Jehovah’s Witness Congregation Remembers Prince
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In the past few days, since Prince passed away, we’ve heard from many, many people — some close friends and collaborators, some mere admirers — about the ways in which the icon affected them. And now the Los Angeles Times has a fascinating piece about the way some of the people closest to Prince — his fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses — are remembering him.
Prince converted to the conservative, fringey Christian faith in 2001, and it seems as though his time in the church gave him a rare opportunity to be normal, to be just another person. Prince attended a Jehovah’s Witness congregation in St. Louis Park, a Minnesota suburb, and his fellow Witnesses referred to him as simply “Brother Nelson.” He never performed for the group; he merely sung along with prerecorded hymns with the rest of them. The rest of the church never treated him as anything special. “He seemed to want to be a normal person,” says one. “He felt like it was a safe place here,” says another.
Jehovah’s Witnesses famously go door-to-door to proselytize and hand out literature, and Prince famously did a bit of that around Minneapolis. The Times has a fun story from one Jewish couple who got one such random visit from Prince: “My first thought is, ‘Cool, cool, cool. He wants to use my house as a set. I’m glad! Demolish the whole thing! Start over!’… [But after he started to proselytize] I said, ‘You know what? You’ve walked into a Jewish household, and this is not something I’m interested in.'” He still stayed for 25 minutes and left them with a pamphlet.
