Author: Gordon Govier

First United Methodist Church is celebrating the 180 years since Methodism was established in Madison. As part of the special anniversary celebration, the church invites members of the public to attend a walk journeying through the religion’s Madison history on Nov. 19. Events will begin at the 9 a.m. church service led by Bishop Hee-Soo Jung. After the service, Jung will lead the “Bishop’s Walk” around the Downtown area highlighting special liturgical locations.

There are various campus ministries at University of Wisconsin-Madison and many are doing their part to embody service. Campus ministries do not stop at worship and free food, but are acting as the light of Christ through the humility of service.

When people from 40 different Madison area churches come together to celebrate, something unusual is going on. But that’s typical for the annual Care Net Pregnancy Center of Dane County banquet. The center has enjoyed widespread support from the Madison church community, both Protestant and Catholic, over its more than three decades of operation. Kirk Walden, Advancement Director for Heartbeat International, an international Christian association of 2,200 crisis pregnancy centers, told the 500 people gathered at Monona Terrace for last Thursday’s banquet that the Madison center is one of the best in the country. “You need to know this,” he…

What if the different churches and leaders worked together to bring Heaven down to earth?  I believe it would be a lot of fun, a lot more would get accomplished, and most importantly, our cities would be transformed a lot quicker by the power of God working through us. As I was studying the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis, I saw something that I had never noticed before.  In Genesis 11:6 it says, “The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will…

When Andrea Herrera started working as a social worker at Chavez Elementary School on Madison’s southwest side, it did not take her long to notice that one group of students was geographically and economically isolated from the school. When Redeemer City Church started holding Sunday worship services at Chavez and looking at ways to serve the school, it did not take long for church leaders to notice the same thing.

Even on an overcast fall afternoon, the nearly 300,000 tiles that make up the mosaic on the new Catholic student center at UW-Madison were shimmering as freshman Casey Gilinson walked by. The two-story mosaic — like the new $30 million Saint Paul University Catholic Center itself, clad in brick and stone and topped by a copper dome — is a striking new addition at the most prominent gateway to UW-Madison, and stands out next to its drab, concrete campus neighbors.

A faith-based South Side Madison community development organization will celebrate 25 years of helping to grow leadership in Madison’s African-American community. The Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership and Development will host a free anniversary event Nov. 3 at Overture Center. The event will include dessert, a presentation by Nehemiah’s founder and president, the Rev. Alex Gee, live music, dancing, a chance to look back at the group’s work over the years with current and former staff members, donors and program participants and a look at the organization’s future efforts.

This summer, after a string of shootings in the city, Sheray Wallace, founder of Meadowood Neighborhood Connectors, and local television show Club TNT organized a march on Madison’s west side as a demonstration of neighborhood unity. The “Walk Against Violence, Save the Children March” started at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on the corner of Raymond Road and Whitney Way and ended at Our Redeemer Lutheran Church on McKee Boulevard, just north of Raymond. Other area churches helped make the march possible, Wallace said. “The congregations came out in numbers,” Wallace said. “And it was just a beautiful thing.”

The documents of antiquity, ancient scrolls, pose all sorts of challenges for scholars trying to read them. This is especially true for the most fragile documents, those seared but not completely destroyed by fire, sometimes thousands of years ago. But now scholars have a new resource to non-invasively read ancient scrolls without unrolling them and possibly damaging or destroying the brittle texts that provide a direct window to human experience in the ancient world. The technology, developed by University of Kentucky computer science Professor and UW-Madison alumnus Brent Seales, was dramatically unveiled in 2015 when the Israeli Antiquities Authority revealed…

The MOM Board of Directors welcomes Ellen Carlson as the new Executive Director of Middleton Outreach Ministry.  MOM is a non-profit, community effort dedicated to preventing homelessness and ending hunger for families throughout west Madison, Middleton, and Cross Plains.