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Here's something totally won't be interested in. It's from my reading about ancient, you might be interested in it, just kidding.

You probably are, actually, it's probably really interesting, I'm underselling it.

By the way, Sherry is not in the studio at this very moment because she's dropping a friend off at the airport, but I needed to get some of this done for the podcast, so I thought I'd just talk to you about it.

But I was reading about ancient Athenian democracy, which is usually a good time.

In this case, it was a very popular book called Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, but anyway, they would have these people do a couple interesting things.

One was, I'm not saying we should do this. I'm just throwing this out there. It's an interesting part of democracy, because they had people vote directly, or the people who were allowed to vote, you know, voted directly.

It wasn't like Republican democracy, so everybody voted. They also had like, I don't know what you call it, like an assembly of 200 to 500 people that would serve as jurors and judges each year.

So that was kind of interesting. And they also did this other thing too, where they would vote whether or not to have an ostracism once a year or something like that.

So it would just be an uptown vote, hey, let's do one, let's not. And if there was support to do one, then everybody would write down who they think should have to leave town.

And it wasn't like just somebody who was, you know, they don't like on the street be like somebody who was trying to take over, pulling power moves and stuff.

And so they would all vote and whoever got the most votes had to leave. And I can't remember for how long it was, maybe period a couple years or several years or 10 years.

And they let them leave with their family, whatever. And then they kept their property form when they came back, but literally just gave them the boot out of town.

And I thought, well, that's barbaric. And I thought, that has.

Sorry, it has a little bit of a feel. So it might be healthy for democracy. I had no idea you can think through the ramifications of that.

More interestingly is the name for the assembly of people that would everybody would gather together, everybody would gather together and it would be huge numbers of people to debate issues and then vote on it.

And everybody got the same vote and it was just not hierarchical at all. And that gathering had a special name for this people that came together for that purpose and voted on stuff.

The gathering's name is Ecclesia, which maybe you've heard about, maybe I already knew where I was going with that. Ecclesia is the word, the Greek word that's translated church in English.

And it's just really interesting. I just wanted to throw this out for you. It's really interesting to me that this was all about nobody has more than one vote.

And nobody is more important than anybody else in the Ecclesia. And that was the term that Paul would use in talking about the church.

This gathering of people called out for God's purposes, for God's purposes in this case, but there was no, there wasn't a special person that gets veto power.

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