Currently, our Sovereign Grace Academy, which meets on Thursday nights, is going through a course on Intro to Church Life and Ministry, that's our term for this semester, or our subject for this term, rather, and we're going through the book that I wrote, I wrote a book entitled The Biblically Functioning Church, and that's the textbook for this class, and in that book, I spend a lot of time dealing with this subject, Jackie's in the class, so you know, this particular subject, you know, we have dealt with at length, and I certainly have some opinions on the matter, having spent the time to put my book together, so I'm not going to be able to outline everything tonight, but I do want to point out some very important things about elders and deacons, primarily what we see in this article, because the focal point of this article is very simple, the local church has the right to choose for itself elders and deacons, that's really the key to this article, that's the truth that it's identifying, because we are not governed by an ecclesiastical authority outside of ourselves that would impose upon us leaders from elsewhere, I mean think about the history of the church, priests would be brought in from other areas and put with a church that they didn't know, and people they didn't know, and that still happens in some denominations such as the Methodist church, the Methodist church has a rotating pastorate, where pastors will pastor for two to three years, they will be brought out of that congregation and sent to another congregation, and the concept behind it, I do understand the concept, and that is this, that the church would never become pastor driven, it would never become personality driven, and you've seen churches that are that way, it's the personality of the pastor sort of takes over the church and becomes the force, the warp and woof of ministry is this one man, but the problem with it is number one, when you have men, and in the Methodist church women, rotating through that ministry like that, what you end up with is you end up with no ownership, and really no real relationship past that two or three year mark, and when I say ownership, understand what I mean, I don't mean like ownership in the sense of, you know, this is my property, but the idea that this is what God sent me to do, and I've said many times, and I believe it to be true, I don't plan to go anywhere else, unless God makes it very clear that Keith, you need to go to, please let it be Tennessee, no, I do like the mountains of Tennessee, but I don't want to go, because this is, unless we all go, y'all want to move to Tennessee together, we can all just pick up and, no, okay, well, we just spent time on a commune, we just talked about a commune, yeah, we're not going to do a commune, but I did see the coolest thing this week, and not to go off the subject, but there's a place up in Virginia for sale, it's an old retreat of some kind, had like 40 bedrooms and all this stuff, and it's only three and a half million dollars, I said, I know I know enough people that we can get together and pool that amount of money, and just have the coolest retreat ever, it would be the greatest place, it has a room, that'd be great for your cigars, Mike, like a cigar room, so anyway, but anyway, the point is, the church, the local church has the responsibility of choosing its own leaders, and so what does it say about that, it says, being thus joined, every local church hath the power given from Christ for their well-being to choose among themselves, meet persons or suitable persons for elders and deacons, well, how do we know that they're meet, how do we know that they're suitable, well, I agree, but first and foremost, the scripture gives us qualifications, yeah, Timothy, 1st Timothy chapter 3, Titus chapter 1, we have specific qualifications for the positions of elder and deacon, in fact, I make the argument in the class, and in my book, that that's why we know there's only two offices in the New Testament Church, because there's only two offices that are given qualifications, we don't have other offices, because we wouldn't know how to appoint anyone to those offices, because there's no qualifications for any other offices, the offices that are given to the church are the two that are given qualifications in 1st Timothy and Titus, specifically the office of elder and deacon, and so those are the two offices, and we are to choose men who are suitable for those positions, being qualified according to the word, and how do we know they're qualified, as Mike said, that we know them, Brother Andy, how long were you here before we began to examine you for an elder? Okay, now, you were a pastor before of, you know, many years, and we knew that, but he still came in and had to get to be known by us, same way with Brother Mike, Brother Mike Collier been here a little longer than Brother Andy, but they both had to go through a process of learning the congregation, the congregation learning them, developing mutual trust within, and then the congregation had to affirm them.