Author: Gordon Govier

Here is a curious, widely forgotten episode in the history of French painting. In 1882 James Tissot returned to Paris following an 11-year sojourn as a successful painter of London society. Tissot (1836-1902) intended to produce a series of paintings of fashionable Parisian women, but one day, during a church service, he had a vision of Jesus tending to people in a ruined building. It was his Road to Damascus.Four years later, reconfirmed in his Roman Catholic faith, he took off on a research trip to the Holy Land, beginning a 10-year campaign to illustrate the New Testament.

To some, they are testaments to God’s drawing power. To others, impersonal “Christian warehouses.”Megachurches, a relatively recent phenomenon, inspire and sometimes intimidate with their size.“Our building is large. There’s no way of getting around it,” said the Rev. Chris Dolson, senior pastor of Blackhawk Church on Madison’s Far West Side, one of the largest churches in the state. Sunday attendance averages 4,200.

Fond du Lac – The Seibel Family Christmas Concert is a little like the Seibel family itself.It’s grown dramatically over the years. Some days, just pulling it off feels like a miracle. And the Seibels see both as gifts. The concert, their gift to their community. The family and its musical talents, their gifts from God.Tom and Amy Seibel and their 12 children will stage their 10th annual Christmas concert in Fond du Lac this weekend before an estimated 2,500 people – a far cry from the 20 or so who gathered in their home to watch a decade ago.

NEW YORK — Susan Hong stops Pastor Tim Keller as he dashes up the steps of a Baptist church on a hectic corner of Broadway and West 79th Street.She heard him preach at 10:30 a.m. on the Upper East Side. Now she has brought friends to hear him at the West Side 5 p.m. service. He briefly greets her, then slips into the service just before his sermon.Keller’s service-hopping — he usually preaches to three-fourths of the 5,500 people who attend Redeemer services — reflects a new model for worship spreading rapidly across the U.S. church landscape: multisite churches.

The Rev. Timothy Paul Jones kept hearing one thing when — four weeks before Christmas — he brought a wreath and some purple and pink candles into his Southern Baptist church near Tulsa, Okla.And all the people said: "Advent? Don’t Catholics do that?"This prickly response wasn’t all that unusual, in light of the history of Christmas in America, said Jones, who now teaches leadership and church ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky."In the dominant American, Protestant traditions of this country, we’ve never had a Christian calendar that told us anything about Advent and the 12 days of…

COMMENTARYCold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for.…

EAST ORANGE, N.J. — The Rev. Dwight Gill figures if there is one thing that will bring more men to church, it’s football. So one Sunday a year at New Hope Baptist Church, NFL doesn’t stand for National Football League, but rather for New Found Life.

If you let loose your imagination, you might hear a desert wind blowing across Milwaukee and smell the scent of ancient parchments – and maybe just a whiff of old camel.That’s because curators and artists are re-creating part of the Middle East in the halls of the Milwaukee Public Museum for the "Dead Sea Scrolls and The Bible," the largest temporary exhibit ever produced by the museum staff.

Technology is becoming more common in churches across the country, but church leaders in Madison do not believe that this addition has changed the fundamental religious experience for their congregations.

Any jazz fan who has been paying attention at all during the past half century will recognize the quirky 5/4 riff that means the Dave Brubeck Quartet is swinging into its classic "Take Five."But there’s another tune the pianist keeps playing that is completely different: "Forty Days," the most famous piece in his first sacred oratorio, "The Light in the Wilderness."