Author: Gordon Govier

Meet Evilyn Pinnow of Fort Atkinson. This ambitious little girl has done some pretty big things in her lifetime, and this year her adventure with Operation Christmas Child is taking her all over the country with a very special shoe box gift.

Want to hazard a guess on the the size of Wisconsin’s evangelical Christian population, and how it compares with surrounding states? In light of the impact of religious voters on the recent election, the information is quite interesting. USA Today has put together an interactive map, based on information compiled by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Along with 18,000 soon-to-be friends, I am excitingly gearing up for Urbana 12, InterVarsity’s triennial student missions conference that will be held in St. Louis, December 27-31, 2012. Since 1946, InterVarsity has hosted 22 student mission conferences, involving over a quarter of a million students. Yes, that’s 250,000+ Urbana alumni.

(An election day reflection from the president of World Vision that may have a message for the church leaders of Madison.) The day I became a Christian, one of the first people I wanted to tell was my mother. I had considered myself an atheist while I studied neurobiology in college. But as I studied more, I discovered Jesus and became a Christian. It was the early 1970s, and my mother’s response to my life-changing decision captured the view of most Americans at that time: “That’s nice, but isn’t everybody Christian?” Times have changed.

Before literacy was common the church taught the gospel through images. This is especially true during the Renaissance when art flourished in exciting new ways, as is on display right now in the Chazen Art Museum in downtown Madison.A special exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque Masters will only be on display for three more weeks so I dropped in on Sunday afternoon, just in time for the 2pm docents tour.

Religion & politics guru Mark Silk assesses the religious layout of 12 battleground states – and explains why religion will matter on Election Day.

Each autumn for almost two decades, volunteers from Baraboo’s Walnut Hill Bible Church host a couple hundred international students from the UW-Madison for a Saturday afternoon meal and hayride. The event is coordinated with campus ministries that work with the international students.

With the northeastern third of the country in the destructive grip of Hurricane Sandy, and the presidential election just one week away, about 500 Madison area residents representing over a half dozen churches gathered at City Church, 4909 E. Buckeye Road, to pray this evening.”It’s not about the Democratic and Republican parties,” said Tom Flaherty, senior pastor of the host church. “We are praying for the will of God to be done. We need to get our eyes on God tonight.”

Walter C. Kaiser Jr. has been coming to Madison for many years. Speaking at Blackhawk Church’s expansive campus at 9620 Brader Way on Thursday evening, October 25, 2012, someone mentioned that Kaiser had also spoken at the church back in the sixties when it was a tiny congregation of the Evangelical Free Church planted on Blackhawk Avenue. In the intervening decades Kaiser moved from teaching at both Wheaton College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in suburban Chicago, to become vice president and academic dean at Trinity, then to become a Distinguished Professor of Old Testament at Gordon Conwell Seminary in…

For the last couple decades archaeologists have been arguing over whether Jerusalem was the kingly capital of David and Solomon, as the Bible reports, or just a backwater home of a couple of tribal chiefs who had good PR, as the lack of certain archaeological evidence might suggest. Andrew Vaughn, the executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research–the main organization of archaeologists working in Israel and the surrounding region, brought a new perspective to the dispute in a talk to the Madison Biblical Archaeology Society last weekend.