Author: Gordon Govier

Alex Gee, at 49, has some stories. “I carried this one guy out of a crack house,” Gee was saying last week. That was 1990. Gee was already pastor of his Fountain of Life Church in South Madison. The church started in his mom’s living room when Alex was 13.

MILWAUKEE (BP) — Scripture does not require governments to redistribute wealth to help the poor, presenters in a session at the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting said this fall. “Class warfare, wealth redistribution, and socialism can, at best, make people only equally miserable,” Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Craig Mitchell wrote in a paper he presented during a session titled “Does God Require the State to Redistribute Wealth?”Mitchell asked, “Is it surprising that free markets, which respect property rights, maximize both producer and consumer welfare, and create wealth (rather than dividing it) are far more compatible with biblical Christianity?” The…

A Waunakee church that pushed the concept of “casual worship” to new levels didn’t draw enough interest and has closed. St. Andrew Lutheran Church, 5757 Emerald Grove Lane, sought to attract people put off by the rituals and trappings of traditional worship services. Parishioners ripped out the church’s pews, pulpit and communion rail four years ago and installed coffeehouse tables, easy chairs and a cappuccino machine. Sunday attendance peaked at around 50 a couple of years ago and had been dropping. Services have ceased and the church building is for sale.

By now the music is ubiquitous. For weeks, everywhere you go, there’s Christmas music. In the store, on the radio, it’s a flood. It’s largely commercially driven, by stores and radio stations. And it’s mostly secular Christmas music.The commercial music programmers know enough to save the really good music for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.But before you tear your hair out over this blatant commercialization of the holiday, don’t forget that there’s also good, live Christmas music being performed, if you know where to look.

At the end of this month, as we sing Auld Lang Syne on New Year’s Eve, we will remember “auld” acquaintances. As the calendar turns over our thoughts turn naturally to reflection, and those who are no longer with us, and played a major role in our lives. Last week Jim Winters, a retired Middleton school teacher, stopped in at InterVarsity’s national office in Madison and offered some reflections on InterVarsity’s former president, John Alexander, who died ten years ago, in 2002. Alexander was chair of the University of Wisconsin Geography Department when he was chosen to lead InterVarsity in…

I heard Zig Ziglar speak several times and when he came to Madison I requested an interview. He declined an in-person interview but agreed to a phone interview from his hotel room, where he was working on a writing project. Zig was a motivational speaker, quite possibly the best ever. We talked about his motivational philosophy and his faith in Christ. I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about but I pressed him on one question.

Last Sunday, less than two weeks after Election Day, 250 people packed Fountain of Life Family Worship Center on Madison’s South Side for an event dubbed a “campaign rally.”It was, thankfully, not the precursor to another political race but the local kickoff of the 11×15 campaign. That’s the statewide interfaith effort launched in February in Milwaukee to cut Wisconsin’s prison population in half to 11,000 inmates by the end of 2015.

Milwaukee was ground zero for evangelical theologians and archaeologists earlier this month, and the theme of the meeting was Caring for Creation.Religion scholars meet every November, at a different location every year. The larger groups, such as the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Academy of Religion and the American Schools of Oriental Research, held their meetings in the Chicago area. The Evangelical Theological Society and the Near East Archaeological Society usually meet within a reasonable proximity, this year it was Milwaukee.

The Nehemiah Community Development Corporation is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The Nehemiah Corporation was started by the Rev. Alex Gee, and has its roots in his church, the Fountain of Life Church but its impact is community-wide.

For eight months, Kim Nash-Walker beat the pavement in search of work. She perused the job boards, sent out resumes, cold-called HR execs to take them for coffee, and learned how to sell herself in a minute or less at any function where employers might conceivably gather. Nash-Walker finally landed what she calls her dream job, as a financial adviser with Wells Fargo, in July. She gives much of the credit to her church, where she found not just the skills to reinvent herself professionally, but the spiritual support for that arduous task.