The Jehovah's Witnesses' secret elders' manual leaked online in 2019

On February 5, 2019, one of Jehovah's Witnesses' most closely held internal documents appeared online — reportedly within minutes of being distributed to elders themselves. It was the 2019 edition of Shepherd the Flock of God, the confidential 274-page manual that instructs congregation elders on how to run the organization's internal disciplinary system.^[1]

The manual is not sold or shown to ordinary members. It governs the machinery outsiders rarely see: how elders convene the judicial committees that weigh accusations of serious wrongdoing, how the requirement of two witnesses is applied, the grounds and procedure for disfellowshipping a member, and how allegations — including of child sexual abuse — are to be handled.^[1] Its publication put that machinery on the public record.

The leak was posted by JW Leaks and made available through FaithLeaks, the whistleblower platform run by the Truth and Transparency Foundation, the group behind the earlier MormonLeaks.^[1] The document itself showed how tightly the organization guards such material: elders were told that physical copies were "wrapped to ensure confidentiality" and delivered only to each congregation's coordinator, and the 2019 edition instructed them to destroy older guidance outright — "any printed or electronic copies of such documents should be destroyed," it said of a discontinued index of elders' letters.^[1] The edition also signaled a move to semiannual digital revisions, a sign of how actively the organization keeps its disciplinary rules current, and how much of that guidance it prefers to keep out of ordinary members' hands.^[1]

The organization did not treat the disclosure as harmless. In 2020, Watch Tower brought a copyright action against the Truth and Transparency Foundation and its founders over the reproduction of its copyrighted works, a case later settled.^[1] Separately, the internal manual reached the public through official channels too: a 2020 edition was entered into a United States federal court record in connection with a subpoena dispute.^[1] Critics had long argued that the secrecy of the manual was itself part of the problem: rank-and-file Witnesses were bound by a disciplinary code they were never permitted to read, judged by rules they could not consult. For an organization whose internal law is ordinarily known only to its elders, the leaks ended that asymmetry — anyone willing to look could now read exactly how the Jehovah's Witnesses judge, and expel, their own.