The Governing Body Assumes Direct Rule Through Six New Committees

Early in December 1975, the full Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses met at the movement's Brooklyn, New York headquarters to consider reorganizing its own authority, and on 4 December 1975 it unanimously adopted the recommendations that its chairman read to the resident Bethel family on 12 December; the change took effect on 1 January 1976, twenty five years after Stalin deported Jehovah's Witnesses to Siberia in 1951, already recorded here, and fifteen years before Jehovah's Witnesses were legalized following the Soviet collapse in 1991, also recorded here. Six standing committees, the Chairman's, Writing, Teaching, Service, Publishing and Personnel Committees, began functioning on 1 January 1976, each headed by a chairman serving a one year term, and from 1 February 1976 branch offices abroad likewise operated under their own local committees answerable to the Governing Body rather than to a single resident overseer. The reorganization ended the arrangement, unbroken since Charles Taze Russell founded the movement's magazine in 1879, already recorded here, under which the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society's president held final say over doctrine and administration alike; authority passed instead to the Governing Body as a whole, vested for the first time with the power to rule on doctrine collectively. The Society's own 1993 history called it one of the most significant organizational readjustments in the movement's modern history, and M. James Penton's independent scholarly account of the same period reads the change as the clearest institutional break the movement made with the single president model it had carried from Russell through Joseph Rutherford and Nathan Knorr.