have seen many of the failings of men, up to the highest levels of the Organization, but always excused such things as “human imperfection”.  I realize now that I should have been paying more attention to Jesus’ words at Mt 7:20, but that is water under the bridge.  Truth be told, I overlooked all these things because I was sure we had the truth. Of all religions that call themselves Christian, I firmly believed that we alone stuck to what the Bible taught and did not promote the teachings of men.

All that changed for me in 2010 when the new teaching of “overlapping generations” came out to explain Matthew 24:34.  No Scriptural foundation was given.  This was obviously a fabrication.  For the first time I began to wonder about our other teachings.  I thought, “If they could make this up, what else have they made up?”

A good friend was a little further along in the process of awakening to the truth than I and we had many animated discussions.

I wanted to know more and I wanted to find other Jehovah’s Witnesses whose love for truth gave them the courage to question what we had been taught.

I picked the name Beroean Pickets because Beroeans had the noble-minded attitude to “trust but verify”.  “Pickets” was the result of an anagram of “skeptics”.  We should all be skeptical of any teaching of men.  We should always “test the inspired expression.” (1 John 4:1)  A picket is the soldier that goes out on point or stands guard at the periphery of the encampment.  I felt a certain kinship with those given such an assignment as I ventured out to learn the truth.

I chose the alias “Meleti Vivlon” by getting the Greek transliteration of “Bible Study” and then reversing the order of the words.  The domain name, www.meletivivlon.com, seemed appropriate at the time because all I wanted was to find a group of JW friends to engage in deep bible study and research, something not possible in the congregation where free thinking is strongly discouraged.

I still believed at that point that we were the one true faith.  However, as research progressed, I found that virtually every teaching peculiar to Jehovah’s Witnesses was unscriptural.  (Rejection of the Trinity, Hellfire and the immortal soul is not unique to Jehovah’s Witnesses.)

As a result of the hundreds of research articles produced over the past four years, a growing community of Jehovah’s Witnesses have joined our once-little website. All those who have joined us and who directly support our web site, contribute research, and write articles, have served as elders, pioneers, and worked at the branch level.

When Jesus departed, he did not commission his disciples to do research.  He commissioned them to make disciples for him and to bear witness about him to the world. (Mt 28:19; Ac 1:8)  As more and more of our JW brothers and sisters found us, it became apparent that more was being asked of us.

Neither I, nor the brothers and sisters now working with me, have any desire to found a new religion.  I do not want anyone to focus on me.  We can see all too well by what is happening in the Organization just how dangerous to one’s spiritual health and relationship with God it can be focus is put on men.  Therefore, we shall continue to emphasize only God’s word and encourage all to draw closer to our heavenly Father.