“To do the Gold King, you’ve got to really bring the gravitas,” Jim Hutchinson says. For most of the year he is a professor at Dallas Baptist University, but for the first half of December, he plays one of three kings who pay homage to Baby Jesus during Prestonwood Baptist Church’s annual extravaganza The Gift of Christmas , “GOC” to its 1,200 cast members.

Hutchinson brings the gravitas even in casual conversation. He has a rich voice, he’s very tall, and his gray hair is gelled back tidily. He is also a choir veteran. His father was a minister of a small church, so Hutchinson and his siblings always sang in the choir, like Baptist von Trapps. The first time he saw GOC after he joined Prestonwood was a bit surreal, he says. “The biggest church I’d ever been a member of had about one

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