WORLD readers (and listeners!) are typically surprised when I tell them that the idea for such a magazine was originally born out of a ministry to children. It’s a story worth retelling.

In the 34 years since we published the first issue of WORLD Magazine, perhaps half a dozen names leap off the pages as truly memorable one-on-one interviews I was privileged to pursue with notable people. And of those half-dozen interviewees, none ranks higher than the British-born theologian J.I. Packer, who died on July 17.

Which makes it more embarrassing to tell you of my carelessness with that interview. 

Every now and then—and sometimes when the swamps of Washington seem most impenetrable—a notably bright light dawns. That happened earlier this month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled convincingly in favor of religious liberty for the nation’s schools.

So if the highly regarded Wall Street Journal, in a lengthy and spacious front-page feature, proclaimed to the world that you had utterly failed when you recently took on the hardest challenge of your life—how would you respond?

That’s pretty much what the Journal did in mid-June, I think, when it used a Page 1 headline to declare: “The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work.” The subhead on the second page stressed the same point: “Remote Learning Falls Short.”

It’s pretty tough, some wise sage has observed, to overestimate the power of the printed page. 

Which prompts me to ask: Does the size of that printed page make any difference in its final impact?

I raise that issue because of a nostalgic discovery I made a few weeks ago, and which I share with you below on this page. It is a faithful reprint of the Sunday bulletin of the church where my father was pastor in 1949. The bulletin was a simple 3-by-5 black-and-white, front-and-back leaflet. It stirs my memory on two fronts.

When I heard that Sarah Schweinsberg was telling “quite a story,” I was all ears. Sarah Schweinsberg is not just an extraordinary storyteller. She is also a voice you’ll hear frequently on The World and Everything in It, our daily news podcast that’s available around the world.

When you pick up your latest issue of WORLD, do you think of it more as a business enterprise—or as a ministry? Do you think first of Truett Cathy or of Billy Graham?

The ideal answer—from my point of view as the magazine’s founder—is that you think of WORLD in both categories.