12 Witnesses

[Please note:  I know this article is even longer than its predecessor.  If you don't want to read it all, I completely understand, but if you would skip to the concluding 1/3 of the article, you will find the overall point laid out there.  Obviously, the groundwork is important in my mind, but having become a skimmer of blogs I understand that you may not care to go that far.  If you are a member of Skelly Drive Baptist Church, particularly if you are in leadership or on a Search Committee, please try to wade through it all.  Thanks!]

I’ve decided to work through some more prolegomena* before running through the structural descriptions and illustrations.  I think this background will help with the overall picture as we progress.

Today, the subject is culture.  I think the word “culture” is often problematic because because it is accurately used in such divergent ways.  I hear and read traditionalists often use the word to refer to what the Apostle John called “the world” when he wrote:

15 Do not love the world or the things that belong to the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. Because everything that belongs to the world— 16 the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s lifestyle—is not from the Father, but is from the world. 17 And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does God’s will remains forever.   - 1 John 2:15-17 (HCSB)

Which is different from the way he uses it earlier in the chapter:

1 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous One. 2 He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.    - 1 John 2:1-2 (HCSB)

Again, the use of the word “culture” in this way is not “wrong,” but it is a limited scope of the use that I will make of it.  So let me explain what culture is for our discussion.

I confess that the term was mostly abstract to me until this year.  When talking about culture, I thought of traditions and ways of doing things that are different from me.  Which is correct, but shallow.  For the greater part, I viewed culture as a matter of perspective.  You just see things a little differently than I do.  Also correct.  Kind of.

Perspective is actually more a result of culture, rather than the essence of culture.  You see things the way you do as a result of the culture into which you are immersed.  It is not the culture itself.

I didn’t really understand culture until February of this year.  In fact, unless you have had a similar experience, my description of this transformational moment may fail to help you grasp what I finally caught standing on the street in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Hanoi, like many places around the world, has a unique traffic … er … situation.  You see, the traffic in Hanoi has very little regulation.  The entirety of the city, at a population of 6.2 million (including outlying metro areas after an official merger in just a couple of weeks, which will double the official city population, according to wikipedia), has only a handful of stoplights, which have only recently been installed and to which only the majority of the population adheres, most of whom do so from the back of a scooter.  In other words, stoplights in Hanoi are just a suggestion to many, when they exist at all.

The entire flow of traffic is governed by a chaos theory that seems also to govern the flight of flocks of birds and schools of small fish that flow and turn together as both individuals and collective.  Well, it might help you to better see it in action, so here is a little YouTube video to help you get a sense of it.

I’ll follow this up with a couple of pictures I’ve produced here before of the exact same intersection:

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Now I know that you are already thinking about my last post concerning the individual and are speculating about how I am going to say that the Missional Church needs to act in a similar fashion with the individuals in fluid motion inside the whole - all moving together to accomplish the goal.  Great thinking!

But, no.

The revelatory experience as I observed the traffic in Hanoi was about the saturating nature of culture within society.  How do you learn to drive in such an environment?  You are immersed in it.  Everyone teaches you through trial and error (hopefully not critical error) and you learn.

Here’s the big point:  Culture is something that everyone in the society agrees upon as commonly accepted behavior.  You learn it as you go because everyone in the entire society teaches it to you.  No matter where you are, if you break the boundaries of what is commonly accepted, you will be corrected by those around you.  That correction may be verbal, hostile, kind, a gesture or something else.  It may come from relative, friend or stranger.  Nevertheless, everyone in society holds everyone else accountable for their cultural standards.

The results of which are key.

It is incredibly difficult, once something is ingrained in a culture, to remove it.  Look at tobacco in America.  There has never been such a targeted campaign to rid a culture of anything that has been sustained and fueled like the campaign to rid America of tobacco.  You could count prohibition, but I would argue that the majority of influential society was not actually on board with that campaign like the support the anti-tobacco campaign has.

Nevertheless, tobacco still survives the crippling lawsuits and picks up new converts daily.

Another result of the saturation of culture, is that churches have a culture of their own, and that culture has some specific elements to the local church, but also participates in concentric and overlapping circles of culture that radiate out through the local context, denominational influences and even the churched society of America inclusive of all denominations over the last 50, 100, 350 years.  As a matter of fact, most of the “decline of the American culture” emails, rants, sermons… even songs, that I pick up on are really decrying the fact that American culture doesn’t reflect the church culture the way it once did.  It is not that American culture is dead.  We still have national values.  Those values just don’t reflect the values of the people in church.

For evidence of this, look at the recent move toward conservationism and the typical response of the evangelical community.  America values “eco-friendly” lifestyles, but the church doesn’t.  In broad terms, anyway.  Read this article on the Eco-Justice Blog for a brief example.

Now, as it relates to Missional and Institutional Church structures, there are a few consequences of church culture.  Of course, it means that the church has to work to understand the culture it is trying to reach - Breaking the Missional Code - so to speak.  That’s the easy part.  Or, at least, the point most obvious to those interested in Missionality.

The more difficult part is deciphering your own church culture, or at even getting the church to realize that it has its own culture.

Because culture is saturation, most people assume that the way they think is “normal.”  It is, for their context, but what they don’t realize is that they are a part of a commonly agreed upon system of values that has them convinced that those values are “RIGHT” and violation of those values is “WRONG.”

For those saturated in the church culture, it means that certain songs, worship styles, modes of dress, lingo and even the evaluation of staff (”working” in the office during office hours, as opposed to being in the community, for instance) becomes something that is “right” because it is what they have always seen and done.  This is most humorously and sadly seen in the comment, “We’ve never done it that way before…” in response to a desire to make a change in any process of the church.

For the individuals and the church as a whole to accept the fact that the things that they have learned from each other and held as valuable are not necessarily right but just what they are used to doing is probably the most significant yet overlooked step in getting a church and its individuals mobilized in the community.

The failure to identify church culture is a de-motivator as well as a barrier to missional engagement.  It sucks away motivation because individuals look at those outside the church as living “wrongly” and their solution is to simply tell them that they need to get into the church and live “rightly.”  This mires the church and the individual into an attractional mode, at best, and can trend to move the church and individual into a judgmental attitude.  This creates an almost impenetrable barrier between the church and its internal culture and the unchurched and their culture, with very little national or local culture to act as a common bond between them and no motivation by either to break through that barrier.

Thus, the best, first thing that a church can do is identify and then evaluate its own internal culture and see what things might need to be excised from itself.  As I mentioned with the tobacco issue in America, simply identifying the ingrained value as needing to be gone is not enough.  It takes time, teaching and will sometimes take the absence of those unwilling to see beyond their raising before the culture becomes able to embrace a new system of values.  We see this taking place in the Exodus as the adults of Israel, despite the plagues, despite the pillar of smoke/fire (glory of God’s personal presence), the protection against the armies of Egypt by the separation of the two by the pillar/presence of God still complained that they would rather be slaves.  After the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptian armies, they still refused to take the promised land even with God as their head, and so, ultimately, God had to allow those who were saturated with the slave culture to die off and raise up a generation who were saturated with a culture that depended daily on Him for their very provision, via manna, quail, water, etc.

Sadly, churches in transition may well have to experience similar absence of those who can not introspectively evaluate their own church culture.

Still, the first major undertaking is personal self evaluation and the comparison of that which is demanded of God to that which is normative for us as dictated by that in which we were raised.

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*prolegomena - For Vicki and Tiffany, this word means “stuff you have to talk about so that the stuff you are going to talk about later makes sense.”  By defining the individual previously and culture now, it will be easier to understand the conversation about transitioning between structures later.

Who knew Systematic Theology would pay off?

I know, dear reader, that I have been woefully negligent in my blogging.  Even after I promised that I would return with passion loaded, I found myself awake at midnight on Sunday evening and not having written for the day or week ahead.  At all.

It was not a matter of not caring, either.  Rather, I found myself consumed by responsibilities in ministry, family and even simply personal.  Yet, I had one of the most profound weeks last week, in spite of its demands.

Though it is all still in process, I think I have finally adopted a Missional philosophy that I can call my own.  It’s two, four, ten and thirty years in the making, depending on your starting point of choice.  Nevertheless, it has finally gelled.

What’s more, I think that I am mostly unique in my thinking.  A long conversation, Providentially arranged, helped me to realize that my core values and theories of efficiency are moderately distinct from many other leaders in the Missional movement, though similar to a minority.

Well, more on that later in the series.

Right now I simply want to lay the foundation of the entire thought of reformatting the church structure:  The Individual.

The Missional Church is, fascinatingly, made up of missional individuals.  I know.  Shocker.

Suffice it to say that the thing that sets the Missional Church apart has to be the goal of mobilizing the individual to engage people living apart from God.

Then to address structure, the Missional church has to be one that facilitates the efficiency of individual mobilization.

The rest of the series is intended to discuss the structural details, so I will not start that here.  I will simply say that the primary issue of the shift between what I call the “Institutional Church” structure and the Missional Church structure is the removal of barriers that inhibit the personal engagement of the individual.  Ok.  More on that later.

Speaking to the issue of motivation, the Institutional church - that is the church that runs everything through the structure of the Church, from evangelism to discipleship to fellowships to worship to ministry opportunities - de-motivates its congregants with the provision of, and reliance on, the structure of the church.  The “outreach” is done (poorly) by a handful of people on a given night of the week by knocking on doors (which is unwelcome in today’s American culture) and going through a scripted presentation of the Gospel - if the people will let them in.  This creates, in the minds of everyone else, that the “outreach” is taken care of and they don’t have to particpate or even worry about it.

For the Missional church, the primary motivator for individual engagement is teaching God’s Word, which is full of the Missio Dei - the sending of God, or the Mission of God.  As Milfred Minitrea said, the church doesn’t have a mission.  It’s God’s Mission.  To make it ours is to make it small.

The combination of teaching and opportunity will, prayerfully, create engagement.  When opportunity is taken by the individual, when they participate in God’s Mission of redemption toward His creation, the experience becomes its own fuel.  How many times have you seen someone share Christ for the first time and become absolutely addicted to the experience?  How many “Mission Trips” have you seen revolutionize the lives of the teenagers who are its participants?

So I had been teaching for a while that we were all “Missionaries.”  Then it hit me one day after returning from Vietnam.  We’ve got to quit using the word, “Missionary.”   I had been with a former IMB Missionary, now heading up Northwood Church’s NGO:  Glocal Ventures, Inc.   We had discussed how, through the years, we had been taught that Missionaries were the top tier of holy servants of God.  Pastors were next, followed by secondary staff and then the deacons, Sunday School teachers, Nursery workers and various and sundry other servants in some miscellaneous hodge podge of lesser Christians.  Also, the culture there prohibited us proclaiming the “M” word as it was a barrier to us engaging those living there.

I began to think that the same word was a barrier to us here - both for those in the church (because we have “them” on an unrealistic pedestal) as well as those out of it (because of its “churchified” lingo).

So, one day I announced that we weren’t going to call ourselves “Missionaries” any more, even though I had been saying that we would for about a year.  Rather, I said, we will now call ourselves “servant messengers.”  The sermon, as you might surmize, was on the value of serving people as a door to personal engagement.

Afterward, one of our senior adult ladies came up to me and said, “You know, Pastor, you kept saying that we should all consider ourselves as missionaries, and I just couldn’t picture myself like that.  But then today you said that we were servant messengers and I thought, ‘Now I can do that!’”

I wish I could tell you all of the stories of people who are beginning to engage the world around them.  I’ve already made this article longer than it should be, so I won’t.  Let me just say that the reason I couldn’t sleep is because I got a call at 9:10 pm tonight telling me of how one of our Youth Workers saw some Hispanic kids playing soccer on our church grounds tonight and, prompted by the Holy Spirit, she walked over and started talking to them, shaped the conversation toward God and shared the Gospel.  She also invited them to participate in some of our stuff and told them that they were welcome any time.  Of course, we are not stopping there in God’s pursuit of them, but the point is she saw the oppotunity and, following the Holy Spirit, she let God use her in His Mission.

Structurally speaking, we have not really made any changes yet.  Two years in, and we are just getting started, but at least in theory, I think I understand where we are going.  As I said before, more on that later.  Nevertheless, the motivation is taking root and God is on the move.

Speaking to a conference hosted by the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell speaks to the issue of hiring the right people.  More specifically, he talks about the tools we use to evaluate the future success of candidates and how those tools are often the worst ones to use.  It’s fascinating to see how poorly we evaluate people for future success.

Reinventing Invention: Online Only Video: The New Yorker

What tools do you think we use that are poor indicators of future success?

How many times have I heard Ed Stetzer and others say that we need to exegete culture? Many, I assure you. Let me also assure you that I am not against exegeting culture. I’m for it.

But how far? How much culture can we truly decipher before we are spending all of our time trying to figure out minutiae? What about culture that moves quickly? Too much time studying a trend and it is out of style before you can apply anything relevant.

Best example: When I moved from rural Kentucky to Charlotte, NC (still in Youth Ministry) I went up to some of my older guys and said, “What up, dog?” They burst out laughing and one of them literally took me by the shoulders and said: “Never again. Ok? Never again.”

Relevant in Kentucky, way past relevant in Charlotte. A little trend that I had failed to grasp well had done much to convince my teenagers that, while I loved them, I knew little of their world.

And then there is the whole postmodern aspect to trends. What they mean to you, what they were originally intended to mean, is not what they mean to many who are participants in them.

I remember when the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong yellow armbands came out. I had a teenaged girl in my Youth Group who showed up one Wednesday night wearing one. Thinking that I would find a point of relationship with her, since my family has been rife with cancer, I approached her and asked who she knew that struggled with cancer.

Blink. Blink. Dumbfounded look.

“The LiveStrong bracelet?”

More blinking.

*sigh*

Foiled again.

So at what level and to what degree do you pay attention to trends? Enough, but not too much?

So we made it back from camp Saturday.  We had a stomach bug throughout the latter part of the week which kept us on our toes… and knees… and…erm… seats.  Well, we’re back and we took a victory lap last night during the evening service.  Way beyond surviving the bug, we had a couple of salvations, several re-dedications and even a handful of students who have surrendered to ministry and missions.  On top of all of that, our missions fire has been kindled in our Youth Ministry and they are asking for opportunities to go and tell.

Yes!  Really good stuff.

Tomorrow is the Founder’s Conference in Owasso, just north of Tulsa, and I am going, if the Lord wills.  My laptop is acting like the motherboard is about to abandon all hope.  Thankfully, it booted this afternoon and I ran to the store and bought myself an external hard drive to back up all my stuff.  All of that is to say that I may or may not live blog all or part of the conference.

Nothing like a firm commitment, huh?

Ed Stetzer and Voddie Baucham are among the speakers at a conference about church planting and church reformation.  I’m looking forward to it.

As you may know, we are currently without a Youth Minister, so I’ll be heading to camp with our Youth Group. I also went last year, but I was just along for the ride then.

I love camp. It is such a great opportunity for God to move in the lives of young people. It is exhausting, but well worth it.

I’ll be posting updates throughout the week, along with some pictures.

Thanks for your prayers.

If you are looking for info on the SBC this week, I am sorry that I will not providing the blow by blow for you as I have the last two years.

On the other hand, if you want some long term thinking about the SBC, I can’t recommend any higher to you this post by my friend, Marty Duren:

ie:missional » Dallas Morning News on Denominational Decline

We’re having VBS this week, and we’re off to Falls Creek for camp next week.  Yea!

There is no standard way to create a resume. Indeed, each resume says something about the one who created it. Sadly, many resumes tell those who receive them “I may be a good person, but I lack vision and the ability to communicate effectively.” Mostly, the resume that is poorly organized and hard to follow is the one that says this, even if the content and the references are good.

Here are a few thoughts, for what they are worth, about your resume.

Stylistically, be brief. Churches know what it is to serve on staff, so don’t give every detail of every event you coordinated. They won’t read it, and that hurts you. List the highlights. If your highlights are that you organized a trip to Six Flags, I hope that you are not submitting your resume for the position of Staff Administrator. I’m sorry to say, that is probably not enough experience. No more than two pages is a good rule of thumb. Remember that the resume is just a filtering device. They will get into the depths of who you are if you strike a chord with them at first blush.

Also, only include your picture if it is a flattering picture. Seriously. I have seen many resumes with pictures that ruled the person out immediately, because it was unflattering. Should that matter? Probably not, but it does. On the other hand, if you can’t understand how to present yourself in a way that removes obstacles, then that says something to the committee, doesn’t it?

Include these things:

Personal Information - The church wants to get a sense of you and your family gives them some history that informs that in a brief but meaningful way.

Education - The committee may not have a minimum standard or they may, but one way for your resume to be filtered out is by not answering questions that they will have for every candidate. Education is a question that will be asked of everyone, so answer it up front.

Experience - Again, be brief. List positions held, dates served and major accomplishments. I only put years, eg. 1999-2001 as opposed to the full dates of hire. I find that this is enough information without being too much information. Also, I can’t remember all of the start and stop dates from 21 years ago and I never recorded them. It’s never mattered to any committee and it sure doesn’t matter to me.

Vision Statement/Ministry Philosophy - This is the personal touch that you are trying to use to find some resonance with the search committee. A lot of guys I know use this paragraph to say things that will go over with just about anybody. They look not to offend. I do the opposite, and it has brought me times of no contact or responses from folks that are “not interested.” While it may be frustrating at the time, I console myself with the thought that they would part ways with me later, or that if they did call me, we might not get along. I also console myself with the thought that the committees that have shown interest are greatly interested. I have set myself apart in their eyes and I always seem to rise to the final person or group. In fact, since taking that direction, I don’t recall ever being dropped by a church, though I have turned some down. They knew who they were getting and it really helped.

Also, make sure it fits the napkin test. It must be concise enough to be understood and yet written on the back of a napkin. That’s communication.

References - I know some guys that furnish references on request. I furnish them up front for two reasons. If they want to know more about me, then that is a good thing and I don’t want them to have to overcome a barrier to do it. Also,my hand picked references should be great opportunities. By the way, never put someone down as a reference without first asking their permission and also without knowing exactly what they will say about you. I ask my references to tell me what they would tell a committee if they called, and then a quiz them as best I can. If you are unsure, don’t list them. The quickest way to have your resume work against you is for you to encourage the committee to call someone who undermines you.

The second reason I furnish references up front is that who I put on the resume says something about me. I not only list the name and the contact, but I list how we know one another. Then I am sure to list people who have worked over me, under me and alongside me, as well as lay people.

Alright. Any questions? Any additions? Any challengers? Take your shot.

Searching for staff is, obviously, crucial. After having been through the process 6 times, I have picked up a few things, and I am sure that most of you have as well.

The committee is so important. You don’t want anyone who is a “delegate” of a person or group of people in the church. Nothing will grind the committee to a halt and frustrate the church faster than someone serving a small interest. Rather, it is vital that everyone be willing to put the good of the church first. This will lead to unity, the necessity of which is absolute.

Next, the committee needs to have a clear job description from which to work, rather than a nebulous idea of what is to be expected. In some churches, the job description is given by the Personnel Committee, in some it is left to the Search Committee and in others it is determined by the church through a survey.

One other thought I’ll pass on is that the search committees I’ve worked with, and having served in six churches, you can imagine that I have worked with far more committees throughout the process, very few of them had their act together when it came to finding out about the candidate. Most of them asked leading questions like, “Do you believe that Youth Ministers should spend time in the schools?” Clearly, this is a conviction of the Committee and they want to know if you share it. However, they have asked in a way that virtually demands a “yes” answer, so no matter what they get, they won’t really find out if this conviction is a high priority for the candidate.

If they really want to know just how important this is, they will ask something like, “What are the practical ways you pursue integrating yourself in the lives of the students in your group?” If school visits come up, then you know it is a priority for them as well.

An even better way to ask the question is this, “Describe your typical week’s activities.” Or even, “Give us a ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of the last two weeks of your ministry where you are.” You are much more likely to find out where their heart is without leading them to your heart. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t suspect ministerial candidates of intentionally misrepresenting themselves. I just think that everyone is putting their best foot forward and when you let someone know that you want to hear about “x” then that is what they are going to talk about. The only problem is that you run the risk of not really finding out who they are.

Oh, and don’t forget the background checks. Absolutely essential nowadays. But be forgiving as you look at credit stuff. Unless they show that they are still in the throws of bad stewardship, then you shouldn’t hold mistakes made a long time ago with too much credence. After all, it takes a long time to get out of credit trouble, and in our culture, young people get into credit trouble soooo fast. Even Christians.

Finally, the committee should understand the position and the skills necessary. If they don’t, they should research it diligently and interviewing other staff about it is actually quite helpful. Case in point, a previous church’s Personnel Committee hired a secretary for the church when we were without a “Senior Pastor.” They didn’t ask me a word about the situation at all. Now, the position really needed someone with Office Software expertise, but they didn’t know that. They hired the best receptionist in their opinion, and I think they were accurate in determining that. She was a phenomenal receptionist, but she didn’t know squat about word processing, putting together a newsletter, using spreadsheets, etc. Meanwhile, they let a highly qualified lady go because, though she was a new Christian, she hadn’t quit smoking, yet. She has now, but she has also moved on to other things.

When the lady they hired came in, she didn’t know what to do, so I had to train her on everything, which took me away from my own job. She got better, but she is still way behind where the other lady was years ago. I found out later that the extent of their questioning her about computer skills was to ask here if she knew much about computers. Her answer was that she used them every day - which was true. She filled out certain forms in a data entry process every day. Obviously, that was not a sufficient evaluation of what was needed.

Translation: If you are hiring for a position, find out about that position from your other staff members, then learn how to accurately evaluate the skills involved.

What else would you add? What mistakes have you seen committees make? What tools have you seen be effective?

Where should the job description originate? How much involvement should the congregation have throughout the process? How often should the committee report to the church? How secretive should the committee be?

How much time should you aim for when starting a search process? Do you give the committee a budget? If so, how much? If not, how do you fund the search?

What is the best way to let your need be known? Do you advertise? If so, where?

Next week: The Resume

[edit]

Hey, Brenda Smith from the Kentucky Baptist Convention has posted some great resources that the KBC has provided.  I am reproducing the links that she gave here, just in case you aren’t getting the comments.

Pastor Search Committee Workbook

Staff Search Committee Workbook

Thanks, Brenda and the KBC for being Kingdom minded and sharing these resources!

[/edit]

In the previous installment of of church staffing I discussed, briefly, the difference between the desire of education versus experience. I asked more questions that inspired a few really good comments, but let me go ahead and give my full thoughts on the subject.

First of all, I admit that I took an incredibly complex subject and reduced it to “this or that” in hopes of generating some discussion, which it did. This blog existed for so long as a personal opinion piece that the community aspect has not rooted well. The longest discussions we had here, though they were mostly genteel, were also adversarial. Without controversial subjects, discussion here has struggled since I turned the blog from SBC politics. So… I have been pretty excited to get some fairly good responses on these last couple of posts on Church Staffing.

Still, I have some thoughts on it myself and would like to give those to you. I would love for you to respond, though these types of pieces don’t often generate as much response. Nevertheless, here goes…

The education v experience formula is not an issue of balance, or if it is balance it is not the kind of balance that one might find on a see-saw, with a fulcrum at one mostly central point and two things holding the tension from opposite ends. There are not two things here: Education and Experience.

When we speak of experience, what kind of experience is that? Mission field? Youth Ministry? Children’s Ministry? Senior Pastor? Lead Pastor? Volunteer?

Likewise, when we speak of education, what kind would that be? Bible College? Seminary? MDiv? ThM? PhD? DMin? Which Seminary? SBC better, or worse? What about self educated men? What about online education?

I have known people with formal educations that were not the brightest. They merely jumped through the hoops. On the other hand, Marty Duren is self educated. There is a difference between uneducated and self educated, you know. Having a degree is not always the test of mental capacity.

And then there’s experience. I postulate that my 10 years of experience as Associate Pastor of a County Seat FBC, was definitely prepared me for the position of Lead Pastor in many ways better than serving as the Senior Pastor of a 25 member church in a smaller town. Yet, in some ways, it surely would have taught me different things.

I think the particular job, church, town and vision for the future all create a mixture of need
that also needs a particular balance of backgrounds and much, much more. In short, the staff position is like a recipe that needs just the right balance of this, that and the other. The next question is, how do you determine that recipe?

That’s up next.

PS - Marty is about to wrap up his Bachelor’s Degree and I think it is onward and upward from there.  I feel sorry for all the twenty something kids that are getting the bell curve busted by him.