MC News
(Madison, WI) — Students who attend college to find meaning and purpose in life will sharpen their focus by attending InterVarsity’s Urbana Student Missions Conference, which is held every three years between Christmas and New Years Day. Urbana 12, sponsored by Madison-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, will be held December 27-31 at the America’s Center and Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis.
VERONA — With the dishes cleared from the evening meal, Steve and Maria Hudson turned off the house lights one night last week and gathered their son and daughter around five candles on the kitchen table. Only the large white one in the middle was lit. “What’s the middle candle called?” asked Steve Hudson. “Christ,” said Eliza, 5. “That’s right, the Christ candle,” her father said.
OCONOMOWOC — There is not always quiet here, but there is peacefulness. Little natural light penetrates the gallery at Oakbrook Esser Studios in this city’s downtown. Instead, the stained glass with images of Jesus Christ, his mother Mary, a number of saints, and even Noah and his ark are artificially backlit.
Last January, about 2,500 parishioners at Blackhawk Church in Madison signed on to a bold challenge: read the entire Bible in one year. The undertaking, called “Eat This Book,” is coming to a close. How did the participants do? I checked back in with the three I interviewed at the beginning of the year.
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.