If you were a fan of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, you might remember that Calvin had a transmogrifier machine. The boy Calvin leads his imaginary tiger Hobbes up to a cardboard box with the word “Transmogrifier” handwritten on it, and explains, “You step into this chamber, set the appropriate dials, and it turns you into whatever you’d like to be.” Hobbes wryly observes, “It’s amazing what they do with corrugated cardboard these days.” The promise of true change is a little unbelievable, isn’t it? It’s the stuff of comic...

There’s more here than you might expect. That was true for me. I’ve been hearing the argument for church revitalization for years, and it has always sounded like a conversation about practical matters. There are practical reasons to sometimes plant a new church. And there are practical reasons to sometimes revitalize an old church. But reading through the articles for this edition of the eJournal, I discovered something larger, something older, something more basic. Church revitalization, it occurred to me, goes to the very heart of what it means to pastor. And the desire to...