“I had made arrangements last week with the White House to have some experts come down and give me an up-to-date briefing on what’s going on concerning North Korea,” he said. “They came down the day that Kim Jong Un invited Trump to come over. So we had a lot to talk about.”

Carter, who recently announced that he would start cutting back on his Sunday school duties, broke some other, happy news to the class about his wife's health. Rosalynn Carter, 90, had surgery three weeks ago at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta to remove "troubling scar tissue" from a portion of her small intestine.

“She’s been very, very ill,” Carter said about his wife of 71 years, who normally attends Sunday school and the worship service at Maranatha, then stays afterwards to pose for photos with him and hundreds of visitors. Now, though, he said with a smile, “She’s doing fine. As a matter of fact, she just phoned me awhile ago to finally say she’s on her way home. She’ll be there when we get (back from church).”

Still, Carter suggested, the situation had been a wake-up call of sorts for the  famously busy former first couple.

“We’ve said this before and nobody believed us,” Carter said to knowing chuckles from some in the packed church. “We’ll withdraw from some of the things we’ve been doing.”