Celebrating Seniors: Reclaiming Older Saints in the Church
September 16, 2025
Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell
Guest: Bill Welte
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 9/16/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Jamie Mitchell:
Welcome again to another hour of Stand in the Gap. Today I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture at the American Pastors Network. You probably wonder what that title means. I mean, each time I host, I introduce myself as the director of church culture, and you probably are thinking to yourself, well, what’s the church culture mean? Well, the definition of culture is simply this, the customs, language patterns, social institutions and achievements of a particular nation, people or other social group. And because the church is its own unique social group, there are many unique traits and trends that occur throughout its relationships and functions. My task is to keep an eye on those distinct cultural issues and translate them into information to help the American Pastors Network and ultimately to help all of us in the body of Christ. I try to keep my ear to the ground and learn what is occurring throughout the Evangelical Christian community and then make suggestions and even some warnings of what I’m seeing each year.
I write a comprehensive report called the State of the Church that will be coming out later this fall and evaluate where we are and how can we most effectively make an impact for the gospel and advance the mission of the church. I did not need to look too deep to identify the problem that I want to discuss on today’s program. Over the past 15, 20 years, there has been a sharp decline in the number of seniors attending church, but even more concerning, less and less seniors significantly contribute to the life and ministry of evangelical churches. There are some sobering statistics data from PRRI indicate notable decrease percentage of seniors, meaning 65 or older who say religion is the most important thing in their lives, dropping from 33% to 16% in 2023. Among older age groups, there are greater decrease in the frequency of church attendance compared to younger groups in the last decade.
For instance, the percentage of seniors who attend church weekly more declined from 40% in 2013 to 33% in 23. And the Barner group notes that boomers have experienced the greatest loss in church attendance with a 22% stopping altogether compared to 13% the millenniums according to Church Track. The real problem is that if the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is going to be stronger, more effective, and we need a number of mature established believers, and by now we’re finding many of those believers are exiting the church and we need to find a solution. We need to get our seniors back and we need to start appreciating them again in the life of the church. Today’s topic, celebrating seniors reclaiming older saints for the church to help me, Dr. Bill, we recently retired president, executive director of America’s Keswick in Whiting, New Jersey, along with their addiction recovery ministry. Keswick has a thriving Bible conference ministry and what is really important for today’s subject, Keswick sits in the middle of one of the largest seniors communities in America, and Bill, in my opinion, has done a masterful job of ministering and mobilizing Senior Saints. Bill Welte, Welcome back to Stand in the Gap today.
Bill Welte:
Thanks Pastor Jamie. We love your ministry and this is a subject that I’m very passionate about.
Jamie Mitchell:
Well, Bill, that’s why I wanted you here. You heard my opening and we’ve talked a lot about this issue over the years. You’ve hearing complaints and the heartache of seniors for decades is this exit from the church reel and what are seniors telling you about their church experience?
Bill Welte:
Seniors are very frustrated. Most churches are gearing everything towards younger families and that’s where we need to be. We’ve been talking about that here at Keswick for a number of years. We need to figure out how to reach the next generation, but not at the expense of ministering to a very large element of the population which are senior citizens. You and I are one of them now. There was a joke that went around a couple years ago that some of Bin Laden was not 50 because if he had been A A RP would’ve found him.
Jamie Mitchell:
You got that right? For sure. I mean, how many times I get emails and things sent to my house, but Bill, in some respects, as we could see over the last number of years, this ignoring of seniors in some respects was almost intentional back a number of years. Do you see that? Is that a fair evaluation of what happened in many churches?
Bill Welte:
Absolutely. We did away with the hymn book, we did away with the hymns, and so our senior friends are like longing for fellowship. They’re longing. I hear so many seniors say, why don’t we just have one hymn? I’ll be happy. We’ve totally ignored them and push them out and we almost treat them that they have no value
Jamie Mitchell:
And see, Bill, that is my concern because we had this wave of young pastors, many of them who came to faith in Christ later on in their life, they didn’t grow up in the church and so they don’t look at the seniors who are in their church as either someone to be specially honored or someone who should be leveraged for ministry. How does these younger pastors miss this? Is this again a good evaluation of what we’re seeing?
Bill Welte:
Absolutely. I think what’s happened is that younger pastors think that they have all the answers and that seniors do not bring value to the church. Now, on the other hand, many seniors have not valued young people. There needs to be a balance between both generations of saying, Hey, you have value and I can learn from you. I’m thankful for the church that I grew up in. We had a program of scripture memorization, which allowed younger people to say their verses to older saints, and at the time I thought, well, that’s kind of crazy, but now looking back over that, that was a way to build relationships between one generation and the next and many of those seniors that I said my verses to became lifelong friends and prayer partners and became great mentors to me in my ministry
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill. That is exactly why I’ve decided to do this program today because I don’t see that in churches. As I visit churches for the American Pastor’s Network and speaking in churches, there is a segregation that goes on. It’s the dividing of the young and the old, keeping them separate and in some respects, churches making a intentional decision that all they’re going to do is focus on young people and young families at the expense of not having a ministry to the saints of God and how we bridge that, how we bring that together is so very important. Well, friends, we’re just getting started. When we come back, we want to look at some of the reasons why it would be beneficial for a church to focus on their seniors. Hey, pick up your phone, call your pastor, text them, email them. If you’re a senior, send up a smoke signal, but get them on the radio today and have them listen to this very important program, how to get seniors back in your church.
Well, welcome back. We are talking about getting seniors back in the church more so making them a strategic and significant part of the church’s ministry Bill. Wealthy from America’s Keswick is with us Bill. Over the years you have endeared yourself to many seniors, especially those who support Keswick. They pray, they give to the work, they volunteer and one of the reasons is they in some respects have felt abandoned by their church and so they come looking for a place to give of themselves to get involved. Bill, there’s pastors listening, there’s church leaders listening today, but if a pastor came to you and sat down and said, bill, you’ve got this ministry to seniors. Why should I intentionally try to engage seniors in my church ministry? What are the benefits? What would you tell them, brother?
Bill Welte:
I want to use an illustration of a church that I’m familiar with. They were doing three services, two contemporary, one traditional, and one Sunday morning the pastor said, next week is the last traditional service, and we just want you to know that the following week, 300 congregants left the church and went to another church. They had to discontinue many of the programs in the church. They had to cut the staff, they had to cut the budget, and they didn’t realize what a significant force this was in the church. Over the years, I have learned that this is the generation of people that will pray very diligently for the ministry. They will also give young people that don’t have a tendency to give. There are many who do, but there’s a lot of people in that generation that don’t give like the seniors do, and they give not only in their living giving but in their after living giving. They’re the ones that are leaving in their estate planning to ministries like the local church and also ministries like America’s kk. There’s great value to ministering to senior citizens and we don’t do it just for the money. We do it because we care about them and they bring great value to the table. They listen, they pray and they give.
Jamie Mitchell:
Yeah, bill, I always believe that the church, the church itself, the building, the office, whatever you have, it needs to be a happy place and a happy place means a place of activity. And to be honest, seniors are available. I mean in the world that we live, most times a husband and a wife are working. They’re busy with their kids, they’re busy with their kids’ activities, but seniors are available and they’re available to come to the church to be a volunteer, to come over and help during the day, help in the office, and I think that one single piece, especially with the kind of lifestyle a lot of our young people and young families live, having a legion of people who are available to serve and to make themselves available to help at the church. Boy, it’s a tremendous benefit and could be just a tremendous blessing. But Bill, you mentioned it before, you and I brother, we’ve gotten older. I don’t know how it happened. I woke up one day and I’m older, so are you and to be kind, I’ve noticed that maybe you more than me, we get a little cranky every now and then because of our age. I’ve heard pastors say this about seniors, they’re demanding, they’re hard to get along. They don’t change very often. Let’s be honest. What are the challenges of working with seniors?
Bill Welte:
You’re absolutely right. We can be cranky, we can be demanding. We have all the answers sometimes and we’re not willing to look towards the future, and there needs to be a willingness, as I said before, on both parts to be open to each other. I mean, Paul talked about older men, older women discipling younger women and younger men, and I think that when we catch that vision, it can be really exciting and a church will grow and really be greatly used by God in this generation. If I could brag on my home church for a moment, they planted a church in our area. We started out with 500 people and then the pastor decided he wanted to make the church a young church, and he grew the church down from 500 to 75. It eventually closed and our home church decided they were going to plan a work there.
When I go on Sunday mornings, my heart is so thrilled because many of the seniors who didn’t want a younger church are now attending that church and they’re greatly involved. I would say that 50% of the church are senior citizens and Jamie, when I look around on Sunday morning, they’re singing their hearts out. They’re lifting their voices to God, they’re raising their hands and they’re singing contemporary music, and I laugh because in many of our churches that minister to younger families, a lot of the people are not even singing. They’re just watching the praise team worship, and this is a church that has embraced their senior citizens and it’s growing leaps and bounds.
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill, it’s so interesting you should say that you know this, and I think our radio audience knows that Recently, my wife Kris and I, we made a move from the east coast out to Indiana to be close to our son and these two little creatures that live in his house called grandkids, but we’ve been thrilled because we found a church and my traveling around and watching churches. I was very, very skeptical of being able to find a church, but I found a church and the number one evaluation or number one thing that I noticed when I came into this church was that they sang. Everybody was singing, which was a shock to me, old and young, and they were singing a cross section of new music, old music. A matter of fact, I always look at the little copyright footnote at the end of each song, and we have songs from the seventies, eighties, nineties, two thousands, and the songs from 2000 twenties. We are singing them all and it just does my heart good. Like you’ve said, to see this cross section. Bill, let me ask you a question. If you had a younger pastor, it’s my contention that I think one of the things, and you even mentioned it before, that these younger pastors need to actually sit down with seniors and dialogue with them. How important is that both for the seniors and the young man?
Bill Welte:
I would’ve never survived in ministry if I had not embraced my senior friends. I have so many senior pastors that I could pick up the phone and call them and just say, Hey, will you pray for me or will you give me advice? The education that they had was just absolutely incredible. The life experiences, I could name men that Newton Conant, John Hibbard, even Pastor Bill Ross, the fellow who was the grandson of the founder, they were so helpful and helped me in my ministry early on, and I still say to myself, what is this next generation going to do when all these guys are no longer on the scene? They have a lot of wisdom and insight into our lives and ministry
Jamie Mitchell:
And Bill, not only the senior ministry leaders, but I’ve challenged young pastors, especially if they go into a church and they are a group of seniors in the church is have a lunch with them, have a breakfast with them, get them around a table and start asking them questions. I mean, showing that little bit of interest in them would not only win the day with those seniors, but they’ll start learning things. Bill, if you were to walk into a church today and they were seniors, you wouldn’t ignore them, would you?
Bill Welte:
Absolutely not. They’re just wonderful people. As I said, they can be cranky, they can be demanding, but they’re some of the nicest, sweetest people,
Jamie Mitchell:
And as these young pastors come along, they also need to understand the challenges that seniors are going through. Bill, can you speak to that in the next minute or so? What personal challenges do seniors face?
Bill Welte:
So many of us are struggling physically. I recently had a stroke in November and I would be lost without my local church. The care that they provided to me and my family, so many of them are having financial difficulties. They’re lonely, they’re facing end of life issues, and they need younger families in their lives to encourage them and to build them up in their walk with the Lord. They’ve seen God’s faithfulness. They memorize scripture, but they also need younger people just to encourage them and say, you can get through this.
Jamie Mitchell:
Amen. Amen. Yeah, I mean I’ve talked to a lot of seniors who their own kids for one reason or another have ignored them. I was involved in the seniors ministry in the last couple of years and so many times heard how seniors moved to be near their kids, go into a retirement community so that they would be close to their kids only to find out that once they got into that retirement community, their kids ignored them. What an opportunity for the church to be that family for our senior friends no matter who we minister. The fact is people are messy. Ministry gets messy, and yet God touches people’s lives and begins to give them purpose and great things happen when we return. I want Bill to share some practical ways that he has been reaching out to seniors over the last couple of decades. I think you’re going to be encouraged and inspired and maybe even start doing some of these things in your own church. I have a sense that today’s broadcast is going to inspire and encourage many churches, and I really hope it does. We’re talking about reclaiming seniors in our church. Bill, we is our guest bill. I know that Keswick does a lot of special programming and a lot of it’s designed for seniors, especially in light of living and being in that area of New Jersey where a lot of people have retired, but can you share about those ministries, how Keswick can serve churches and how our listeners can find out about?
Bill Welte:
Well, one of my favorite stories as a young pastor came to me one time because my friend Robert Hayes and I were playing before the services and we were playing hymns, and he said, you guys got to change this. There’s not going to be any young people here. Well, we’re still here. 28 years ago, Robert Hayes and I started a ministry called Our Community Hymn Sings. We started out with hundred people. We are now in our 28th season and we’re still averaging between five and 600 people every month. There are senior citizens that are getting saved and for two hours we sing. We sing hymns, we sing Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, and it’s absolutely thrilling each month to hear people tell the stories of how a song, a hymn or even a new song has ministered to them when they were going through a real tough time in their lives.
We also have ministry. We’re in the fifth largest senior citizen population in the country, so we ask the Lord, what can we do to minister to the people that are all around us and twice a year we do what we call a Young At Heart conference, and I wish you could come and see what this is like When they gather in the lobby, it’s like a high school program. They’re like little kids running around and greeting each other and fellowshipping with each other. It’s really thrilling to see what God is doing in that age group.
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill, what’s the website for so people can click on there and find out about the ministry?
Bill Welte:
Thanks, pastor Jamie. They can visit us@www.americaskk.org or they can call 1 804 5 3 7 9 4 2. We’d love to send them information about our ministry.
Jamie Mitchell:
Hey, bill, I want to tap your plethora of experience and resources and ideas. If you were pastoring a church and you wanted to reengage your seniors, even reach new people, what kinds of programs or initiatives might you do if you were in a church trying to minister to seniors?
Bill Welte:
Well, I think the one thing that you said a few minutes ago was sit down with them, grab a meal with them. Just let them share their life experiences with you and get to know them. A lot of churches in our area moved away from Wednesday night prayer meetings to Wednesday afternoon prayer meetings, and they found that the attendance increased drastically because seniors don’t like to go out at night. This is a group that loves to be involved and loves to be active. As you said, they’re great volunteers. We have a group that comes in every month to help us mail our prayer calendar. We have prayer groups that meet throughout the area and in other geographic locations. They’re really eager to serve and to learn.
Jamie Mitchell:
They’re looking for a sense of purpose, but also community Bill. I mean this group of people, the seniors, I mean if you can just gather them together, they like to do stuff together, and if you can turn it on its head and give it a purpose, whether it’s a service project or to help a missionary group or to just support an effort, they would show up and they would be there, wouldn’t they?
Bill Welte:
Absolutely. It takes work and I think that that’s why most of the younger pastors shy away from this type of ministry because it does take work and planning, but it’s so beneficial. It is so beneficial. I never dreamed that the hymn sings would be still running 28 years later with such great enthusiasm and attendance and we sing a lot of new songs. It’s not just the hymns, but they’ve learned to adapt to the music because we give them the kind of music that they love and they have endeared themselves to over the years
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill, one of the things that I heard, and I even did this while pastoring, is that I tried to connect my seniors with my young people. Every year our young people would have retreats or go away to camp, and we asked our older saints to sign up and we gave them their name. We gave them the information, and we asked them the week before and the week after a special retreat or a special camp to specifically pray for our students, and then the next time that they had youth group and they were going to do testimonies and they were going to share about what they learned at their camp or retreat, we invited those prayer partners to show up. And can you just imagine what would happen if we could do that kind of intergenerational connections between older and younger in churches? It’s not like they’re doing a bible study, but they’re knowing their name and they’re knowing who they are. And I’ll tell you, Bill, they walked into church the next week and it was a whole different attitude in the fellowship. Have you ever seen that kind of interaction young with old?
Bill Welte:
Absolutely, and I think this has to happen in the home. I’ve learned so much from our former chairman of the board, Howard Bateman, who he and his wife Barbara, invested great amounts of time in their grandchildren when they were young, and at this age of Howard’s life, he just turned 91. His grandkids are so engaged with him, they care for him, and I believe it’s because he and Barbara spent so much time investing in their kids. They went to all of their sports activities, they encouraged them. They did a lot of things like they would invite the kids over weekly to read to them at night. They turned the TV off and read great Christian books and other books, and I think when it’s happening in the home, it will translate over into the church.
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill. We’ve talked a lot, or at least we alluded to that sometimes younger pastors, they need to have a little bit of an attitude adjustment. What would you say though to seniors in a church today? What word of encouragement, how might you share with them about watching their own attitude when they’re in the church so that they don’t push young people away from them? What word do you have for a senior today?
Bill Welte:
Well, I think they have to think about the future. We forget what it was like when we were kids and we rebelled against the things that our parents were talking about. I remember one older couple that were very conservative and they were angry that we were having contemporary concerts, and they decided one time to come to a contemporary concert and they were absolutely thrilled when they saw all these kids worshiping and praising the Lord together. I have a good friend, pastor Bob Alderman who was very straight and narrow, and one time he went to a program that his grandson was doing, his grandson was leading worship, walked out on the stage in his bare feet, holes in his jeans. There were a thousand kids in this room, and he said to his wife, Ms. Amelia, get up out of the chair. We’re going home. And very wisely, Ms. Amelia said to him, Bob, sit down. We’re going to stay and worship with these kids. And he shared with me five minutes later, the tears were flowing when he realized that these thousand kids were worshiping and praising the Lord different than what he was used to, but nevertheless, it was something that really ministered to his spirit to see the next generation rising up and worshiping and praising the Lord. We need to be tolerant of the next generation. We need to encourage them if we want to be encouraged as well.
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill, I was pastoring a church and we had somewhat of a youth movement, a lot of young people, a lot of college students coming, and we had this dear couple, they’d been there from the very beginning and they had moved into the area, moved into a retirement community, and one day I went up to them and I said to them, can I ask you a question? I know the music isn’t your kind of music, and I know that we’re a lot more contemporary here than probably you’re used to or even that you like. Why are you here? And they didn’t miss a beat. They both kind of looked at me, they smiled and they said together. They said, we recognize at our age and stage of life that we’re not the future. Our runway is a lot shorter now today, but the people around us, the ones kids that are in this church, they are the future.
They’re what the church has to look forward to. We want to be here to invest, to pray, to be a part of it. And to be perfectly honest, we don’t want to go to a church just with all old people because as we get older, we want somebody to take care of us. I think that’s a great balance of understanding that you have an opportunity to build into the future, but also the future to take care of you. Friends, I hope you’re listening and listening carefully, maybe writing down some of these ideas. When we finish up, I want to talk about a strategy for elevating your seniors and then give a word about what we’ve experienced this week with the death, the untimely death of Charlie Kirk who touched the next generation.
Well, thank you for sticking with us. So we have been attempting to challenge you and your church and its leaders to take a hard look at your ministry to seniors and ask the questions, have we marginalized our seniors and do we see them as a value in the body? Now, if you recognize that you need to reclaim an emphasis on seniors today has been designed for you. Now, the fact is you and your church may have a great group of seniors who are loved and encouraged, praise God for that. But that let me tell you is going to be the exception, not the rule, but wealthy has been helping us think through this dilemma that the Evangelical Church is facing and giving us some helpful suggestions and encourage us to make an attitude adjustment concerning seniors in their church. Bill, as we finish up, I would really like to get practical for our listeners, and can you give me two or three or four maybe first steps that any church should do to get serious about reaching seniors? Even if they don’t have a lot of seniors in their church, what can they do to try to increase the pool of seniors in their church?
Bill Welte:
One of the things that I’ve been learning since my stroke, I have 16 year olds that I’ve been investing in, and I’ll tell you, they have been such an encouragement to me in my ministry and where I am in life right now. I hardly ever see them face to face, but they asked me if I would pray for them, and I got their cell phone numbers. So every day we text each other and we share what God is teaching us. That’s such an easy thing. I know years ago I started encouraging seniors to text their grandkids and they go, no, I don’t want to do that. And I told them, well, if you want to communicate with your grandkids, that’s one of the best ways to do that. And so many of them have picked up the mantle, and that has helped them to foster relationships with their grandkids in this generation.
The other thing I want to encourage pastors to do is to sing more hymns in their church. They’re not interested in just a reimagined or re-engineered hymn. Sing the hymn the way it was written. It can be one hymn, but I’ll tell you what, you’ll really engage your seniors. That’s a way for a pastor to say, I really care about you and I want to be involved in your life. And so many of them have stories of how those songs minister to them over the years. I’m thankful for men like musicians like Kristen and Keith Getty who are really getting us back to singing the hymns and learning about why they’re so significant in our lives.
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill, I’m not a musician and I don’t want to deviate too much on this, but one of the things that I’ve noticed in the past five or six years when I kind of fell back into ministering solely with seniors is that they love the hymns, but they’re also easier for them to sing technically. And I’m not a musician. I mean, basically I play the radio really good, but technically speaking, the way a hymn is laid out and the way you sing it, it’s much more easier for a senior to sing a hymn. And it is some of the different modulations in the way that melodies are written. For the newer hymns,
Bill Welte:
A lot of the older hymns have been around for ages and we remember them. A lot of the new songs are here and then they’re gone the next day. So I love singing both. I think it’s important for us to do blended worship. We need to learn the new songs as well as the old songs. And as I told you one time, we did a hymn sing where we said, we’re going to do the hymns of the church. We only did one hymn. The rest of them were songs like Majesty. And afterwards folks came up and said, we love coming to Keswick because they sing the old hymns of the church. And Robert and I got laughing because we only did the one hymn, but we helped them make bridges the gap between the old and the new and it can be done.
Jamie Mitchell:
Bill, you inspired me with what I saw happening down at Keswick and your ministry. About a year or so ago, I put together a little seminar that I do for churches called How to Reignite Your Ministry to Seniors. And the thing I tell pastors is, look, you walk into a church, gather your seniors together, sit down with them, start listening, ask the questions, things like music and programmatically, have we abandoned our seniors? Are we incorporating those things? And then find some simple ways for them to engage in ministry. And boy, I’ll tell you, if a church or a pastor will do just a couple of these simple steps, they will make a huge difference. Bill, you’ve been a blessing to be a part of this program today. I want to encourage people to check out America’s Keswick. Go to the website, get to some of the conferences. Hey pastors, get a group together and go to one of the senior retreats that Keswick does. Bill, you’ve been a blessing today. Thank you so much for being a part of this program today. Thank you
Bill Welte:
So much for including me in the Stand in the Gap program. We really appreciate everything that you for doing in this ministry, and I pray that there’ll be lots of people that will pray for and support your ministry
Jamie Mitchell:
As we finish up today. The few minutes that we have left, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that this past week we lost a brother and a warrior in the faith in Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA. Probably. You now understand who Charlie is if you didn’t know who he was before. I’ve known of Charlie for a decade, knew the church that he attended and the kind of cross path with he and his family years ago and watched the growth of his ministry. We’re talking about seniors today. Charlie was so focused on young people and reaching the next generation and starting them to come back to church. Matter of fact, he constantly pushed young people back to churches because he believed that that intergenerational connection, old with young, what was desperately needed. Charlie was an old soul. If you listen to him.
His values, his beliefs, the things that he was espousing, not just politically but spiritually and practically and lifestyle, was marked by an older generational thinking. And he repackaged it to reach this next generation. I now live in a college town. Purdue University is literally two miles from my home. And this weekend I was so burdened by the loss of Charlie, but also watching what’s happened that I’ve reached out to my local Turning Point USA chapter that’s on the campus and as a senior adult have made myself available now and said to the Turning Point chapter here, use me if you want me just to pray for you. Give me some names of kids to pray for. If you need a volunteer, I’ll be there. If you need somebody to help you raise money, I’m going to do that because as a senior citizen, I may not be the one to reach a college student or go on the campus and interact with them like a Charlie Kirk and some of these others who are doing it, but I can support that effort. And so I just believe we’re going to see a great revival even come from Charlie’s death, and we as seniors need to step up to the challenge. Well, it’s been a joy to be with you today. We need seniors. We need young people. We need to get them back in the church. We’re a family of families and we need to turn the church back. And to do that, we need courage. So live and lead with courage.
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