The midweek study is the engine of Protestant practice and the place its distinctive claim gets acted out: that an ordinary reader with an ordinary Bible can get at the meaning without a priest. Eight or ten people, someone's front room, one passage, and the assumption that everyone can read it. This is why Protestant mission and literacy campaigns travelled together, and why Bible translation has produced written forms for several hundred languages that had none. It is also where the arrangement strains — lay readings sometimes run past what the denomination holds, small groups become the actual congregation people belong to, and pastors find that the front room has more influence than the pulpit. The Catholic and Orthodox equivalents exist but are newer and thinner, and the Catholic Church only formally encouraged lay Bible reading in the modern sense at Vatican II.