MC News
WAUNAKEE, Wis. — Every December, for the past 25 years, singing hasn’t stopped at the Nativity scene in Waunakee’s Village Park. In the mix of voices, is JoAnne Buchanan-Rounds. She remembers the day this holiday tradition was almost gone.
When Kitty Geier retired after working as a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital for 50 years, it didn’t take long before she was back — as a volunteer. “I waited two months,” she said. “This is my second family.” Geier, 74, is a Madison native and 1962 graduate of the St. Mary’s School of Nursing, which closed in 1974. She and her husband live two blocks from the hospital.
More than twenty years before the Justified Anger Movement began, the Rev. Alex Gee began to invest in rebuilding the African American community in Madison by launching the Nehemiah Project. The Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development is now a $500,000 per year operation, providing housing, mentoring, employment, advocacy, and a variety of other services. And shepherding the Justified Anger Movement.”We’re still about empowering people to bring about hope, transformation, and justice,” Rev. Gee told a crowd of about 150 people who gathered at the Fountain of Life Covenant Church, 633 W. Badger Road, in Madison, for an update on…
A $30 million campaign by the Madison Catholic Diocese for money to train future priests greatly exceeded its goal, bringing in pledges of $43.7 million, according to the diocese. The just-ended effort was the first diocesanwide capital campaign in more than 50 years. Church officials attribute the robust response to several factors, including the intrinsic value parishioners place on seminarians, or priests-in-training. Parish priests are considered the lifeblood of the church, though their numbers nationally are down sharply from the peak years in the 1970s.
Many churches in Wisconsin have built columbaria over the years, even though state law didn’t clearly define them as distinct from mausoleums, which can only be built in cemeteries. Gov. Scott Walker and the Legislature recently updated the law to make clear that churches are allowed to build columbaria, provided they follow certain rules. Columbaria can be buildings, free-standing structures or walls within buildings, usually located in churches or cemeteries, that contain several niches to hold urns or other containers with the cremated remains of the deceased.
In journalism circles BBC stands for the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation. But in Texas, the heart of the Bible Belt, it stands for the Bible and Beer Consortium, which appears to be a Fort Worth outfit designed to promote dialogue between atheists and Christians.Last June such an event was held at a night club in Dallas featuring Dan Barker, of Madison’s Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), and Justin Bass, who is both the pastor of a church plant that meets in a hotel in Frisco and an adjunct professor at the Dallas Theological Seminary. Barker courageously showed up for the…
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.