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MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a phenomenon that happens in churches when an entire congregation — across all ages, across all small groups, across the whole range of life stages and backgrounds that make up a healthy church community — reads the same book in the same week. I've seen it described different ways by different pastors. Some call it a sense of common language. Others call it a shared emotional temperature. One pastor I know described it as

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a phrase at the center of MARK! The Herald Angel that I want to spend some time with today, because I think it carries more theological weight than it might initially appear to. That phrase is "fair dinkum." For the uninitiated: fair dinkum is Australian slang meaning genuine, true, authentic, the real deal. It functions as both adjective and emphatic exclamation. A fair dinkum story is a genuinely true story. A fair dink

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Every story lives or dies by the reality of its world. Not reality in the sense of factual accuracy — fiction is fiction, and the rules of fiction are different from the rules of journalism — but reality in the sense of internal consistency, specific detail, and the feeling that the world you're reading about existed before you arrived and will continue existing after you leave. The world of MARK! The Herald Angel is called Paradi

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Every year the calendar separates Easter and Christmas by about eight months, and in the cultural imagination they end up feeling like two entirely different holidays with two entirely different emotional registers. Christmas is warm and anticipatory and domestic — candles and carols and the smell of something baking. Easter is solemn and triumphant and outdoor — lilies and sunrise services and empty tombs. And yet. I've been thin

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Here is something I've observed across decades of ministry experience, working in and alongside churches of all sizes and denominations: The Advent sermon series that lands hardest every year is almost never the most theologically sophisticated one. It's the one where the congregation feels, from the very first Sunday, that they are all inside the same story together. Theological depth matters enormously. I'm not suggesting otherw

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I have been singing the same Christmas carol since I was old enough to stand in a church pew and hold a hymnal with both hands. I have sung it in children's programs and Christmas Eve candlelight services and shopping mall food courts when Muzak was still a cultural institution. I've sung it at the top of my lungs in the car and in the quiet of early December mornings and probably somewhere in between during at least three separat