Jehovah's Witnesses splinter groups

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Jehovah's Witnesses
Overview Organizational structure Governing Body Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society Corporations History Bible Student movement Leadership dispute Splinter groups Doctrinal development Unfulfilled predictions Demographics By country
Beliefs Practices Salvation Eschatology The 144,000 Faithful and discreet slave Hymns God's name Blood Discipline Literature The Watchtower Awake! New World Translation List of publications Bibliography Places Kingdom Hall Gilead School
People Watch Tower presidents W. H. Conley C. T. Russell J. F. Rutherford N. H. Knorr F. W. Franz M. G. Henschel D. A. Adams Robert Ciranko Formative influences William Miller Henry Grew George Storrs N. H. Barbour John Nelson Darby Notable former members Raymond Franz Olin Moyle
Criticism Criticism Handling child sex abuse Unfulfilled predictions
Opposition Persecution in Nazi Germany Supreme Court cases by country
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A number of splinter groups have separated from Jehovah's Witnesses since 1931 after members broke affiliation with the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Earlier group defections from the Watch Tower Society, most of them between 1917 and 1931, had resulted in a number of religious movements forming under the umbrella term of the Bible Student movement.

After 1931, some isolated groups of Jehovah's Witnesses came to distrust instruction from outside the local area. Some preferred their autonomy even after persecution and isolation abated, such as in Germany following World War II, in Romania following the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and in the former USSR following the Cold War. Beginning in the 1990s, other former Witnesses used Internet technologies to group themselves around shared ideas such as numerical analysis of the Bible, or a wish to embrace some but not all of Jehovah's Witness beliefs and practices.