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A religious group that sparked protests in 2016 for providing free lunches to Middleton High School students with a dose of Christian scripture has expanded to schools in Madison and Verona. Students from those schools “asked us for a couple of years to do that,” said organizer Melissa Helbach after serving up pizza to about 30 Verona Area High School kids at Harriet Park, located two blocks from the school. On Monday, the group served about 20 kids at the city soccer fields located across Mineral Point Road from Madison Memorial High.

When Casey Johnson and Nathan Hobert five years ago were starting what is now Redeemer City Church in Fitchburg, they had a broad vision of what it could be. “We knew we wanted to be a church that was going to bless the community,” Johnson said. “We wanted to be very involved and we wanted to be Jesus incarnate in our city.” Now Redeemer City has its own building on the west side of Fitchburg in a neighborhood that is short on community resources. They have partnered with two elementary schools, helped create an afterschool-program for children in a neighborhood isolated…

The small wooden church is half-hidden, nestled on a hill in southeastern Wisconsin in the city of Delafield. St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church was built in 1851, one of the historic “carpenter Gothic” churches surviving in the United States, and on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s such a quiet place residents often forget it’s there, though it was established by the pioneer founders of the city.

Watching her husband and other soldiers in the 1st Battalion, 128th Infantry of the Wisconsin Army National Guard’s 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team work through their deployment experiences in 2004, Jennifer Kuhnert realized faith and spirituality can play a valuable role in that transition. That was when she first recognized the call to be a chaplain.

In a world of digital communication and fast responses, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church and Orchard Ridge Elementary are slowing it down in an ongoing pen pal partnership. Each year, third grade students at the southwest Madison school are paired with a community member from Good Shepherd, which is only about a block away. They participate in regular communication through the writing of letters once a month. As they connect through written words, a relationship is formed.

The photos and video footage has been terrifying from the Bahamas the last couple of days where seven people have died and Hurricane Dorian has inflicted unprecedented devastation. It’s been a nightmare for End Time Ministries International Senior Pastor Godfrey Stubbs here in Madison who grew up in the Bahamas and still has family and friends there who have been devastated by the hurricane and are facing the daunting task of rebuilding and restoring their residences after the damage.

Members of Madison’s Jewish community will celebrate Sunday the completion of a new Torah scroll for Chabad of Madison. Celebrants will gather at Hotel RED, 1501 Monroe St., at 11 a.m. before parading a few blocks with the Torah scroll under a traditional canopy to Chabad of Madison, 1722 Regent St., where the scroll will be housed.

CHICAGO (RNS) — On a near-perfect late summer evening, about a dozen people gathered on a picnic blanket in Chicago’s Palmer Square Park, spread between kids playing on playground equipment and young adults throwing a Frisbee disc on the lawn. Accompanied by the crunch of joggers’ footsteps on the gravel path circling the narrow strip of green in the city’s trendy Logan Square neighborhood and the rumbling of a passing El train, one of the picnickers took a piece of pita bread and broke it in half. “This is our body,” he said, passing it to the person sitting next…

A single van-full of 6 middle school students and their leader spending a week in the summer serving at a local school. This is how Blackhawk Church’s Madison Missions began back in 2001. It was an idea to teach middle school students the vision and mission of Jesus to serve in the community. Since then, has grown into a summer of week-long service camp; this year has seen 293 students with 60 leaders serving a total of 5,500 hours with 70 different organizations. It is a classic example of how one congregation (yes, a very large congregation) can collaborate with lots…

Rev. Staci Marrese-Wheeler isn’t sure exactly when the idea for the school Weekend Nutrition Program started. All she knows is it neither began nor ends with her. Her particular involvement started about five years ago. “A few years ago a colleague of mine at St. Luke’s Episcopal, the Rev. Dr. Paula Harris, and I had been talking about ways our churches could better serve our neighborhoods,” Marrese-Wheeler said. She is pastor of Lakeview Moravian Community Church on the east side of Madison, near St. Luke’s, as well as Glenwood Moravian on the west side.