MC News
I was previewing a documentary on race inside the studios of WKOW television last month. There were perhaps two dozen of us there — mostly police officers, clergy, social workers and elected officials — watching and then being interviewed to supplement the program. As the documentary wound to a conclusion, I noted that Gee’s was perhaps its most prominent voice. That is no surprise. Gee is a well-known pastor, community organizer and civil rights leader noted for his oratorical skill. A lifelong Madisonian, he leads Fountain of Life Covenant Church and the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development.
ALLOUEZ, Wis. – Nearly 160 years ago, on Oct. 9, 1859, Mary appeared to a young Belgian immigrant living in Kewaunee County, located in eastern Wisconsin on Lake Michigan and near Green Bay. Today, it’s the only approved Marian apparition site in the United States. On Aug. 15, the feast of the Assumption, the U.S. bishops formally designated the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion as a national shrine.
A Downtown Lutheran church will partner with Catholic Charities Madison to operate a day resource center this winter for the homeless, filling a critical hole in the local safety net that had worried social service providers. The center will operate from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday from Nov. 1 through March 31 at Bethel Lutheran Church, 312 Wisconsin Ave., according to the Rev. Scot Sorensen, the church’s senior pastor.
Fitchburg’s Phil Haslanger spent 35 years in journalism, almost all of it with the Capital Times. By 2003, he began as part-time pastor at Madison-area churches while working full-time in various management roles at the newspaper. For the last nine years, Haslanger, 67, has been full-time pastor at Memorial United Church of Christ, 5705 Lacy Road. He’s a social advocate, a stellar writer and a compassionate pastor.
The Salvation Army of Dane County is proposing to demolish its current building on the Near East Side for a six-story structure that would update its homeless shelter for single women and families and add long-term housing and support services for destitute renters looking to get their lives back on track.
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship brought its national office to Madison in 1969; for many years it was located just a block off the UW campus in a former sorority house on Langdon Street. Today InterVarsity is located in a modern office building at University Research Park, and as of Wednesday has a new president. Tom Lin, the first full InterVarsity president to be selected from within the organization, now heads the campus ministry with 150 local staff who serve almost 1,500 field staff located on 669 campuses across the country.
After breaking a number of National Football League records during his 20-year playing career, legendary Green Bay Packers gunslinger Brett Favre was finally inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame last Saturday. Favre, who holds the record for most regular season wins as a quarterback and owns or shares over 140 NFL records, was enshrined in the same hall as other quarterbacking legends in Canton, Ohio, this past weekend with quite a number of cheeseheads in attendance at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium.
Pastor Joshua McHenry Miller is a relative newcomer to Madison. In the last four years, though, he has jumped in with both feet, seeding a new church in the Leopold neighborhood and forging strong and deep partnerships with Leopold Elementary and a number of other organizations.
Rev. Alex Gee begins a new video column about life in Madison on Madison 365 website:
DES MOINES – On a 90-degree Sunday morning in June of 2010, a group of Zion Lutheran Church members followed their traditional service with their first-ever outreach to a local apartment complex. Lugging boxes of fried chicken, beans, potato salads, and chips to feed more than 100 people, the church also brought soccer balls and craft projects to share with the building’s younger tenants. While adult residents curiously observed from their doorframes, children bounded out to play: hanging on to the volunteers, dancing, and wolfing down the food. What appeared in the moment to be a generous but simple gesture…