JD Greear calls people who left his church a synagogue of Satan?

Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna have a short podcast today. I'm gonna jump right into it.

We're gonna talk about a chapel that just came out from the seminary I went to, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the chapel message is from the 25th, so January 25th, that's

Tuesday, and someone actually messaged this to me right when it happened that, you know, oh my goodness, you know,

I can't believe J .D. Greer said what he said, and I've gained the gist of it just from seeing posts online, but I haven't listened to the whole thing, so I was poking around it today.

J .D. Greer's teaching on Revelation, the seven churches, and I haven't heard the clip in question yet, but we're about to get there, so we're gonna listen to it together, and the reason we're doing this isn't, it's not a,

I think the, sometimes the other side thinks you're just playing a game of, you know, gotcha.

It's, you know, critique the pastor, and I saw there was an article from the

Gospel Coalition that came out, ironically, I think on the same day, it was yesterday, from, I don't know, remember the author, but it was a whole article on why you, you know, it's dangerous to use sermon clips out of, implying they're out of context, these gotcha moments that are posted online to destroy preachers, and, and who are they talking about?

It's woke preacher clips. It's the montages I've put together. It's enemies within the church. It's that kind of stuff that they're talking about, so I may do another episode and just talk about that particular article, because the question isn't whether or not you take a clip or quote someone.

The question is, are you doing it fairly? Are you representing them accurately? If someone says that I do not agree with killing, and then you edit the clip to make it sound like I agree with killing, then you're overturning the meaning of the author, but if you're just quoting what the author states, we do this all the time with Bible verses, you know, you can't do that with the

Bible. We do this with, the academic process would grind to a halt if you weren't able to quote people, so the question is, are you doing it fairly?

Are you doing it in context? Are you honoring the authorial intent? Those are the things you should be looking for, but there's a political game going on, so all that to say, that's not why we're doing this.

We're not just, let's, you know, we got a clip of him saying this, and I mean, J .D. Greer is not even the president of the

SBC anymore. Here's why I think it's important, though. J .D. Greer is still an important figure in the denomination.

He's still got a big church, and now it's smaller now. When you shut your church down for a year, that's what happens, but he does have still an influential and a big church that's held up as the model for what churches should be in the

Southern Baptist Convention by some. He's, some would call him, I don't use this term much, but the golden boy in some ways.

He's this guy who, you know, he got it right. He's doing ministry the way it should be done in the 21st century, and he's able to communicate with the young people and those who have been hurt by church in the past.

They're able to come back because J .D. Greer is, he's more hip. He's not this boring, legalistic type of person.

He doesn't fit the mold that the people who are not wanting to come back to church think of when they think of church.

He fits a different mold. He's more trendy, the way he dresses, the way he speaks, just everything, the whole vibe.

So this is, to me, he represents more than just himself. He's representing an entire, really my age, people just younger than him, an entire group of people who saw him when they were going to Southeastern, right?

This is very real to me because I was at Southeastern when his church was being held up in this way. He represents what we were all supposed to kind of be striving for, and to see kind of where this is all gone, to see how he reacts to people leaving his church,

I think is going to be interesting. And the question is, you know, is this the kind of, is this the way that we ought to react when things happen in our church?

If you're a pastor, or if you're an elder, if you're just even just a layman at a church, is this the way that we react publicly about things that happen?

And bad things happen. Look, my dad is a pastor. I know, I know exactly the kinds of things that happen.

There's cheap shots, the backbiting, all of that stuff. That's anyone in leadership, but pastors in particular,

I mean, there's a spiritual target on your back when you're preaching the truth. And so whether or not you have, you know, the devil coming after you, or God sifting you, or whatever it may be, you're gonna be undergoing some kind of difficulty.

That's just life. And when you're in a position of leadership, you know, more so. People are attracted to the centers of power.

They want to sometimes be friends with you, then they, you know, you invest in them, and they leave, and they reject you.

And that's just, that's part of life. I'm somewhat used to seeing that. That's not the norm, necessarily.

It's not like that happens all the time, but that does happen, and it's gonna happen, and life's full of hurt and pain. And that's why, you know, thinking of a utopia on this earth just is not an option in my mind.

That's not faithful to human nature. We're never gonna have that. There's always gonna be scars that we bear in life.

And so anyway, J .D. Greer, in this clip, talks about some of these scars that he has. Now, for what reason, though?

Why does he have these scars? Why is he lashing out? Is he showing a, is he placing the blame in the wrong place?

Is it a moment of self -reflection for him? Is it, why do the people in his audience need to know what he has to say?

Why do they need to hear him say this stuff? And I think as we go through it and hear what he has to say, what you'll realize is the whole way that this is being framed is there's a, it's open season on conservatives.

Political conservatives, but to some extent, theological conservatives. It's open season on them.

They are the, to blame for the issues going on right now. It's, it's not all, and I'll talk about who

I, who, who really, who are the people that actually are pushing evil, sometimes demonic agendas.

You know, who, where should we be putting the blame? Who should we be fighting? Where should we be investing our efforts in the battle that's raging around us?

We know there's a battle raging around us. Battle's not against flesh and blood, it's against angels, principalities, powers, but those, those powers use people.

We know that there is a battle, and so where we fight the battle is very important.

That's why this clip is important. This is gonna be signaling to people my age and younger, people sitting in this audience at Southeastern, who the bad guys are.

Who we need to, or at least one group, that we need to invest time opposing. And, and I think it's, well, from what

I've seen so far, it's an error. Let's listen to the clip, though. Let's, let's hear J .D. Greer in his own words about this, and see, see what he has to say.

So, I'm gonna start, it's at 33 mark, about, into this Chapel from Southeastern, from the 25th of January, 2022.

...persecutors of the believers in Smyrna. I think the hardest thing to reckon with as a pastor is the persecution that comes from inside your church, from those that you know ought to stand with you who do not.

I know many of you are preparing for ministry, but some of you already know what I'm talking about. That deacon, that staff member that you have invested so much time with that turns on you.

The Absalom to your David, the Demas to your Timothy, the John Mark to your

Paul. That person whose belief structure you share so much in common with, who turns on you because you won't acknowledge or bow down to their idol.

I'll tell you that, having been, what, 20 years now, I celebrate our 20th, my 20th year at the Summit Church this year, it used to be that most of the criticism

I got from the religious community came from so -called Christians on the left, who criticized our naive commitment to inerrancy or our supposed clinging to outdated sexual ethics.

But what has been more surprising and hurt even more has... Let's stop it right there for a moment and just talk about what we've already heard.

So he gives some biblical examples of ministry, fracturings, relationships being broken, and he attributes it to not being unwilling, unwillingness on the part of the

Orthodox person, the believer, to bend down and bow to idols.

That's the thing he attributes that to, which I don't know that that's necessarily the case.

Some of it is just, you know, you're rejected, and that person took you for a ride, and they're leaving.

They're going in a certain direction, and it's not that you won't go with them and bend to their idols, but, you know, sometimes that is the case.

There's an overemphasis, I noticed, on the more progressive evangelical side of it. Everything's an idol.

They look at, you know, kind of like power relationships in critical race theory, right? It's like, you know, everything's a power disparity, and people on the evangelical left seem to...

Everything's an idol, right? You know, family's an idol, marriage is an idol, oh my goodness, and everything. And so that, you know,

I've pointed out before, that's kind of a way that sometimes things are flatlined. You know, you could have the right is just as evil as the left, even though the left is, like, incorporating

Romans 1 in their platform. The right is just as evil, because, well, they could idolize the nation, or something like that.

So I just, very minor thing there, obviously. I wouldn't say it unless I noticed that that was a trend.

The idols are brought up. I don't know that that's the case with all those situations, but what he's saying is 100 % true.

You're gonna have people break from you in ministry. That's just, that's part of life. It's throughout the New Testament, and he talks about the left being upset at him, and this is really the expectation

I think we should have. When you're talking about a group of people who deny distinctions between genders, and they say that it's just a social construct, there is no actual rooted in creation, created design,

God has expectations for responsibilities attached to gender, it's just kind of a, it's like a, you know, an outfit you put on.

It's something that, you know, is superficial. You're, you know, if those are the people that are on the left, they're gonna have a problem with you when you open your

Bible, and you see responsibilities and very hard and fast gender, you know, specifics, characteristics of what makes a man, what makes a female.

When people on the left are pro -abortion, they're gonna have a problem when, you know, you open up your Bible, and you find out, yep, babies are humans, murder's wrong.

When, you know, people on the left are gonna have a hard time with the concept of private property throughout Scripture, they're gonna have a hard time with a lot of the implicit, just the assumptions that you find throughout

Scripture of national distinctions and boundaries, even in the

Old Testament, borders around cities. I mean, the fact that the alien and the sojourner are labeled that way, they're not just part of Israel, they're, you know, they're gonna have a lot of problems with the

Mosaic Law, certainly, the way that certain groups of people are treated, especially on sexual ethics.

The list goes on. Capital punishment, they're gonna have a problem with that. Like, they're antithetical.

Their belief system is antithetical to almost everything the Bible promotes in some way. So, that would be an expectation

I'd have, right? If you're going to preach directly in opposition, diametrical opposition, to what the left has to say, and they're following a false social justice narrative, then, yeah, they're gonna have a problem with you somewhere along the line.

That shouldn't be surprising. It should be expected. It should be, we should even locate,

I think, on the left, like, that's where the devil has done a lot of work. He's deceived people into these lies, and that's the mission field.

That's where we're trying to awaken people to understand that what they're doing, what they believe in, what they're pushing is sinful.

So, that's an expectation, right? That's a given. That's just, anyone who wants to do ministry that's remotely close to what the

Bible teaches, you're gonna have that. So now, J .D. Greer, so everything so far, okay, we're good, right?

That's, I would, you know, I understand being disappointed, maybe, that the left is going after you for stuff, but it's like, you know, what did you think you were getting into when you got into ministry?

But then we get into this. This is the clip, I think, that everyone's, kind of, on social media is talking about.

Criticism that started to come from our friends on the right, those whose belief systems

I share so much in common with, who could not bear to have their own political idols challenged.

2020 was a difficult year for many, many reasons. But maybe, for me as pastor and as SBC president, the most difficult was that 2020 revealed that for a lot of people in our churches, their primary identity was political.

It wasn't that it wasn't also Christian, they were also Christian, but the primary identity was political.

We know that because a lot of church people left their churches, not just Summit Church, but a lot of them, because of some disagreement over a relatively small political disagreement, at least small in light of the gospel and in light of eternity.

Well, you didn't say enough about this particular cultural issue, so I'm leaving. You said too much, so I'm leaving.

And I would say to these people, some of whom have been at our church for years, for a decade, and I would say, we agree on every point of gospel doctrine.

We believe in the gospel, we believe in the authority and inerrancy of the Bible, we believe in the sanctity of life and marriage.

I married your children, I walked with you through the tragedy of a death of a loved one, and now you are leaving because you disagreed, because we said too much, one too many things about George Floyd, or we said not enough about him, or because we asked you to wear a mask for a season, or because we did not keep the mask mandate in place long enough.

We Christians say that we hate cancel culture, but it was amazing to me how so many of us canceled our church over a relatively small disagreement.

And I kind of look at that and I say, no wonder, because we pastors get to disciple our people about one hour a week, and Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow get them for three hours a night.

You know, when the church gets in bed with politics, the church gets pregnant, and the offspring does not look like our

Heavenly Father. It looks like the synagogue of Satan. I know the slander of those who say they are

Jews, and they are not. They're actually from the synagogue of Satan. They don't have satanic worship rituals, they don't put

Satan on the roof, they don't sacrifice kittens, but they're from the synagogue of Satan. But now let's tell you right now, and I realize

I'm kind of cruising over this at about 30 ,000 feet, but when somebody tells you that just loving your neighbor, just being willing to listen, just taking a humble posture toward those who are hurting, just not being quick to speak, to try to listen twice as much as you're making declaration, when those things make you a liberal, you know you are listening to somebody out of step with the

Spirit of Christ. Or when somebody tells you that your refusal to put biblical authority behind a good but secondary political issue, when that makes you a liberal, they are speaking out of the synagogue of Satan.

I'm not saying they are necessarily from Satan or that they are not a Christian. Just that conflating allegiance to Jesus Christ with allegiance to secondary world powers is a tactic of our enemy.

Now when you get this kind of criticism, you always remain humble. Sometimes there's truth in it, and sometimes you can learn from it, even if it's not given in the right spirit.

But the point I'm trying to make is that opposition doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. In fact, if I could be so bold, it probably means you're doing something right.

In our particular culture, in this moment, when right and left are coming after you, that doesn't prove that you're not doing things right or that you don't have your convictions in place.

It's probably a pretty good indicator, though, that you are doing things right. Jesus's opposition came from left and right.

If we're gonna stand with him on our day, we ought to expect it from both directions also. In fact,

I'll say, when I served as SBC president, I used to ask our communications director, are both sides angry about this right now?

And if the answer was yes, then I just assumed we were saying something right. If only one side was pleased, you're like, well, we can't be saying the right thing now.

It was what was bewildering to this church. It was not the secular powers in Smyrna.

It was those who said they were Jews but are not. Jesus's counsel, verse 10, don't be afraid.

Don't be afraid. That sounds like good news, doesn't it? Great news, but watch

Jesus's explanation for why they should not be afraid. Alright, we're gonna stop it there.

I think that's the main clip. So this is very interesting to me for a few things. This is a muddled, rambling, self -contradictory, self -justifying, telling clip from a sermon.

A few things I just wrote down as I was listening to this. First off, I mean,

I don't even know where to start. Let's start with synagogue of Satan. So he's calling, I mean, he said that these are minor political issues, right?

These are minor things compared to the gospel, but yet the people who disagree with him are the synagogue of Satan because they've made too big of a deal about something that he thinks is smaller than that.

They left a church over mask mandates and, you know, really the

BLM push that was at Summit Church and, you know, things that J .D.

Greer... Look, J .D. Greer himself during this time says that Black Lives Matter is a gospel issue. He said that.

So if... And he's saying that we agree on so much, you know, we agree on the gospel.

Well, how do I know that we agree on the gospel? How is someone who believes in the true Orthodox gospel, when you say

Black Lives Matter is a gospel issue, how do they know that you agree with them on the gospel? It sounds like you're adding something to it. Black Lives Matter is not a gospel issue.

And so there's a big problem here. J .D.

Greer will take something usually from the... Well, almost every case

I think I talk about, it's from the political left, and he incorporates it into the gospel. It becomes a gospel issue. And so...

No, the jury's out on this. It's not... I don't even know if the jury's out. It's just he's been at best muddy, at worst false teaching.

He has taught falsely that certain things are part of the gospel when they are not. He's incorporated a works.

And so there's a big problem here. There's a theological disagreement. This isn't just some political thing.

So he's the one that calls those who would make a big deal about some of his comments and shutting down his church.

It wasn't just mass. He shut down his church for a year. People who make a big deal about this are somehow part of the synagogue of Satan.

And how is that any... How is that remotely biblical to call people just for leaving your church, for disagreeing with you about this, for going somewhere else?

How is it remotely biblical to call them part of the synagogue of Satan? Now, if they came to you, and they did what

J .D. Greer does, and they started saying, well, you need to... Capitalism's a gospel issue, and you need to preach on that, and you're not preaching on that.

Maybe we'd be closer to something there, that there's a Judaizing tendency or something. They prohibit marriage, doctrine of demons.

Something biblical that you can look at and say, this is a theological issue. But J .D. Greer's the one, actually, that would be closer to any remote description you could give of a false teacher, not the people leaving over these things.

And so he's saying they're not Christians, really. I mean, synagogue of Satan, they're not Christians. I don't know what else...

What other conclusion are you to draw from that? And if he thinks they're still Christians, and he's using that terminology, he needs to...

I don't know. Southeastern needs to revoke his degree, but I'm not going to get into that. All right. So he says that they talk...

Let's see. They said that he didn't talk enough, or he talked too much about George Floyd, or that kind of thing.

Really, he emphasized too much that. And that's just a straw man.

It's not that he talked too much. It's what he said about it. He said that BLM was a issue. That's...

It's what he said. So J .D. Greer is not constructively listening, and then providing a response that reflects that he's actually taken the time to accurately depict the people who are criticizing him.

He hasn't interacted with the material that's been presented to him at all.

He's just strawmanning them. He's doing something that's actually, frankly, evil. And he does this quite a bit, to be honest with you.

There's a lot of strawmanning going on here. Listening makes you on the left, right?

Who says that listening makes you on the left? No, standpoint theory. When you listen to one person and what they're saying, some story of oppression, but you're not willing to examine the facts, you're not willing to listen to the other side, then you are favoring...

You're actually engaging impartiality, which Scripture is against that, and that's part of the problem.

You're not adjudicating fairly. If you're talking about something that happened without... The facts haven't even come out yet, and J .D.

Greer's already out there talking about how painful this is for him and the black community, which he's done many times, then no, that's...

The problem isn't listening. The problem is believing without evidence. He says...

He talks about the conflated allegiances, people that are confusing somehow their political identity with their

Christian identity because they're watching Tucker Carlson at night, and he slips in Rachel Maddow in there, too.

He says it's from people on the right, but then he starts trying to broaden it a bit, and yeah, I doubt there's many...

I mean, I don't know. Maybe there are people at Summit. Maybe there are that'll listen to Rachel Maddow. She's pretty far out there, but you're really getting the sense, though, it's the conservatives.

That's what he says at the beginning. It's people from the right that are going after him. It's the Sean Hannity's. It's those kinds of people, and he's frustrated that they're listening to Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and trusting them more than they are him.

They should trust him, I guess. Is that what it looks like? Trust him. Just believe whatever J .D. Greer says and Summit Church says about the virus, and if you go along with what they say, then that's being a

Christian, and if you decide that actually they're... Where's J .D. Greer getting his information?

What made him think shutting down the church for a year is what made him think that masks was right?

Who was he listening to? Was he listening to voices on the left? Was he listening to government authorities?

Was he listening... Who was it? Because, I mean, he even shut down his church past when the government said you had to do it. That's the question

I have. Does he have dual allegiances? He's putting the microscope on the other side for having a particular view of the virus, but yet he's getting his understanding from somewhere.

So, the same critique would fall right back on him. He's very self -justifying and seems to think that if he's angering both sides, that's right where he wants to be, and this has been a really big problem for Christians.

This is where the Overton window keeps moving left, and the evangelical Christians seem to think that as long that...

You know, the goal should be... Tim Keller's kind of like this. The goal is centrism. Both sides attacking you means you're on the right page.

There's nothing in scripture that says this. There's nothing that indicates this. So, that's just arbitrary on his part, and frankly, when you have one side that's, you know, let's take

Romans 1 and insert it into our party platform, and you have another side that's still very open to Christians having influence on their party, if we're talking about Republicans and Democrats, then you should really be making the

Democrats a lot more angry. That would make a lot more sense. So, a lot of venting going on here.

You know, he thinks it's obviously important, this issue. Important enough to call a group a synagogue of Satan.

He talks about cancel culture, that they canceled him, and this is also just completely tone -deaf.

Cancel culture is this new phenomenon where... Not that it's new in the history of the world, but in our experience, it's relatively new, where it's not just leaving a church.

People have always left churches over things. It's not just firing someone. It's trying to smear someone's reputation in such a way that they can't operate in society anymore.

It's trying to close the door behind them and say, you're not wanted here. You don't have a place in the public square.

That's what cancel culture is getting at. This person is a pariah. They shall not be touched. Everyone back away from them.

Don't give them a safe haven. Shame them. It's really very parallel to the

Chinese communists and what they did to capitalists during the cultural revolution.

It's shaming people publicly to put them on display and say that this is what you're not supposed to be.

Let this be a warning to everyone else. That's cancel culture. It's after destroying a person.

The people who leave a church and say, I don't agree with your mask. I want to go to church. You haven't opened your church for a year.

The people who leave a church over that, they're trying to destroy J .D.

Greer. They're on his back all the time so that he can never have a job, never have a safe haven.

Let's absolutely destroy him in every way we possibly can. No, they're just leaving. It's not cancel culture at all.

In fact, I think what J .D. Greer's doing, I'm not saying what he's doing is cancel culture, but it's closer a little bit because he's trying to say there's this group of people who are the synagogue of Satan because they disagree with what he says are minor political views.

This whole thing is nuts to me. It just shows the peril, the real trouble honestly that we're in in evangelical

Christianity. If that's someone who was just previously the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and if that exemplifies where people are going, then we are in big trouble, guys.

I don't know how else to put it. Well, this has been the episode of Conversations That Matter today.

My hope and my goal and what I strive for and what I know to be true also is that there are a lot of faithful men out there that you don't know the names of.

I've met them. I meet them all the time. I'm sure I'll be meeting them even over the weekend. In fact,

I was just talking to Russell Fuller on the to see you. I'm going to be near Louisville.

We were talking about just the shape of the church in that city. It's pretty bad.

I'll be honest with you. It's not just Russell Fuller who's told me that. I've had a number of people living there that have a hard time finding a church.

They're driving like 30 miles outside of Louisville or whatever. They're finding a church somewhere else. This is not surprising to me.

This used to shock me when I would hear people that had traveled down to the Bible Belt and gotten into a town where there's 1 ,500 churches and they can't seem to find one.

I always thought, well, you're the problem, obviously. There's a lot of churches. Until I saw how much of a desert some of these places are, and so much of it is political.

So much of it is churches that want to please man and not God. They want a smooth sailing ride.

They don't want to take hard stands. They're afraid of the media. They're afraid of the the people in the church who could jeopardize their position.

They're just really trying their best to make sure it's a smooth sailing situation.

I think that's part of the reason why J .D. Greer says, well, if both sides are shooting at you, you're in the right place. When you have a break over fundamental disagreements, you can't bridge that divide.

You just can't. If you try to do it, you're going to be attacked by both sides. So the goal is always to bridge divides, to build all these bridges, to make sure that people of diametrically different views can somehow sit in the same church and worship

God together and give to the offering plate. When these views are over things like, can you have homosexual orientation and still be a faithful follower of Christ and accept that?

Is that morally acceptable? When the views are over, is the

BLM movement on the same moral plane as the anti -abortion movement? When the disagreements are over, is reality objective or is it subjective?

Are there social locations that must be preferred over other social locations when interpreting the world and perhaps even scripture?

When the disagreements are over whether or not we should show partiality in the church, when they're over whether or not we should even meet for church because of a virus,

I could go on and on and on. These are all these very fundamental disagreements. When it's over what the gospel is, is it

BLM part of the gospel? Is that a gospel issue? If J .D. Greer says that, I would be out the door.

That's not the gospel. Sorry. Bye. Gospel is what Jesus Christ did, not anything I do or any social group does that doesn't even belong to Jesus Christ.

That's not the gospel. These disagreements are very fundamental. If you're striving to make people who are false teachers or believe in bad theology or just immoral, their ethics are so bad that God condemns from the pages of scripture what they believe and you're trying to make them happy, then good luck with that.

You don't have a church anymore, though. You have a social club, and that's what I'm finding exists more often than not, but there are people.

There are faithful followers of Christ, and they're everywhere, okay? It may be hard to find, but they are everywhere.

Sometimes there are even churches that are compromised, and there really needs to be another church planted in an area. I know some areas like that where there's a lot of churches, but there needs to be a solid one.

They're out there, and so I'm looking forward even this weekend to traveling and meeting some of the people from these churches because it's always refreshing to meet faithful followers of Jesus Christ.

They're not doing this. They're not looking at the wind and saying, okay, which way this week? How can we center ourselves?

They're looking at just what does the Bible say. It's immovable. It's solid. It never changes. God never changes, and we sink our teeth into that, and we bite hard, and we don't give up.

When people try to challenge us, we will not back away from the truth that we believe in the pages of Scripture.

We won't massage it. We won't try to make it something else. I won't say the Bible whispers about sexual sin like J .D.

Greer says. We will stand solid. Look for a church like that. If you're not in a church like that,

I encourage you get out of there. Go to discerningchristians .com. Maybe there's a church in your area. If there's not on that website, try some others.

Maybe try the sermon audio search. Sometimes that can pop up things. I don't know. Look around.

Look around your community. Maybe there needs to be a church. Maybe you're the one that needs to go out and start that, and I know

I've gotten some flack in the past. People think that I'm saying, like, go start these rogue churches, and you know, I'm not saying that.

I'm just saying that if there is no option, and there's nowhere to worship, that sometimes maybe

God is the one that is telling you, showing you, I should say, showing you—theologically correct language here—He's showing you through circumstances that maybe you're the one that needs to be part of this.

Maybe that's your gifting, and maybe what you do is you find an area where there is a church that's solid that you can be in communication with, and they can maybe help you and sponsor you, or maybe they can send someone out.