Author: Gordon Govier

Christian-based organizations that care deeply about the issues of social injustice and human need often find it necessary to diminish or hide the message of Jesus Christ for fear of being rejected outright or losing federal, state, county, corporate and private funding. Earlier this year a group of volunteers, led by Scott Haumersen of Wegner CPAs, established the Madison Christian Giving Fund to address this need.  The fiscal sponsor of the local effort is the National Christian Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in the country.

A group of Wisconsin faith leaders says Gov. Scott Walker is wrong to call for Syrian refugees to be kept out of Wisconsin and the United States. About 15 clergy members delivered a petition to the governor’s office on Monday, urging him to soften his position. The effort was part of Faith in Public Life, a national group that has collected signatures from more than 1,500 faith leaders nationwide, including about 100 in Wisconsin, in response to the 30 governors who have announced their intentions to keep Syrian refugees from resettling in their states.

SPRING GREEN – The blaze brought firefighters from around the region, created a spectacular early morning glow and destroyed a 147-year-old building on the west end of this village’s downtown. On Thursday of last week, an excavator took down what was left of the historic structure at Monroe and North Lexington streets and pulled the charred, but intact, cast iron bell from its ruins. In fact, when Carl Oman gently lowered the bell to the ground, its striker struck and revealed that the bell had retained its sound. Like the bell, made from a mold by the Cincinnati Bell Foundry…

“It’s not our job to save Madison,” said Michael Beresford, director of outreach and service at High Point Church. “It’s our job to be a witness” he told a group of almost 100 men and women who gathered at Upper|House on the University of Wisconsin campus this morning. Beresford had invited them to A Conversation Between Pastors and Marketplace Christians to build capacity for a greater Christian impact on the city of Madison. Beresford recently moved to Madison from Seattle, the latest move in a career spent with a number of ministries including the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

Christine Hodge was honored with the Rotary Club of Madison’s 2015 Manfred Swarsensky Humanitarian Service Award on November 11 at its weekly meeting at the Inn on the Park. Hodge was nominated by Dawn Crim. Hodge came to Madison from Arkansas in 1971, a single mother with her three children. The people of the historically black Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Madison’s south side quickly embraced her and her family — a gesture that she reciprocated later in life.

MADISON, Wis. — The Spring Green Department says the Cornerstone Church is a total loss, following an early morning fire Saturday. Authorities say someone called 911 to report a fire at the church located at 210 North Lexington Street in the Village of Spring Green around 2:08 a.m. Officials say that when first responders arrived, the structure was fully-engulfed.

As the seventh film in the popular science-fiction series “Star Wars” is set to premiere next month, First United Presbyterian Church in DePere is preparing to host an event weeks earlier to explore what’s common between Christianity and the film. Atheists are welcome, the church says. The De Pere church will host “Star Wars: Faith & The Force” on Nov. 14, about a month before “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” premieres Dec. 18, according to the church’s website. Read more of this story.

LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) — Flooding, snowstorms, a flu outbreak, even a fire — any of those might have slowed a group of Wisconsin nuns who say none of it has kept their order from praying nonstop for hundreds of thousands of people over the last 137 years. The La Crosse-based Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration claim to have been praying night and day for the ill and the suffering longer than anyone in the United States — since 11 a.m. on Aug. 1, 1878.

Jacky Meremable is a man with his feet planted in two very, very different places. One foot is planted firmly in the tropical soil of his native Haiti. The other is buried deep in the cold and sometimes snowy plains of Madison, Wisconsin.

Would I ever read it? Another volume from a natural history book club had arrived in the mail. Month after month they came, but I was so engaged in doing natural history that I read none of them. A few decades later, with more time to spare in my Wisconsin home on peaceful Waubesa Wetlands, I finally picked the volume off the shelf and began to read John Muir. As I turned the pages, I soon found myself caught up in a psalmic crescendo. It was not only Muir’s lyrical writing but also the familiar soundtrack playing in the background.…