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MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I spent years in the world of animated children's content, and it taught me something that I find myself returning to constantly as I think about the future of MARK! The Herald Angel: the difference between content that families watch once and content that families return to every year for the rest of their lives. That difference is not production quality. It's not budget. It's not even the sophistication of the animation. It's wh

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I want to tell you about the Christmas I almost ruined by trying too hard. It was a few years into having four kids, which means it was the season when I was theoretically most experienced at Christmas parenting and practically most in danger of overcomplicating it. I had ideas. I had a list. I had ambitious plans for traditions and experiences and meaningful moments that would be remembered forever. By December 20th, I was exhaus

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Mark the Herald Angel does not want to go to Earth. He makes this abundantly clear on the bus ride home from the Eternal Herald, after his editor dismisses his story and hands him an itinerary with a single word on it: Earth. He mutters about it. He slumps in his seat. He crosses his little arms. He is, in every particular, a being who has been asked to do something he did not sign up for and does not want to do. He is, in other w

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I've been on both sides of this conversation — the ministry leader trying to build a meaningful Advent event, and the author being invited to be part of one. Both perspectives have taught me things that I think are worth sharing. The good news first: booking a Christian author for your church Advent event is more accessible than most ministry leaders assume. Most Christian authors in the independent and mid-list space are actively

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I know what you're thinking. It's June. The Christmas music isn't even in the stores yet. The last thing you want to do is think about December. And you're right — mostly. I'm not here to suggest you start shopping or decorating or planning your Christmas Eve menu. That would be absurd, and I have more respect for your summer than that. But here's something I've observed in years of ministry and family life: the families who have

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Before MARK! The Herald Angel, I spent years working in animated children's content. Specifically, I was part of the writing and development team for Auto-B-Good — a series that went on to win five Emmy Awards and find its way into the homes and hearts of families across the country. It was, in many ways, the best education in family storytelling I could have received. Not a formal education — though I respect those tremendously —

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Luke 2:19 is one of the shortest and most quietly devastating verses in the entire Christmas narrative. The shepherds have just left. They arrived frantic with wonder, spilling over with an account of angels and heavenly armies and a message about a baby who is the Savior of the world. They shared everything they'd seen and heard. And then they left, going back to their flocks and their night shifts and their ordinary lives, glori

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ One of the things that makes a character transformation believable — and I've thought about this a great deal in the course of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — is that the character being transformed must be entirely sincere about who they are before it happens. Not performatively resistant. Not waiting to be convinced. Not secretly hoping someone will come along and shake them out of their rut. Just genuinely, completely, absolut

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