Common Core in Mississippi: A Response to the Baptist Record

The Common Core Standards that are being rolled out in the states over the next year are receiving a lot of attention these days. The New York State Superintendent cancelled a series of town hall-style forums after the strongly antagonistic response he received at the first meeting.[1] Other states have experienced popular protest against the implementation of the Common Core standards, too:  North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Wisconsin, Washington, Michigan, and more have “Stop Common Core” organizations that are making noise in their respective state legislatures.

I have tended to avoid issues of education policy because of my strange position as both a public school teacher and a Baptist pastor. I am privileged to teach in the second-highest-rated district in the state of Mississippi. There are inherent conflicts of interest (and obvious risks) in speaking out about policies and legislation that affect public schools. However, The Baptist Record, the official newspaper of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, has published an article that has driven me over the edge.

Mr. Rob Chambers wrote a major piece for the Record on September 26^th.[2] Mr. Chambers is cited as a “consultant for the Mississippi Baptist Christian Action Commission.” Mr. Chambers is not a public school teacher or administrator, but his M.Div. from Southern Seminary gives him some clout on the ethics of the Common Core Standards.

I object, though, to Mr. Chambers’ analysis, conclusions, and rhetoric.

First, a note about the Common Core Standards. Common Core is not a plot by the Obama administration to take over state public education. Yes, Common Core is a product of a hybrid public/private initiative that had as its goal the elevation of our performance in education across the nation. However, this partnership is not a sinister cabal bent on taking away local freedom or authority when it comes to curriculum or instruction. The Common Core Standards are an attempt to set specific, meaningful goals for states (and therefore for districts) in mathematics and English skills. THERE ARE NO SPECIFIC CURRICULA INCLUDED IN THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS. What IS included is a list of objectives that look very similar to what we’re already teaching. However, Common Core has at its heart a motivation to make relevant connections between academic disciplines and to relate those disciplines to real-world experiences that will propel our students toward success in college and career.

The Common Core Standards do not tell teachers what to teach, nor do they provide some nation-wide standardized test for students to take (you know, like the ACT or SAT that we already use as the be-all and end-all nationwide standardized tests). Further, even though I agree with Mr. Chambers’ objection to Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eye being “recommended” by the Common Core English Standards, it must be pointed out that NO ONE is mandating the teaching of that or any other specific work in your child’s classroom. What is covered in a specific classroom is still up to the teacher, their department, their school, their district, and their state department of education. We must keep in mind that even with Common Core Standards being implemented perfectly and wholly, it’s still up to teachers to chose, execute, evaluate, and revise lessons.

Secondly, Mr. Chambers is emphasizing scientific language in an inappropriate way in making judgments about the Common Core Standards. In reference to a statement by Dr. Lynn House of the Mississippi Department of Education Mr. Chambers says, “This statement is a “statement of hypothesis.” Notice the phrase, “will do” and “will ensure.” Since these standards have never been tested, a casual reading of this would lead one to believe this statement is a tested, proven and factual statement. It is not.”[3] What Mr. Chambers is objecting to is the language of certainty in Dr. House’s description of Mississippi’s Common Core standards: “That’s exactly what Common Core State Standards Will do…They will ensure that Mississippi’s children are equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive…”[4] Dr. House is not declaring that she or anyone else has discovered the formula to make great students or citizens. Instead, Dr. House is stating what is perfectly in line with natural reason: if we achieve certain universal goals through our educational practice then we will have formed students into people ready for the next step, whether that is college or career.

Mr. Chambers seems to rely on the “scientific method” too much in his analysis. He says, “The primary problem is that the standards actually represent a hypothesis only. This means these standards have not been tested, there is no empirical data, and the outcome of the standards is at best an educated guess. Furthermore, in keeping with the “scientific method” that requires the testing of the hypothesis, there have been none in any US public school. Therefore, the standards is not a scientific theory, and there is no valid basis for any claim that these standards will work. Pure reason dictates otherwise. Neither are the standards scientifically valid because the standards have not been proven to be just as effective in one state as they are in another. The one shoe fits all approach will not work.”[5]

He is exactly right in saying that the Standards are not a scientific theory that is testable in a lab. Education policy is in a different category than scientific theory and testability. We cannot treat the goals of education as hypotheses to be tested. Instead, education policymakers examine the culture around them, assess the needs of students, compare those needs with the philosophical goals of education, and finally act in accordance with that complicated mixture of information.

The Common Core Standards are attempting to break the “assembly line” mentality that Mr. Chambers himself reflects in his analysis. Common Core aims to unify knowledge and demonstrate that the things we teach are not isolated, context-less units of useless knowledge. Rather, what we teach is essential for the pedagogical goal of helping shape young people into full-realized adults who are knowledgeable and (more importantly) capable in society. Mr. Chambers sounds like so many on the periphery of education that do not understand the complicated work of reacting to the needs of students as well as the demands of society.[6] Dr. House probably complicated the issue by using a metaphor (raising the bar on a high jump) to illustrate the intended outcomes of the Common Core Standards. Mr. Chambers needs to move beyond the metaphor and actually show what Common Core is: a set of un-scientific yet highly relevant guidelines to begin moving our schools toward excellence.

Further complicating the issue is the Christian perspective to education, specifically, that education should be about humanizing the students as much as it is about helping them understand God’s creation and their role in it. The Common Core Standards are certainly not designed with a specifically Christian perspective, but they do encourage outcomes that a Christian educator should be able to support, that is, that the idea that there is a universality to truth, and that all things “fit together.”

I wish that Mr. Chambers had used his article to demonstrate a Christian analysis of the Common Core Standards; it was an article in The Baptist Record, after all.  There is certainly a Christian perspective on the issue, and there is even more specifically a Baptist perspective on the Standards’ implementation. Instead, Mr. Chambers laments the secular political process and resorts to scare tactics intended to stir up the “parents and grandparents” of the children who will be affected by the new Common Core Standards.

Finally, to Mississippi.  Common Core is not the great savior of public education in our state, but it is also not the great doom of our schools either. As one recently retired Mississippi teacher told me, “there will be something new in five years, just watch.” I am neither excited that Common Core is being implemented in Mississippi, nor am I frightened that it’s coming. I will be required to learn a new way to show that I am teaching up to the standards that Mississippi requires, and I will teach every student the mathematics they need to understand the world as I have done every year.

Mississippi has an awful record when it comes to public education when compared to the rest of the nation. We are 48^th in major metrics (the ones that are scientifically demonstrable).[7] There is no plausible spin on the rankings that makes our public education system look good as a state.  The Common Core Standards are an attempt to address our poor performance. Common Core is not a set of lessons plans dropped out of the sky; it is an attempt to bring Mississippi education into the better-performing landscape of American Public Education.

Race is certainly an issue in Mississippi public education, but Mr. Chambers is suggesting that the MDE’s plan to help lower-performing race-based subgroups reach the level of the highest subgroup is cause to throw out Common Core Standards. Again, at no point will the Common Core Standards, let alone the MDE Annual Measurement Objective determine what is in a teacher’s lesson plan. The MDE tries to make statistical measurements to predict testing outcomes for reasons far beyond the actual teaching events in classrooms across the state. Students of every race are taught the same lessons plans and given the same assessments. If racially motivated instruction or grading is occurring, then the school or district should correct it. Do not blame Common Core for the something completely unrelated to it.

To conclude, Mr. Chambers achieved little more than to frighten the readership of The Baptist Record. He concludes by suggesting that the Mississippi legislature delay implementation of the Common Core Standards and that the Standards represent a violation of the 10^th Amendment. This is pure folly. The States have entered into an agreement with the Federal Government who, in turn, had entered into an agreement with private organizations and businesses to develop the Common Core Standards. Besides, we weren’t doing all that well on our own. He also comments that, “A starting point could be that government officials work together in delaying further implementation of the standards and related components. Then, work together in full disclosure with the citizens and develop a solution that is just, fair and equitable.”[8] The development of the Common Core Standards have not been a hidden, secretive thing; they have been in process for years and only now that they’re about to be implemented are people being encouraged to participate in the political process of their development and launch.

Mr. Chambers means well, I’m sure, but his article produces more heat than light, I fear. Stirring up Mississippi Baptists over issues they shouldn’t be afraid of is shameful. There is no sinister plot to take over Mississippi education. What should concern Baptists in Mississippi is that it takes quality teachers (that is, men and women who seek the humanization of their students based on the fact that their students are made in the image of God) to make quality schools. No standards or curricula can make up for what faithful men and women can do in the classrooms. That is what should concern Mr. Chambers: the ethics of being a teacher in a poorly educated state.

Let’s not get too excited about Common Core in Mississippi. The good news is that our test scores from the 2012-2013 school year will be frozen for three years while the Common Core Framework is set up, tested, and revised. We don’t have to begin a grassroots political campaign to repeal Obamacare Common Core. We don’t need to take an absolutist position; we need to understand that the power to teach is still in the hands of the teachers and that Common Core Standards put into words and goals those things that we, as teachers, have wanted all along - student success.

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[1] http://www.newsday.com/long-island/education/state-ed-chief-urged-to-slow-common-core-1.6261909

[2] http://www.christianaction.com/blog/comments/ms_education_common_core/

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, non-cited comment by Dr. Lynn House in Chambers’ article.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Tony Johnson comments of some education departments at the university level, “Educational philosophers and the field of educational philosophy has suffered for failing to embrace this [improving educational practice at all levels and in all places] role. By considering themselves engaged in the premier educational discipline, educational philosophers stand above and apart from others investigating educational practice. In attempting to become as academic as possible, educational philosophers alienated their natural colleagues and never gained full acceptance by academic or “real” philosophers. In hitching their wagon to the academic, professionalized vision of philosophy, educational philosophers not only denied their reason to be, but ensured for themselves a lonely, inconsequential professional or academic life.” This professionalization has trickled down to the level of policy-makers and certainly to political pseudo-experts. They want machines that drive the industry of education when no such machination exists. See Johnson, Tony, Discipleship or Pilgrimage? The Educator’s Quest for Philosophy. New York: SUNY Press, 1995, 75.

[7] http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2013/state_report_cards.html?intc=EW-QC13-EWH

[8] Chambers, “Common Core Education in Mississippi.”

On Welfare

On Welfare

Delivered at Madison Chapel, Madison, MS

The 21^st Sunday of Pentecost

In his 2011 book The Triumph of Christianity, Rodney Stark explains how the great story of Christianity is one of progressive consolidation, reformation, and differentiation.[1] He concludes that Christianity’s triumph is history is a function of its adaptability and portability: the Gospel has been communicated in so many places, languages, and societies that it has been able to survive persecution, progress, and patronage.

Triumph as a result of Christianity’s need for survival has become a now-fading ethos of triumphalism. There can be little doubt that the world we created in America has either crumbled or never was real to begin with. We are left in an unfamiliar position: the church in America is not accustomed to holding a position of declining cultural influence.

But are we actually in a period of decline? The Gospel and its ecclesial expressions are more prevalent than ever, but these expressions are not “our” type of church, so we perceive that it is the Church, and therefore the Gospel that is failing.[2] Although the discussion and sensationalism of the “marginalization of Christianity” is false, we do find ourselves in a new place, a no-man’s land between what we thought was important and what is next. This “margin” is where we find Jesus in his encounter with the ten lepers.

As we have no doubt heard, leprosy was as much a social disease as it was a physical ailment in the ancient world. Contracting any number of skin diseases was cause enough to be separated from one’s community. The experience of losing the functioning community was grotesquely paralleled by the loss of physical functions brought about by the disease. Once these lepers had been excluded from those things they knew, they were forced into a new community somewhere else and with someone else.

In the masterfully-crafted Lukan narrative we encounter Jesus, who is between “merely” preaching, teaching, and healing and the great turmoil that will surround him upon his arrival into Jerusalem, the city to which he has “set his face.”[3] It is this margin, this in-between-ness that serves as a theme for the passage. The lepers are between societies, moving from absolute exclusion toward (we hope) reception and welcome. Jesus is moving from the rural ministry of Galilee toward the cross. For this moment, though, all of these characters are “between Samaria and Galilee.”

Jesus is here acting and moving between culture and religion. He is speaking between both so that both may hear and know that the in-breaking Kingdom of God is something more than either. It is not such a leap to suggest that the Church in our beloved Mississippi is, at this very time, in a place of “margins” and between-ness.

The setting of our Baptist churches in Mississippi is a convergence of the triumph and triumphalism of Evangelical Christianity. We are living out the consequences of the two great forces of these triumphs: mission and dominance.

Baptists have been motivated from the very start by a conviction to share the Gospel to the entire world.[4] We have shed our tendency toward restorationism, that is, the belief that the Baptist way is the only way to be the true Church, but we hold to the idea that we are a faithful representation of the New Testament Church and that evangelism and discipleship are the central tasks of that Church.[5]

Because of our powerful conviction to evangelize we have accomplished great things as Baptists. Our sense of mission (not exactly “missions” or “missional”) has urged us into all the world. We have planted and supported churches and ministries the world over that have helped millions of people confess Christ as Lord. We have worked for the relief of people in need by providing food, shelter, and medical care in the name of Christian charity. We have dug wells, build homes and hospitals, supported businesses, and helped progress where we could, knowing that the work of Kingdom ministry is both spiritual and physical.

Our mission has transformed into dominance, though, especially in our own State. We have looked upon our God-given successes and interpreted them as positions to be defended. We have looked upon the broader culture and have seen something to conquer.

We Baptists have lived into the worst definition of triumphalism, “a sense of pride that renders [us] insensitive to [our] own limitations and unappreciative of the contributions of others…[it] occurs whenever a church identifies the salvific work of God through the Church of Jesus Christ too closely with its own ecclesial life.”[6]

We exhibit “Evangelistic Triumphalism” when we “define the mission of the church almost exclusively in term[s] of evangelism…these churches under-invest in the nurture of new believers into the life-long pilgrimage of Christian discipleship.”[7] This type of triumphalism creates us-versus-them categories: “[it] celebrates its effectiveness and success in communicating the Gospel with American society, but it devalues the summons to continue to break down the walls of alienation that divide people inside and outside the church…it fails to…become the presence of Christ in the world.”[8]

We are also guilty of exhibiting “Counter-Cultural Triumphalism.” This shameful tendency pits one church or denomination against a cultural exponent, trend, or even another denomination. We “fall prey to triumphalism in the celebration of [our] obedience to [our] lofty vision of the Kingdom of God, a vision exercising judgment against all systems of worldly power as well as against those churches adapting their lifestyle according to indigenous cultural forces.”[9]

Evangelical Christianity holds sway in our state, but as it has settled into a de facto dominance of our culture it has shown its own faults. The Christian triumphalism that we have inherited can only end in ways that inhibit the Kingdom of God.

We can dominate the culture. We can exclude, persecute, and boycott. We can plant ourselves so firmly that we cannot move no matter how hard the Spirit blows. We will lose the Gospel of the Cross when we aim to rule.

We can retreat. We can develop the Church into a seceded territory within a condemned culture. We can be isolated in our certainty of truth. We can build a pristine Baptist ghetto where we are right and the world can go to hell. Our triumph, or rather our bitter defeat and withdrawal, means the loss of our God-commissioned witness to the world.

The false reality of Christian triumphalism needs to be replaced with a kingdom-specific perspective on our role in this or any State. If the church finds a true home in the margin, the no-man’s land, then our ideas of either dominion or retreat must be abandoned for the good of that same Church.

Jeremiah’s letter to the Exiles is an essential case study for such a re-evaluation of our more authentic life as a Baptist church. The captives who have been taken to Babylon lived a highly pressurized life on the margin. They were expected to assimilate into the broader Babylonian culture, much as we see demonstrated with Daniel and his friends. They were pulled into a choice between becoming more “hard shell” and preserving their Temple-less religion or losing their identity as a people called by God. Certainly this choice was not one black-and-white decision but was rather the understandable consequence of the innumerable life choices each exiled family made.

Our great fear is that as we accommodate to the broader culture that we will lose whatever distinctiveness we have as Baptists, a long-held and fundamental belief that persists in our denominational psyche. If we hear the words of Jeremiah to “seek the good of the city” we imagine theological liberalism, a loss of distinctive identity, and a Church as transient as the culture around it.[10] The exiles feared the same things that drive our neighbors and us into the hegemony of triumphalism, that is, that the calling of God will be subsumed into a generic, American Christian civil religion.

Christian triumphalism tempts us to pray for “the good old days” rather than for “the good of the city.” “The temptation, all too easy, is to cling to the dream that this is a passing phase, quickly to be reversed; or worse to demonize the wider society and to cut oneself off in a counter-cultural ghetto…The future of the Church, its wellbeing and welfare, will be wrapped up with its ability to work for and to contribute to the welfare of the society in which it is set.”[11]

We can see the shifting cultural tides as a new Babylonian Captivity of the Church, prating for either God’s swift return or God’s punishing justice on our “enemies.” This is certainly the stance of the fundamentalists, who would rather burn it down or shut it down than work, truly work for the good of any city. The lack of compromise seems to be the faithful stance - the Gospel or nothing! - but in fact it is a symptom of the fear and paranoia that we are losing the power we never really had.

Let us be a people about the welfare of the city. We need to re-imagine the church’s role and responsibility in our present setting. Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles stings the hearts of those who see “fighting the good fight” as digging in against the world around us. It is a God-ordained call to give up on the good-old-days and to get on with the holy business of doing life together.

Those who see the exile as a punishment for faithlessness need to re-evaluate their setting; it is better to understand the exile as a consequence and as a further revision to God’s dealings with God’s fickle people. To pray for the welfare of Babylon is to invite danger into our hearts; for certainly as we ourselves invest in the good of our own city we run the risk of interacting with people who disagree with our most precious faith.

What is a Baptist church’s role in the midst of a city and state like ours? Certainly it is to maintain those things that make us Baptists to begin with. We will preserve our conviction that the proclamation of the Gospel, though our lives and words, is foremost in our identity. We will pray for our city, its works and its wants. We will participate in it so far as our consciences will allow. We will hold up the Gospel of Jesus Christ and bear witness to that Gospel in our lives, words and deeds.

We have not been taken into exile, and we are not a persecuted minority; however, we do find ourselves in a season of transition. Will we embrace the city springing up around us or will we pray for our own triumph?

My vision of the church in Mississippi during this time of transition is of a group of disciples who abandon both their ability to dominate and their desire to secede. The church in this way neither leads the culture nor follows it, but rather participates in the wider culture on the church’s own terms.

I wonder about those 10 lepers. At least one of them had no business going up to Jerusalem to the priests - he was a Samaritan. Jesus healed these margin-men, but the joy of that moment goes even beyond that cure. The 9 lepers went on to the priests and were restored to everything they had ever missed and remembered. The one leper eventually went to the city, but he went within the entourage of faith in Jesus, who was going to Jerusalem to show what God was doing in the midst of the Old-Time Religion.

Doing the spiritually difficult work of being a part of the broader community means following some of the forms and patterns we are accustomed to, but it also means holding on to them loosely as we follow our God into the world. Let us seek the welfare of the city, the place where God is at work. In doing so we will find our welfare, for when everything else is gone, we should be a people near to our God.

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[1] Stark, Rodney, The Triumph of Christianity, Grand Rapids: Harper Collins, 2011.

[2] One of many examples of this scenario is the proliferation of Assemblies of God congregations. See http://www.religionnews.com/2013/08/09/assemblies-of-god-defies-denominational-decline.

[3] Cf. Luke 9:51.

[4] I would focus here on Baptists in Mississippi, although this statement is surely true for all Baptists historically. Leonard, Weaver, and many others have written extensively on Baptist origins and fundamental identifiers. For the purposes of this sermon, see Leavell, Z.T. and T. J. Bailey, A Complete History of Mississippi Baptists from the Earliest Times (2 vols.), Jackson, MS: MS Baptist Publishing Co., 1904.

[5] I would include ministries of relief and mercy in these two broader categories, lest I be accused of short-circuiting my own argument below.

[6] Tupper, Frank E., “Biblicism, Exclusivism, Triumphalism: The Travail of Baptist Identity,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 29 no 4, 411-426.

[7] Ibid, 421.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 422.

[10] “Theological Liberalism” is probably a misnomer. See Roger Olson’s article on the subject: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/10/what-is-liberal-theology

[11] Riches, John, “Sermon on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7,” The Expository Times 118 no 12, 600-601.

What Is, Was, and Could Be

The prophetic role of the preacher is something that needs to be emphasized in Baptist life. We have become something other than prophets in recent years; I read and hear more sermons that are historical explorations of Scripture or moral lessons suitable for children than I do those that strike me as prophetic.

What is prophetic preaching? Certainly it is not the pop-culture-defined telling of the future, as though the preacher was some sort of Christian Nostradamus. Prophetic preaching is more like the things to which Jeremiah was commissioned in his calling: “…to pluck up and break down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”[1] The preacher is to be a prophet in that the preacher is called to point out those things that should be rejected, torn down, and thrown out as well as to present those things that should be built up and planted.

I do not mean the contemporary “vision casting” that so many refer to in church leadership literature.[2] Rather, the preacher is tasked with the great responsibility of moving beyond the lessons of Scripture to the nature of the Kingdom of God as it is being formed in the local congregation.

This type of preaching is firstly an act of identification in which the preacher points out those things that are worthy of examination. Not everything is worthy of such identification; Baptists have a sad habit of emphasizing cultural and ecclesial issues that have little bearing on the Kingdom to the exclusion of those things that would truly bring that Kingdom in a more present reality in the congregation. Prophetic preaching is an act of contrast in which the preacher reveals the dissonance between the way things are and the way things could and should be under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.[3]

Secondly this type of preaching is an act of evaluation. We are called to give insightful, critical, and thorough analysis to those things that are truly worth our sermon time. We are commissioned to point and say, “this is good!” or “this must go!” or even “this is sinful and a shame!” More to my overall point though, our preaching should move in focus from the general and the broad to the focused and the specific issues of our congregation.[4] We should be about the work of evaluating the identity and ministry of our congregation, thus bringing to light the assumptions, implications, and consequences of our previous choices and actions as a church.

The final act of prophetic preaching is proscription. Jeremiah’s commission to “build and to plant” is certainly a command to develop the new and the previously un-thought-of. With the Spirit’s leading from within the congregation the preacher can describe those things that are not yet real and true in the church. We are commissioned to preach more than the negative of issues, the ills of society, or the sinfulness of culture. We are called to point toward something new, something that has not yet been experienced by our people.

Allow me to illustrate. In the first Superman (1978) the hero spends time in a Fortress of Solitude wherein he interacts with recorded holograms of his father and mother who teach him about his heritage and his destiny to be a hero. At the time of its release the idea of a hologram or a realistic way to store such a massive amount of recorded data was fantastic and certainly “alien” to audiences. By the time The Man of Steel was released in 2013, the Fortress of Solitude was more technologically appropriate for the digital age. Instead of crystals that contained recorded images, Superman was taught by an interactive Artificial Intelligence that was a disembodied version of his father.

What was alien and beyond the realities of audiences in the late 1970s was insufficiently advanced and alien for people in 2013. The same task, that is, the contrast of Superman’s native technology and that of contemporary America, could not be accomplished with holograms and recordings because we have such things. They have become normal or at least plausible to us. The new movie introduced technology that is still beyond us - a self-actualizing artificial intelligence that is essentially the preserved personality of someone long dead. That’s something audiences find sufficiently “out there.”

Prophetic preaching must point out these differences. Our old modes of thinking, our assumptions from generations long passed, and our models of ministry need examination and evaluation as much as our moral positions do. Prophetic preaching is, at its heart, the same work that Jeremiah was called to do: point out those things that need to go, tear them down, and then replace them with new, good, growing things.

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[1] Cf. Jeremiah 1:10.

[2] I’m thinking of George Barna, Andy Stanley, Ed Young, John C. Maxwell, and Bill Hybels. Each of these men (and many others) emphasizes the development of a vision to be described and explained to the congregation by the pastor or other leader. This is an importation of a secular business model and business language into church leadership and is not what I mean by prophetic preaching. There is certainly a place for this idea of developing, casting, and refining a ministerial vision, but it is most often not the pulpit.

[3] Fundamental to my point is that preaching is not about the preacher. I am often tempted to use the pulpit to show off my skills at research or oratory or to emphasize some obscure point I may have uncovered in preparation. Preaching should instead be focused on the congregation and on encouraging transformation in them.

[4] I’m not talking about the traditional Baptist practice of “stepping on toes” or calling out sinners in the congregation. Although that sounds like an exciting service!