136: Helping Small Churches Thrive | Interview with Karl Vaters

Listen in as the top leading experts in small church ministry, Laurie Acker & Karl Vaters, discuss the church growth movement, post-Covid impact, and the future of smaller congregations.

Connect with Karl Vaters:
www.karlvaters.com

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Transcript

Laurie Acker: 0:01

Hey, this is Laurie Acker, welcome to the small church ministry podcast. Hey, welcome back to another episode of the small church ministry podcast. Super special guest today, Carl Vaders is joining us, and if you haven't heard of him or read his books yet, you need to get on his list, because he is like, I guess, before we started what we were doing, he was like, the guru. If small churches like, he was the one that people wanted to speak from, speak to and hear about what's happening in small churches. And I know Carl has a lot of stories to share just about his personal life and what he's doing now. But as we jump in, Carl, do you just want to introduce yourself? Like, if people actually say, like, Who are you and what do you do? What do you say?

Karl Vaters: 0:54

Well, I don't use the word jewelry. I am a I've been a pastor for over 40 years. I've pastored small churches for that entire time, and now, for the last 10 plus years, I have been helping to create, find and distribute as many small church specific resources as I can find. But I specifically am in the pastoral space, because that's my experience 40 years as a pastor, some of the frustrations of a church not getting bigger and then realizing, Wait a minute, maybe there's some value to it being small. And maybe the fact that 90% of the churches in the world are under 200 maybe that's not a problem to fix. Maybe that's a part of God's strategy, and we should get on board with that. And so I try to help encourage small church pastors and then give them small church specific resources as much as I can. I

Laurie Acker: 1:45

love that, and I love that you even just focused on maybe it's not a problem to fix. I was just talking to a group of pastors and but that's what we talked about. You know, sometimes we're just focused on the wrong problem and we're looking at the the numbers as being the problem, and taking our focus there, I think sometimes takes our focus off what God's actually doing in our spaces. So Carl, in your 40 years of pastoral experience, all in small churches, has your, how has your How have your beliefs about small church ministry? How have they evolved? Like you used to think this, and now you think this,

Karl Vaters: 2:19

yeah, that's really kind of the foundation of this entire ministry of helping small churches thrive. I, for the first 25 of those 40 years, I pursued the church growth paradigm. I was, I was one of the last classes to graduate from Bible College under kind of an old school way of pastoral training where we were taught how to be a pastoral presence, how to teach well and how to pastor well. I never heard I never had a class on church growth. I never had a conversation about church growth. I never heard the term church growth when I was in Bible college. But within about five years after I was out, everything shifted, and everything was for that. And I saw that and went, Okay, I gotta learn some new stuff, and so I unlearned the old, I relearned the new, and I tried to apply the church growth principles into the situations that I was in. And while I gained some benefit from it, and while there were some good principles that I was grateful for the result of numerical increase at the pace and at the size that appeared to be promised never materialized for me. And I got to the point where I almost left pastoral ministry, because everybody kept telling me, all healthy things grow. If it's not growing, there must be a sign of a problem. And my church wasn't getting bigger than these certain, you know, fixed numbers. And so I thought, I must. I think the church is healthy, but it's not growing. So I must be missing something. I must not have a clue. And so I almost left pastoral ministry until I looked around and realized, okay, maybe this isn't the problem we've been taught that it is. And so my mindset had to shift. I had to change from all healthy things grow to different types of growth happen in different ways, and not all growth is numerical. And that shift was not easy to make, but when I did start making it, I just had to write it all down, and then I started putting it out for others. And thought, maybe somebody else is in the same boat as I am. And it turns out, there's a whole lot of pastors who are in that boat of frustration, trying to fix a problem that isn't a problem. And so that's where the ministry came, and that's how I ended up in this space. Was through those those seasons of frustration, and then coming out the other side and realizing that God did not made it make a mistake when he placed me where he

Laurie Acker: 4:35

placed that is truly profound, right there, just to say God didn't make a mistake when he placed me where he placed me. And if anybody's listening right now and you're feeling like, Oh, I'm in the wrong place, like, like, let that kind of soak in a little bit. Because when you talked about how hard the mindset shift was, I think that is true for for all of us in whatever mindset we're hanging on to change is hard. Our brains don't change it really quickly. Changing culture is hard. Right? But when you said all, all growth is not numerical, the other thing that popped in my into my head, was, all growth is not even healthy. Like, have you seen growth that wasn't healthy, whether it's in your space or other spaces? Because I certainly have, and I think it's, it's so difficult, because we look at growth like, oh, they must be doing something, right? And when it comes down into it, sometimes there's really unhealthy things in church growth.

Karl Vaters: 5:27

Yeah, there very definitely is, I want to say up front, I am not anti big church at all. I love churches of all sizes. And so there are, there are many churches that have grown very large and have done so in very, very great but yeah, I have seen, I think we've all seen unhealthy growth when the growth is built on the celebrity of the pastor, or the growth is built on putting programs and events before biblical discipleship. Most of the time when we are discipling people, discipleship and growth are not against each other. They they can go hand in hand, but there are times when we have a choice where, okay, I can either disciple go. I can keep discipling people well and maybe lose some people because of some hard discipleship lessons, or I can back off and compromise on the discipleship in order to get the numbers up. And when that happens, then we've got some problems. And that happens more often than it should.

Laurie Acker: 6:30

Yeah, well, and I love that you said you love churches of all size. That's, that's one of our our gigs, too, is, you know, God works in all spaces, big, medium, small. You know, two or 2000 or 20,000 like, God's at work all over the place, and in saying that too, all small churches are not healthy. Like, sometimes people kind of challenge me on that church growth. And, you know, like, like, you're just, you're just letting people think that everything they do is healthy. And I'm like, no, no. Like, small churches can be completely unhealthy as well. Like, it's not really about the number, and I wasn't going to talk about this till the end, but since we're talking about it now, you have a brand new book out that I have not read yet. Do you want to just share about that? Because I even loved the title of it,

Karl Vaters: 7:12

sure. Yeah. The new book is called desizing the church, how church growth became a science, then an obsession, and what's next. And I wrote it because my first four books were really encouraging and resourcing small church pastors. So they've written two small church pastors about how to do small church well. But then, as I spend a lot of time traveling and talking to small church pastors, I started asking myself a couple years ago, where did this obsession with bigness come from? Because while I'm trying to provide resources, is there something beneath this that is causing this constant obsession with bigness, that maybe if we could discover where the problem is, we can maybe fix some things. And so I started doing some research into it, and I did a deep dive into the history of the Church Growth Movement and how it intersects with the history of America, quite frankly. And it takes two or three chapters. I can walk you through it. It'll take a few minutes to do. It's a fascinating story, if we've got time for that, or if just that quick overview is enough for now,

Laurie Acker: 8:14

hey, if you want to go for it, go for it.

Karl Vaters: 8:17

Sure. Let me give you the quick overview. Donald mcgavern is universally understood to be the pioneer of the Church Growth Movement. He was a missionary in India for 40 years, and near the end of his time in India, he started hearing about entire villages where everybody had come to Christ all at once. And he didn't believe it, so he went to check it out, and he found out it's true. And then as he retired, he spent some months in Africa where he had heard of several villages in several countries in Africa, where that had happened as well. He thought, I want to study this, because I want to see if there are underlying principles that we can learn from to help entire people movements come to Christ. Is God doing something here that we can understand and that we can learn from? And He came home, and he wrote a book called The bridges of God home, being America, and that is universally understood to be the first church growth book. It's the first time that the term church growth actually appeared in print. It's the first time that most of the church growth principles that we now today take for granted were established. And then he established the Church Growth Institute at Fuller University. And for the first seven years, he would not allow American pastors to attend, which is weird. Now you Yeah, you can't just say no American pastors allowed. So here's what he did. He came up with three restrictions. You can only become a student at the Church Growth Institute if one, you have you are conversant in more than one language. Two, you have to have worked for, for, I think, was three years at least, in a in a missionary context. And thirdly, you actually had to write a paper to prove that you were competent in an understanding of an indigenous people group outside of your own. And when you apply those three things to it. It excludes 99% of us, pastors, including me. And he taught this class for seven years at Fuller and for seven years, American pastors kept saying, please let us in, because they were reading this book and they wanted to know more. And then finally, at seven in 1972 when he was, I think, 83 years of age, he taught the first ever class along with C Peter Wagner, one of his students that included American pastors. And that class in 1972 at Fuller is universally understood to be the spark point for the American church book movement. So I get myself refreshed on this history. And then I started asking, Well, why did he not want American students to be in the class? That was the thing that kind of stuck with me. And so I actually had some conversations with Gary McIntosh, who is Donald McGovern's biographer. And McIntosh told me this. He said, Donald mcgavern didn't want American pastors in the class because these principles coming from Africa and from Asia were about how to increase the percentage of Christians within the population. He wanted people movements to come to Christ. He didn't care how big the churches were. And in fact, one of the things he discovered was that the multiplication of healthy small churches is actually the engine that typically fuels the global growth of the church, not the building of larger ones. And he said, I don't want American pastors in because Americans have a unique relationship to bigness, and if they get a hold of these principles, they will make it about making individual churches bigger, rather than about increasing the percentage of Christians in the culture. And in fact, that's exactly what we did. So it became a science through Donald mcgavern, and then it became an obsession to build bigger churches when American pastors got got a hold of it. So that's the quick overview. It takes about three chapters in the book to walk through all the details of that, but that's where the subtitle

Laurie Acker: 11:50

of the book, wow. And you know, my husband and I have always kind of he's a pastor of a small church, and we've talked through the years about the degrees in church growth. And everybody that we know as a pastor who got a degree in church growth, like an Advanced Study in church growth, they didn't grow their churches. And what was happening is, is they're they're learning these principles that are supposed to be, go do this and you will grow. And then they didn't. And so it's kind of interesting when you think about, like, these principles that you know, we scientize this whole thing, like, if you do this, but, but really, God never said, If you build it, it will grow.

Karl Vaters: 12:29

No, no. I mean, you can't do an honest reading of the Bible. Close the volume at the end of Revelation and sit back and go, Oh, so it's about getting more people in the room. That's what Jesus wants us to do. There's no way that comes from the text. We we try to read that into the text, but it doesn't fit, because it doesn't

Laurie Acker: 12:50

come Yeah, I would love to ask you a couple questions that I get asked by people about church growth. Are you up for that? I'd like to know how you answered this question. You already referred to it. But when people say, if it's healthy, it will grow, that is a biblical principle. The fruit increases if we're doing the right things. So how do you answer that? Yeah,

Karl Vaters: 13:12

well, all healthy things grow. Is an interesting hypothesis. If we were scientists, we would declare that to be a hypothesis, which is a hey, maybe this is true statement. Scientists then take a hypothesis, and what they do is they do the research. They either do experiments or they do studies with research to find out, is my hypothesis true? And if it's true, then it becomes a working theory. All healthy things grow. Is a reasonable hypothesis. If the church is healthy, part of that health will be evangelism. Evangelism will produce new converts. And if we're making new converts, then the church will grow numerically. That's a valid hypothesis. But when we test that hypothesis in the real world, what we find is that there are a whole bunch of healthy churches out there, churches that are making converts and baptizing new believers every year, that do not grow numerically for all kinds of reasons. So rather than testing the hypothesis to see if it's true, we have stated the hypothesis as a fact without actually doing the research. So that's how I respond to the all healthy things grow. It's great hypothesis, but it has not proven itself out to be true, and that that is, let me with one codicil. If what we mean by all healthy things grow is a church that is healthy will increase numerically, which is what we always mean by that. Now, will a healthy church continue to grow? Yes, but it will grow in we use phrases like, it's not about its seating capacity at sending capacity, which I profoundly agree with, but then we obsess over the CD capacity. So our, the church that I, you know, serve now, and I've been in for 31 years, we kind of have this 150 or so shoe size, the where we work best, but we are constantly sending people out into ministry. So is our church growing? Yes. Is it contributing to the growing? Of the kingdom of God, yes. Is it increasing numerically? Not so much. All

Laurie Acker: 15:04

right. Well, let's talk about this one. So I have people, okay, I don't know, maybe almost weekly coming at me with this, you don't understand, if my church doesn't grow, we're going to close our doors. We don't have enough people to pay our bills. How do you respond to people with that one

Karl Vaters: 15:22

that is a valid question with a whole lot of pain behind it. I acknowledge the pain behind that. I acknowledge the reality of that as a small church pastor for decades, I understand how difficult it can be to pay the bills, and is more difficult now than it was when I started in pastoral ministry 40 years ago, 40 years ago, a typical Church of 50 regular attenders could probably pay the pastor full time and it could probably pay the mortgage on the church building, that is not the case in almost any place today. So it's a valid question with a lot of hurt behind it. The only way I know to answer that is this, it we have to have a minimum amount of people if we're going to have a church according to the structure of church that we understand in most of North America, that is a building, a full time pastor these particular programs. And so it's the structure that we're trying to pay for. And if we change our structure, then we don't need quite as much money. One of the chapters in desizing the church, where I start to make the turn towards what can we do better about this is entitled discipleship fixes everything. So if we concentrate more on discipleship and less on the structures that we've been handed down for the last several decades, discipleship will literally fix every problem a church has, financial problems, discipleship will fix that, moral problems, Unity problems, maturity problems, discipleship fixes all of those things. So if we disciple our people to understand what Jesus is calling us to do and the things Jesus is not calling us to do. And we have a mature a church filled with mature disciples. They might look around and go, Why are we trying to put all of our money into a building that really isn't necessary, or whatever the structure might be that's weighing us down. So our problem is not paying the bills for the church. The problem typically is paying the bills for the current structure we have. I'm

Laurie Acker: 17:29

kind of liking asking you these questions. Next time I get asked these questions, I'm just going to drop this podcast episode in. Okay, here's another one. We haven't bounced back after covid? What do we do? Wow,

Karl Vaters: 17:45

yeah, yeah, stop looking in the rear view. That's the blunt response, but I'll try to temper that a little bit with a little more kindness. But yeah, no, I've met a lot of pastors who are the same way. We haven't bounced back after covid, or we just want to be the way that it was before covid. Well, here's the thing, we cannot go back. We are not time travelers. Actually, we are at all time travelers. We're just heading at the same pace and in the same direction through time. But you can't go backwards. So yeah, there are, there are things that happen, that change, that that accelerate the changes. And I believe, I'm convinced that covid changed nothing. It simply accelerated and amplified things that were already in I still agree with that. So, yeah, the churches that were very healthy, my church, I'm grateful to say, is a perfect example of that. We've actually grown stronger since covid. We haven't gotten any bigger, thankfully, we haven't gotten any smaller, either, but we have definitely we have definitely become stronger because we learned some new things that we had to learn because covid and the shutdowns. I live in California, we had longer shutdowns than any other state. We learned things through that we didn't push back against it, we didn't get angry about it. We figured out how to adapt to it. So we are now in a new world accelerate at an accelerating pace. So we cannot, and we will not, have the church that we had pre covid, but we can adapt and understand what a church looks like now today, post covid, we have different challenges. We have people with a different understanding of how to communicate, even right now, the way we're doing this podcast was, was fairly unique to a small percentage of people that they could communicate this way through a conference call, and now they just call it zooming. I don't know what happened to Skype, poor Skype. We used to we used to Skype everybody, and now we zoom everybody. And so we've learned all kinds of new things. So now let's use those as ways to introduce people to the Gospel. And I'm not saying let's go to zoom church. That's not what I'm saying, but we've learned some things through it. Here's what I've discovered over the years, and my dad taught me this. When you go through a difficult season, the only way you can take more out of the difficult season than it takes out of you is to learn everything you can from it. And that two and a half years or so, when we were heavily in the middle of covid and the pandemics and the shutdowns and the aftermath of it, that two and a half years or so, if we will look at it correctly, can be like a decade's worth of learning squeezed into two and a half years, but only if we're determined to learn what we can. Wow.

Laurie Acker: 20:25

So good. So much wisdom. Okay, let me ask you about outreach events, because we get this one a lot too. Our outreach events aren't working. How do we justify outreach events like VBS and community service and stuff, when people aren't joining our church afterwards, we spend all this time and effort and then nobody's coming back to our church.

Karl Vaters: 20:45

Yep, discipleship fixes everything.

Laurie Acker: 20:49

That's your blunt response.

Karl Vaters: 20:52

That's my blunt response. Now let's temper it a little bit. Yeah. Again, a lot of the challenge with our outreach outreach ideas is that we are trapped invisibly. We don't realize it because we've inherited it. We're trapped kind of invisibly in a structure of what evangelism events look like and what it is that they're supposed to do for us. And we need to recalibrate that and understand what is it that Jesus says when we are to go and preach the gospel to all creation when we're to reach out and visit the prisoners and to feed the hungry and to help the downtrodden and all of the things that outreach is supposed to do. Let's take a look at what Jesus really had in mind when he said that. And if you take a look at the history of the early church, when they were following Jesus commands to do that they were not doing so in order to get people into the building right, right when the early church went and literally rescued girls, baby girls, out of the woods, because the Roman culture, and the Roman and Greek culture at the time loved men, despised women, and they would, they called it exposure. They would lay a baby out in the woods, leave it to the gods, was their excuse. And and Christians looked around and realized, this is horrifying. This is not honoring to God. And they started rescuing baby girls who were abandoned by their parents, and they started orphanages, and they started what eventually became convents, where baby girls were rescued. They didn't do that in order to get their numbers up. They did that because it was the right thing to do. So when we do outreach, we need to do it because it's the right thing to do. And the end game isn't to get people in the building, the end game is to feed the hungry, to visit the prisoners, to share the gospel and leave the results to God.

Laurie Acker: 22:49

Love it, all right? And then the last question I'll ask you that I get asked a lot, and this is probably based on my audience versus yours. I work with a lot, with volunteers and lay people and ministry leaders, and they'll get so excited at our conferences about the focus moving from numbers to discipleship, and they'll come back and say, How do I get my pastor to embrace this? Because my pastor is very discouraged by the numbers, or my pastor is very numbers focused. What would you say?

Karl Vaters: 23:51

That is what that is probably the toughest question you've asked me. That is a very,

Laurie Acker: 23:58

very that's why I saved it for last.

Karl Vaters: 24:01

I know I appreciate that you you got me all relaxed with these other ones that were a little easier. And then slam now we'll hit your heart at the end and see if you can handle this one. Vader's. You No, that is a real challenge, and part of it is because we do have this structure in the church of clergy and laity. And I'm not anti clergy and laity. I do believe there are people who are called full time to do ministry, and I I wouldn't be in full time ministry if I didn't believe that was the case. But I do think that the wall between clergy and laity has become too thick and too high and and because it is so thick and so high, there's this sense that information that flows from laity to clergy has to go uphill, and the information that flows from clergy to laity is going downhill, and we have gravity in favor, and people are just open to that. So that's why it is a challenging question, because the average congregation member who's catching on to this is trying to go uphill to communicate this to them. Yeah,

Laurie Acker: 24:59

I love that visual, because that is what it feels like, and that's what it feels like to them, like it's so hard.

Karl Vaters: 25:05

Yeah, oh, absolutely. And pastors are are attuned to the idea of gripers, whiners and control freaks being a part of our lives. And every pastor has dealt with gripers and whiners and control freaks. The problem is we then begin to interpret almost any creative and helpful. Criticism, any constructive criticism, it's very easy for us as pastors to interpret every piece of constructive criticism as a griper, a whiner or a control freak. So what you have to do is you have to come across as not a griper or a whiner or a control freak, and the only way I know to do that is if you are a part of the solution already pastors, after a while, we get our ears attuned to listen to people who are participating, who are volunteering, who are helping, who are saying nine supportive words for everyone, criticism so they become trusted people who we will pay attention to. I've been blessed to have a bunch of people like that in our congregation. We just recently, in December, lost the the one of one of two founding remaining founding members. The only remaining founding member now is his wife, but they were the only founding couple that were left. And he was, he passed away in December, and he, over the years, was about as supportive as a human being can be, of his master. He was always there. He was always supporting. He was always telling me, I did a great job, even when it was just an okay job. And he was one of the people who could walk up to me and say any negative thing, I would take it seriously because he had earned the right to be heard. So serve, volunteer, help and be an encouragement. So that you earn the right to be heard. It will not be easy. It is like pushing a boulder uphill, but be the person who the pastor's ears are attuned to listen to and to trust.

Laurie Acker: 27:14

You know, I love that you you know, you started off by saying pastors have become accustomed to this because they have dealt with whiners and gripers and complainers, even if you're not one. And I think that's one of those phrases where I'll say, pastors are people too, you know, like like that, that edge of empathy and compassion and really understanding why someone is resistant, whether it's the pastor or your peer or whatever, you know, just getting into that, that understanding of having empathy and compassion, and there's a reason, there's a reason for kind of the pushback or the resistance. And I love that you said, just be part of the solution, because we all want to be part of the solution, you know. And so I love to press into

Karl Vaters: 27:52

there. And as you say, you know pastors are humans, and every single person you know, if you've ever stood in front of a group of people and you've made a presentation, you can talk to 100 people, and you can have one person who sits in the back with their arms crossed, looking bored, and you can walk away, and that's the only person you and you think I completely knew it, because that one person did like 99 cheered. 90 of them. Nine of them stood and applauded at the end, but one guy sat in the back with his arms crossed, and that's even if you're not doing something in public. We take a single negative voice and we amplify it to 10 or 20 times the value of the positive voices. And this has been proven to be sociologically true. There's been a ton of studies on this. We amplify the negative voices that speak to us and we diminish the positive voices that speak to us. So if you're as you're approaching your pastor, just be aware of that as well. If you can overwhelm the pastor with positive, with volunteering, with helping, with being an encouragement, then they're more likely to hear that one negative, not as something that tears them down, but as something that can help

Laurie Acker: 28:53

them up. I love it. I love it. Okay, before we run out of time, one of the phrases that we say a lot in our organization is small church. Ministry isn't less ministry, it's just different. What do you love that you find unique in smaller churches?

Karl Vaters: 29:13

To me, it's the opportunity to be hands on and known by the pastor, and for the pastor to know people. This is when I talk to pastors. This is the single biggest shift that pastors have to make when a church grows beyond 150 certainly up to 200 or more at that point, the pastor is beyond their capacity to know everybody in the church. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, and if they plan for it well, and if they make sure that other people are stepping into pastoral roles on smaller, more intimate ways, then everybody can still be discipled and everybody can still be taken care of. But for most pastors, I think part of the reason that there are so many small churches in the world is because I believe most pastors are called to do hands on relational pastoring, rather than delegating of the pastoral tasks to others. Yeah, and that's one of the strengths of the small church. I think there are a lot of Christians out there that the fact that the pastor knows my name is a huge part of what draws them in, keeps them there, encourages them to step up in ministry. It's a huge part of their spiritual growth that the person who speak. Being on the platform on a Sunday is also the person that I can approach during the week or text when I've got a question, who's going to visit me when I'm sick? Is going to perform the ceremony for a loved one that they actually knew that these are important things for church members to have, and half the body of Christ are in churches too big for the pastor to know their name, and they're being pastored by small group leaders, and that's great. But about half the body of Christ, it really is important that the pastoral presence is there. And for most pastors, I think that's a really important part of the way God made

Laurie Acker: 31:07

us. Oh, I love it. And even for pastors of small churches who have teams that do visitations with them. Or, you know, they build up some other laity in other ways. There still is that, I know, in large churches, they call it access. I hear that a lot. I have access to the pastor, like we have to work up to getting access to the pastor. And I love that. You know, in the churches I've been in recently, you know, I mean, they know where I live, you know, my last church, everybody in the church had been in my house. They know where I shop, you know, and it's, it's such a different feeling in smaller churches. Carl, thank you so much for spending so much time here with us today. It is a pleasure to reconnect with you. We met a couple years ago, and it's fun to get reconnected. And I'm looking forward to just kind of staying in touch with our, you know, with our ministries here as well. So if people want to hear more from you, learn from you, find you. What's the best way?

Karl Vaters: 31:59

Yeah, the easiest way is to go to carlvaters.com as long as you spell my name right, it's pretty easy to find me, but spelling my name right can be a challenge. So yeah, and I appreciate you too, Laurie. I think as we go forward, I look forward to having more correspondence. We are in the same place, but we're coming at it from different angles. Me from the pastoral angle, and you from the the average attender angle. Both of those are really vital in the small church. The if you are listening to this and you are thinking, Well, I'm not a leader in the church, I'm not a pastor, the smaller the churches, the more important you are. I mean, everybody's important in every church, but in small churches, the typical person who shows up on a Sunday and who helps out even just a little bit has a role to play in a smaller church that is so vital and it is so important to the mission and to the ministry of the church. And I just want to say thank you to all of you who step up and do that you often are unnoticed by the people around you, or maybe you feel unnoticed, but it is not unnoticed by God. So thank you so much.

Laurie Acker: 32:59

Yes, and Amen. I love it all right, everybody, until next week, we'll just close it off here and go be a light. You.