MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ Let me tell you about the Christmas traditions in my family that have actually stuck — and the ones that didn't. The ones that didn't stick: the elaborate coordinated Christmas Eve dinner I attempted exactly once before accepting that takeout pizza is also a form of grace. The advent calendar I bought with great intention on December 1st and forgot to fill past December 8th. The ones that stuck: reading a Christmas story aloud o

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ There is a moment on Christmas Eve — usually somewhere between the wrapping paper anticipation and the late-night church service — when the house gets quiet enough to gather everyone together. If you're anything like my family, that moment is sacred. My wife Amy and I have four kids. And from the time they were small enough to sit still in pajamas with damp hair from the bath, reading Christmas stories aloud together has been one

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I have a confession to make. I've been singing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" since I was old enough to stand in a church pew and hold a hymnal with both hands. I sang it in children's programs, in Christmas Eve services, in shopping malls when Muzak was still a thing. I've sung it probably hundreds of times over the course of my life. And it took me until my forties to stop at the second word. Herald. Not heavenly. Not happy. Not

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ When I was in the final stages of writing MARK! The Herald Angel — when the story was essentially done and I was reading it through for the last time before releasing it to the first readers — I asked myself a question that I think every writer should ask before they let a manuscript go: What do I want the person who finishes this book to feel? Not think. Not know. Feel. Because thinking and knowing are good and important, but the

MarkTheHerald.com ✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦ I want to talk directly to the pastors and church leaders reading this, because this is a message that has a very specific and limited window of usefulness. The churches that have the most meaningful, most unified, most well-executed Advent seasons are the ones that made their key decisions in August. Not October. Not November. August. I know this because I've been in and around church ministry for decades, and the pattern is cons

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 ✦ 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 ✦ 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 ✦ 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