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The author reports on the observation of the communities of Italo-Brussels Jehovah's Witnesses over a 30-year period (research in 1976, 1996 and 2005). In the 1970s, "conversion" as the means of entry into a new religious community was dominant as a theme in the Kingdom Halls. Thirty years later, it is recruitment through kin and the "vécu" of kinship relations inside the religious enclaves which has become the main objective of these communities. The author analyses the processes in the composition of the socio-cultural basis and the structure of the intra-family relations in these communities between 1976 and 2005. He also tries to develop further the social network recruitment theories on this issue, not in order to object to the recruitment practices, but in order to show the changes that have taken place, and the appearance of "internal" cultural bias in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a society such as Belgium, most Igbo migrants of the 1990s soon became immigrants without papers. It was only after regularization campaigns (as in January 2000 in Belgium) that a significant number of them could be regularized to stay. This means that most of them had a very difficult time in the first years of their stay in Europe. This can best be described as a situation of anonymous liminality. That is the moment when Christianity and their cosmology enter their life in Europe. These help them in their self-rediscovery and reappraisal, as well as in their social reconnection. Liminality, traditional Igbo cosmology, an ethnicity profoundly mitigated by Christianity, and transnationalism are the four basic ideas for an understanding of the life practices of Igbo migrants in a Western society since the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1976 a survey was conducted among two Italo-Brussels congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses and the results compared with a number of autochthonous Dutch-speaking and French-speaking control groups. Towards the end of 1996 the author put the same questionnaire to the same two Italo--Brussels congregations as part of a wider survey about allochthonous religious and social networks in Brussels. The results show how the Italo-Brussels community of Jehovah's Witnesses has evolved from being a specific movement, which took advantage of first-generation immigration, into a community in which kinship--as a source of support and as a symbolic frame of reference--and a traditional family ideology are very much in evidence, but which henceforth will be increasingly sustained, on the one hand, by a second generation who have been born and brought up in the "Truth" and, on the other hand, by a network that is based on kinship and social proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of the Jehovah's Witnesses movement and immigration in continental Western Europe. In 1891 Pastor Russell visited Antwerp and Brussels. The preaching of the Watch-Tower message actually began in Charlerol, in 1901. By 1912 there were already study groups in Belgium. The war caused a serious break in these groups, and in 1918 there were only about five members left. However, between 1920 and 1924 a miner from Liege, called Poelmans, resumed the preaching, serving the area by bicycle. By 1938 there were twenty congregations in Belgium, but in the next few years difficulties arose due to a persecution by the Catholic Church. This was presumably because some witnesses refused to do military service. At the outbreak of the war there were about 20 Witnesses in the Genk area, and another group in Eisden. The group has kept expanding up to now, and there are congregations in Waterschei, Eisden, Winterslag and other areas. There were only about 50 publishers in Limburg after 1945. Today there are several congregations in that area. In 1945, 10,500 kilos of clothes and 15,000 shoes were sent to the Belgian Witnesses by their brothers in the U.S. At the first assembly after the war, 2,000 people gathered in Brussels, Belgium. By 1960 there were 7,000 publishers in Belgium and by 1976, 20,000 in 277 congregations.