Anabaptist History - Part 6 — Walter Beachy

Well, blessings to all of you, and it's a joy again to be here and to share this time with you. It is the last night, isn't it? That happens so quickly in weeks of meetings and partial weeks of meetings like we're doing here.

On your outline, we will be wanting to talk about the last two of the four main issues in Anabaptism, and that's our Ecclesiology, or our position regarding the church, and then non-resistance, lastly.

Matthew 18 and the Authority of the Church

So, we'll want to talk about the church first. Let's turn to Matthew 18 before we go to the passage, or to the outline, and look at this passage in Matthew 18, which is one of the major passages that our forebears would have turned to, and that we ought to consider when we think about how the church functions, and the authority of the church, and so on.

1st Corinthians 5, the whole chapter, would be another passage that has the Apostle Paul doing a good bit of exposition and explanation of the church's authority to discipline, and so on. Let's pick it up at verse 18, where Jesus said, Moreover, if your brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault.

And let me stop and say that fault is a fairly good translation, because in the Greek language you have about four, but really three very definite words for sin, and they are progressively worse with the Greek word anomia, anomia being law, anomia being lawless, or is often not consistently, but often translated iniquity.

The lesser word for sin is where you try for the goal, but you fall short. Then there's another archery term, by the way, that talks about missing the mark to the right or left or beyond, and that beyond does not mean that you're actually doing better than the target.

It just means you've missed. It's another way to miss. And then you have the one that says, I don't like the target. That's iniquity. That's lawlessness, or iniquity. This is the lesser one, the fall short.

And let me say at the outset that some dismiss this passage for church discipline by saying that it says here, if your brother sinned against you, so he's talking about personal things. However, if that's the case, how do you explain, if that's what is intended as the only way this should be understood or practiced, why does it come to the church?

And that's what Jesus himself says, that if one does not hear the private admonition and the small group admonition, why do you take it to the church? And if it's only just between two persons or someone sinning against you, and is it not true?

It certainly is in the Old Testament that the sin of one brother in a congregation or sister, women sin too, right? In Pennsylvania, women sin too. Anyway, if a brother or sister sins in the church, and we're talking now about going on in the practice of sin, it definitely affects the brotherhood.

There's a sense in which we do not live alone, as it were, unto ourselves, and our lives affect others, especially family and church and so on. So let's go back and read it now. Moreover, if your brother shall trespass against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.

And if he shall hear you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear you, then take with you two, one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.

Jesus was a realist, and of course knew human nature, even fallen human nature. So he knew that if someone will not hear a sincere admonition one-on-one, that very likely he's going to be looking for fault in the way it was done.

Not too long ago, I had, I was involved in a, in a tension between members of a pastoral team, and I don't like to get involved in problems like that, especially when I knew all of them. And I think it's safe to say that the one who blew it the most, I knew the best, and was probably the closest friend to.

And at one point he was complaining about something that the others did, and I said, well, I don't disagree so much with what they did, but as to how they did it. And I looked at him, and I said, that is a very old saw.

I wouldn't go there if I were you. If you agree with what they did, but just don't quite agree with how they did it. I said, let's not even go there. Bottom line is, did they do a biblical or an unbiblical thing?

Well, it was biblical. I said, that's all I need to know. It's all you should need to know. And he thanked me, so I think we're, well, I know we're still friends, but in any case, Jesus said, take one or two with you, a small group now, so that every word is established.

He can't say, you said this, you said that, that sort of thing. Then verse 17, if he shall neglect to hear them, the small group, then it says, tell it to the church. Now, the first time that you have Jesus using the word church, that it's recorded, is in Matthew 16, when he says, I will build my church.

And you can say that statement of Jesus, I think, effectively, to get all the meaning by saying, I will build my church, I will build my church, I will build my church, I will build my church. You know, you're going to emphasize each word has a slightly different nuance, but I'm sure it helps us gather the intent of what he's saying.

Here is the second time it appears, and he's saying, if one will not hear the small group admonition, tell it to the church. But, if he neglects to hear the church, let him be unto you, obviously the church, as a heathen man and a publican.

Then he says a very, very controversial thing. Verily, I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. And again, I say to you, that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Now, let me give you just a quick rundown of what the Anabaptists said in the first generation, what they wrote in the first generation of our movement.

They said these things about the church. The church is a believer's church, meaning only the regenerate are invited into the fellowship of the congregation. You don't just take everybody in by infant baptism or by membership drives.

There are evangelical churches that do that. They have membership drives. One of them told me, we hope then if they come to church, they'll hear the gospel and get saved. Ta-da! I mean, that's not what the Bible teaches.

So, our Anabaptist forefathers caught that both from scripture and early history that the church is a believer's church made up of those who are redeemed and who voluntarily join themselves to a local fellowship for accountability and responsibility and so on.

And they believed, along with what I'm just saying there, that we are us, in some respects or in a good bit of respects, we are responsible for each other in the local fellowship and accountable to each other.

Now, unless you apply that in a local fellowship, it finally has no meaning at all. I agree with the concept that there is a universal church, meaning all those who are born again are members of the body of Christ.

But I can't be accountable to everybody out there, and I can't be responsible for everybody out there. This is lived at the local level and what's written about what Jesus said and what the Apostles wrote was written to churches.

And there's where it has to be lived out. So, they believe that it's a believer's church, and they believe that we are accountable and responsible, and they believe that the locus of authority... We don't use the word locus a lot.

Locus comes from the word we get locale or that sort of thing, the place. Yeah, let's just say it like that. The place of authority is the gathered church where the Lord Jesus is present, which means then that he honors that presence when we are together in his name as regenerate believers, doing our best to be biblical.

Then there is authority, and it's amazing. He used the same words in binding and loosing as what was used of the function of the 70 elders, the Sanhedrin in Israel. I can imagine. I wish I was there, but when we get to heaven, we can ask the Apostles.

But my guess is when he said this toward the end of his year of popularity, no, it was even later than that. It was into the third year that he would have said this, that I'm guessing Peter and the other Apostles said, What?

Binding and loosing? It's not quite accurate, but it's close to say forbidding and allowing. But it goes beyond that. It means basically you could bind doctrine and you could bind ethics, practice. But he's talking about the very same thing as the Sanhedrin, the 70 elders did in Israel, and they were recognized all through the era of the Old Testament.

And Jesus never said anything negative about that arrangement that Moses' father-in-law, you know, had told him to do. Reader's Digest version, there I can use it. Reader's Digest version, he said, you're gonna kill yourself with busyness.

So why don't you put in judges of hundreds and judges of fifties? And then if they can't take care of it, then they can come to you, Supreme Court, as it were. The Western judicial system is patterned after that.

And if you take a case all the way to the Supreme Court and you lose, where do you go from there? Home. There's nowhere else to go. And they're sometimes wrong, right? They sure were wrong about Roe versus Wade.

They've been wrong about some other things. They are mere mortals, but their word is law. He's talking about something very similar to that, although we all know this is the final authority. Right here is the Word of God.

Moses' Delegated Authority and Matthew 23

But, well, turn with me to Matthew 23. I just want to point that out yet real quick, like, and then I'll take you through the outline rather fast. In Matthew 23, just a few passages, chapters back, Jesus said to his disciples, verse 1, and to the multitude, he turned to them and he said this, the scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat.

Now, these are the people that he had often rebuked. He was hard on them. But, notice what he says next, all therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do, but do not you after their works, for they say and do not.

And he goes on to say they're a pack of hypocrites, but they are your authority, obey them. And that was true until Pentecost. And then, when Peter and John were in front of the Sanhedrin, and they flogged them and said, don't preach in the name of Jesus.

Peter said, you judge whether we'll listen to you or we'll listen to God. Jesus said, go everywhere and preach. So he was saying, your authority has ended, and it did, obviously did. But the authority of Jesus is still present in the earth, and its locus is the believer's church, where Jesus is present, and people are Bible believing and trying hard to be biblical.

Parental and Church Authority

Now, let me just ask a question. Now, I'm trying to think about how to do this best to make it clear without a lot of time being used to do so. Let me illustrate it this way. Should your children obey you as parents?

Are they duty-bound by scripture to obey you? That's not hard to believe, but let me ask you, do you have perfect judgment? Are all your commands absolutely right? We had a curfew for our teenagers, and especially one of them, who was most like me, she would challenge me by saying, so-and-so don't have a curfew.

She made it sound like about the only young people in the youth group that have a curfew is them. I said, isn't it too bad you weren't born in some other family? Or I would say, so? But we are your parents.

Now, where in the Bible did we read that young people should be home by 11 o 'clock? That was Saturday night, 12 o 'clock other nights, y 'all. Midnight was the last they should be home. Now, the question I ask young people, if our children just deliberately blew that, and that was before cell phones, so sometimes we knew ahead of time it may be hard for them to make it, but we were usually up or at least awake until they were home.

Saturday nights, it was 11. We read that in Hezekiah. Did you know that? Does your Bible have that book? Well, we wrote one. But we were doing what we thought was for their good, and I still believe it was.

And I ask young people, if our children would deliberately break that rule, were they guilty before God of sin? And without almost no exceptions, they would say yes. And you could kind of tell by looking at a class which ones had a curfew and had broken them, because it was like a big flag went up, I'm guilty, you know.

But it is wrong to disobey parents unless parents would ask you to disobey God. And so God trusts, God delegated authority to parents. Is it shocking that he's delegated authority to churches? I debated a good long while about being baptized in the Amish church, though I didn't agree with them.

I then already had the conviction in my heart as a young Christian that if I joined the Amish church, I would obey its rules. I think I'm right. I don't agree with all their disciplines, but I think rather than, just like Jesus talked about the scribes and Pharisees, he didn't agree with their disciplines either.

Did you know that right at the time he said that, one of their rules was that you couldn't plow on the Sabbath? And because most of their homes had dirt floors, they went on to say, don't move your chairs on the Sabbath.

And if you have to move a chair, pick it up very carefully, and then set it down very carefully, because if you pull it, you've plowed. It's absurd. But, well, I'll just leave that. The authority of Jesus is present in the local church that is made up of born-again Christians honestly trying hard to be biblical.

I think we need to be concerned about that. Now, if you want to follow me, I'll just make a quick comparison between the free church and the sacral church, or the state church, the official church. And this is what was happening very definitely in the 16th century.

Free Churches, Sacral Churches, and Anabaptist Ecclesiology

On the left there, you have the free church and some things about it. And to the right, you have the opposite then under sacralism, believers only versus all in society. Our voluntarism is over against coercion.

And being evangelical, meaning believing in salvation by grace through faith, is over against being sacramental. The reformed church did, however, move away from that so they were still sacral but not sacramental.

Then responsibility and accountability can be put together as one. But in the sacral church, you're simply associated there and you have a lot of liberty for individualism. And I'm not going to knock megachurches.

And they vary. Some are better than others, I'm sure. And I'm sure there are people who get saved in megachurches that we would be uncomfortable in. But megachurches, one of their attractions in this period of time, is that there's very little accountability.

It's a matter of association. And it's a matter of I can do what I want to do. I can attend when I want to and not when I don't want to. And I can do what I want to do. Nobody will bother me. That's the association individualism that was happening except for attendance and that sort of thing back in the 16th century.

Now, comparisons of emphasis. For our purposes tonight, we will not take time to talk about pietism. That would be good for an hour, but we just don't have the time. So let's just look at the Catholic, the Protestant Evangelical, and the Anabaptist emphases.

And this is, I think, well, I know, this is yet fair to be said of most Protestants, most Catholics, and Bible-believing Anabaptist Mennonites. It's sad, but I have to identify today Bible-believing Mennonites because we have, like I said last night, we have Mennonites who have a very different Bible from what you and I have.

The Catholic Church sees the Church as an institution capable of conveying God's grace to man through the sacraments. And that is not an unfair exaggerated view of the Catholic Church. I've had many, in fact, we currently have former Catholics at United Bethel, but over the years I have shared on this subject and even at Bible School with former Catholics present.

And they agree. That's essentially that's kind of at the core of how they see the Church. Protestants go beyond that, and they see the Church as an institution for the proclamation or the preaching of the Word and the observance of the sacraments.

Very little discipline happens in many, even most, of the Protestant evangelical congregations or denominations. But they do have preaching. The Catholic Church essentially gave up on preaching in the 7th century, the late 600s.

Very little preaching happened. And it was mostly liturgy and formality and some singing after Pope Gregory of what are called the Gregorian chants. And up until 1962, all the services everywhere in the world, including the liturgy that the congregation memorized, was done in Latin.

And then in 62, they decided to go with the language of the people, with the vernacular. And so now in America, it's done in English. But very little preaching happened from about 700 to 1540, 1550. But when the Catholic Church was really losing members to both the Protestants and the Anabaptists, they began to do a little teaching, little homilies, little preaching exercises, teaching exercises in the Mass so as to counter the influence of the Reformation, the other groups that were emerging.

To this day, their sermons are about 10, 12, at the most 15 minutes long, called homilies. They don't even call them sermons. That's Catholicism and Protestantism went much better than that, and they had long sermons.

A lot of preaching, and the congregation went to singing in the Catholic Church until 1962. Only the professionals sang, because way back, the Popes had decided that the common people without education in music cannot sing well enough to be worthy of worshiping God.

So when I went to Catholic Mass back in the 50s, then they had someone coming out from Columbus to sing the Gregorian chants, because the congregation didn't sing a bit, nothing, for centuries, for over a millennium probably, that they didn't sing at all.

And then they started in 1962. Now, note the difference, the additional factor, in Anabaptism. Anabaptism sees the Church as a Brotherhood of the Regenerate, where the Word is preached, and now I borrow from Menna Simons, sustained by the means of grace.

Actually, you could put the quotations in front of sustained there. Sustained by the means of grace is a reference to Church discipline, where we call each other to obedience, in brotherly love, we admonish each other, we discipline each other, and we bear whatever cross, inwardly or objectively with our world around us.

But the preaching is sustained by the discipline of the Church. Let me tell you a little story that just really says this well. I have heard, we used to sing, I used to sing in a male quartet before I was married, and then even until a while after I was ordained, and we would sing in Protestant evangelical churches, like in revival meetings, and so on.

And I've heard some really good sermons. It wasn't in a church, but it was in another setting, that I heard one of the most vehement denunciations of women using eye shadow, eye makeup, to make their eyebrows bushy, and to make it look like they were living in a dank basement, you know, with mold in the top of their eyes here.

That's sort of, that's the kind of thing he talked about. He just creamed the women for that, and there were women sitting in the congregation that were living in basements, and looked like it, and yet he just really nailed them.

But the Church never did anything about it. And in Christianity Today, some years ago, probably 25, an article caught my eye. Whatever Happened to Church Discipline? Written by a Baptist pastor. And he sounded like a strict Mennonite.

He really did. Now the issues were different, but he was calling for church discipline. He said the church he grew up in, he can't remember there ever being any public discipline. And preachers would cry out against sin, but sin went right on, and nobody paid much heed to it.

Church Discipline and Consistency in Practice

And then he gave this illustration. I hope you'll remember it. He said a friend of his, who's also a pastor, had a little girl of about four, who one Sunday morning when he was preaching, and he and his wife had the agreement that mama got the children, two children, ready for church, so he could be in the study Sunday morning, doing the last minute touch-ups on his sermon, and praying, and all that.

Well, anyway, on the way to church, mama was telling how Susie was bad that morning, and didn't cooperate. So daddy, she was sitting in the back seat, daddy lectured Susie vehemently from the front seat.

And after he finished, and before they quite got to church, it was quiet for a little bit, and then Susie from the back seat said, daddy, were you preaching at me, or did you mean it? And he went on to say, you know, that little four-year-old Susie observed more than some of our adults do, that her daddy would decry things she saw in church, but the church did nothing about it.

It's an amazing thing. The summary of the Anabaptist view there is the church is comprised of those who are truly converted, or regenerate, committed to brotherly discipline, and voluntarily join the fellowship.

And the circle of membership in the visible church is the same as the circle of the invisible church. Now, I would hasten to say, no church can absolutely always know. But we should intend that if we draw a circle and say, this is the membership here at Anabaptist Fellowship, that that circle of membership would be the same as the circle that would circle those who are truly regenerate.

When I first shared that in a CMC ministers meeting, by request, and I was young and didn't know how well this would be received. Most received it well, but there were several older men who gave me a hard way to go.

One of them said to me right at break time, we had a break in the sessions, and he came up to me and he said, why did you leave the homage? I said, what do you mean? He said, what you're teaching on church discipline is just Amish.

I said, it's so different from the Amish. You were never Amish, obviously. I said, some of the things are the same because at least they have church discipline. But I said, it's very different from what I experienced in the Amish church and observed there.

And I don't have time to go into that. And I don't want to disparage the Amish. But the point is, he went on to say at one point, and another pastor agreed with him, you've got to be realistic. And we've got to make peace with the fact that we will have some of the world in the church.

Well, I'm sorry, I pastored for 32 years and I never made peace with it. And I felt it was a serious responsibility on the part of the leadership team's responsibility to the church to discuss the commitments of people, examine them.

And before we recommended them for fellowship, membership, not fellowship, that could happen before, but membership, that we could do so with confidence that they are born again Christians. I think that's what God intends.

That's what our Anabaptist forefathers said. There's an account, it's probably third generation because it was about 100 years after the movement began. And there was still serious persecution, but not much martyrdom anymore.

I don't think maybe any. And two young men came to an Anabaptist pastor at night, their first meeting, and told him that they are Christian and are not satisfied with whatever church, I don't know, was it Catholic or Protestant.

And they wanted to be baptized as believers and come into the fellowship. Now, it is true that at that point, yet the Anabaptists were very careful because some people faked coming into the church to get all the information they could, and then they'd turn them in to the authorities.

So they were very careful for that. But that account that I read went on to say after several hours of talking at night, this pastor said to these two young men, Go home, read and study the scriptures and seek the Lord, because I'm not ready to baptize you yet.

I do not intentionally bury live people. You get what he was saying? Baptism is a symbol of death to self. And he said, I detect too much life of self. We need a good dose of that, I think, in today's Mennonite circles.

Now, if we had a full week, I would have tried last night to give you an assignment there on the next page at the top. Well, I'm not sure how it is in your outline, though. But where there's a list called the Scriptural Imperative for Church Discipline, have you got that list?

There is the list of scriptures that directly deal with the subject. I would have asked you to read them and then we'll talk briefly about them. I just don't have time for that. But I would say that Matthew 16 and Matthew 18 and Matthew 23, which I read tonight, Matthew 18, 23, plus 1 Corinthians 5, the first two listed there are the most important and the most detailed ones.

But all of them address the subject. Now, just a few more things, and then we're going to have to quit for this particular subject. The Anabaptists saw the authority of the Church as being for instructive discipline and for corrective discipline.

And you have moral discernment besides preaching and teaching and counsel that's mentioned there in Ephesians 4, the goal being till we all come to the unity of the faith. Then you have moral discernment, Philippians 1, 9 and 10.

Paul says there that he prays for the Christians at Philippi that they would have sound judgment. Christians ought to individually but then also collectively move beyond just deciding between black, what's wrong, and white, what's okay.

We should graduate to look at things as good, better, best. Was it Montgomery Ward or Sears who used to advertise like that? They have the good stuff, they didn't have any poor. Good, better, best. Well, there are lots of moral questions that are based on that sort of issue rather than just, is it definitely wrong or is it okay?

That sort of thing. But discernment of that nature needs to happen in brotherly admonition, which is what fraternal admonition means there. Now, corrective discipline is where the word is interpreted and application is made.

Have you ever heard the statement, we don't need any kind of disciplines, we don't need any kind of applications. And I would say in a small church, you may not need any written ones, but what's wrong with having some written ones?

But you certainly need some understood ones because when people say, we'll just go by the Bible. If you would ask the leadership of the Episcopalian Church in America, do you go by the Bible? They would say, why, of course we go by the Bible.

But they just ordained the second bishop that is an active gay bishop. The first was a man and when they ordained him, the man he was living with in a homosexual relationship and his ex-wife and daughter from that wife were a part of the ceremony of his ordination.

And just a few weeks ago, I read in the news, it's now a couple months old, it was kind of kept quiet, but they ordained a woman bishop who lives in a homosexual relationship. Do they go by the Bible?

They would say yes. They don't really, but they would say yes, just like a lot of Mennonites would say yes today because they think they can find the Word of God in the scriptures where we're just so simple-minded that we're taking the scriptures very literally and not digging in for what is really the Word of God.

So you have to finally say, like, would there be any Christians anywhere with any level of maturity who would disagree with the statement that the Bible teaches that we should be modest in our dress? Everybody would agree with that, right?

But what's modest? And I remember back in the 60s and into the 70s when the miniskirts were in, and the miniskirt was initially designed by a gay woman. No, it was a gay man. I think the same French or English, I think maybe now English, man who did the bell-bottom trousers.

Remember those? They had a brief comeback recently. Yeah, I've lived long enough to see the bell-bottom trousers come and go and then come again. But you know what the intent was the bell-bottom trousers was to make men look like women.

This is what he wanted to see. He was homosexual. Shouldn't we know something about things like that? Shouldn't we give some heed to them? Does the church not have the right to say? I remember when one of our students was a student at Eastern Mennonite College way back in the late 60s, early 70s.

And I was on the board of trustees. I was there for a trustees meeting when Martha told me, the student, that Myron Augsburger had begged the women in chapel not to go for the miniskirts. And he made this statement.

I don't see how any woman can claim to cover her nakedness unless her skirt falls over her knees while she is seated. Because if she's opposite a man and her skirt is above her knees, at best she hides her nakedness.

Can you imagine that being said in chapel at Eastern Mennonite College today? I'm afraid you can't imagine having Myron Augsburger even say it today. I'm not sure, but I don't think he would. Now, let's go on with that list of things I have there.

Private admonition, small group admonition, public admonition, and then either exclusion or forgiveness. And a church must be willing to be a forgiving church. I summarize there at the bottom the ability of a congregation.

And I have some other lists in there we don't have time for. But at the end of this discussion in your outline, the ability of a congregation to discipline rests in her willingness to, number one, be a discerning brotherhood, an admonishing brotherhood.

It's not only the preachers that admonish, right? Right? Amen? It's kind of weak. And to be a forgiving brotherhood or to be willing to exclude the unrepentant. Let me close this section with just a quick story.

A Redemptive Example of Church Discipline

One day, a brother came to me with a heavy heart. And he said to me, I just heard something in town at one of the shops where a Methodist deacon had a mechanics shop. And another guy worked with him who was not a professed Christian.

But the Methodist deacon was a professed Christian, but he was a town gossip. And he said he named a brother in our church, a young man with a wife and two children, I think at that point, and said that he was seen at night, late at night on the porch of a lewd woman that was known to be a prostitute in our area there.

And he said, I don't know what to do with it. And I said, well, you really should go talk to the man. And when we looked at Freundschaft, blood relationships and all of that, I finally let him off the hook and I said, I will go talk with him.

I frankly did not believe it. But I called the brother and I made an appointment. He was a builder, he had an office, he had a good business. And so he set a time for me to come and it was after supper and we went into his office.

And I said, I'm here just to check something out with you. I said, a report has come to me, not in a gossipy way from within the church, but it's being gossiped in town that you were seen at such and such a place on such and such a time.

And I expected him to say, that's absurd. To my surprise, he broke down, wept. When he gained his composure, he said, I thank God she did not answer the door. But he said, my wickedness is still there because, and they were having problems in their marriage, some health related and otherwise.

But anyway, he said, I went there with the intention to sin, but she did not answer. So I left, went home. I thank God that it didn't happen. But he said, I was probably seen there because I was there.

So we talked about it. He prayed and then he asked if I would stay and have him call. He wanted to call his wife in and share it with her. To make a long story short, we had a really redemptive time there, a sad one, but a redemptive one.

And then the kind of thing that preachers love to hear, I was thinking, this is being talked about in town. What do we do with it now? And before I could say anything, he said with, and then he named the Methodist deacon, with him telling the story, he said, I think I would like, I ought to make a confession in church.

Now that's easy pastoring. And he did. He got up and made confession in church. I then made clear that actual adultery had not happened, but we prayed for him. We forgave him. And there was accountability set up and then some counseling arranged for their marriage problems.

And some while later, I had some work to do on the car and I don't get into electrical things at all. So I took it into the Methodist deacon. He just got a good start, buried under the hood. When he said, Walter, you're still pastoring out here at the church on the edge of town?

I said, yeah. Well, he said, have you heard about, and then he named this brother and I wanted to make sure he's talking about the same thing. So I said, heard what? So he started to tell me and I said, Jay, just stop right there.