News

Most parents know how scary high school years can be.  An “anything goes” culture coupled with intense peer pressure can pull impressionable kids away from the values they are taught, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In 2014 five Middleton High School moms began praying together for their kids: for God’s protection, for their faith to withstand the pressures of their high school years, and for their witness. When the kids were asked, “what do your friends think about what you believe?” they responded, “I don’t think they know what we believe.”

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Shelly Cai was 18 years old when she left the southern Chinese metropolis of Nanjing to enroll in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In August 2010, after a 13-hour flight from Shanghai to Chicago and a three-hour bus ride, Cai finally arrived in Madison, where a distant cousin picked her up. During orientation, Cai found herself jet lagged, struggling to make sense of all the English.

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Jim Lundgren, interim president of Madison-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, is pleased to announce that Alec Hill returned to work on February 1st in a new role — president emeritus. The return comes fifteen years to the day since Alec was first announced as president in 2001. Alec announced his decision to leave office last May in order to begin cancer treatments in Seattle.

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On International Women’s Day, one month from today, Madison’s David Lippiatt plans to be on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. He’s leading a group of climbers with his long-time friend and former colleague Belinda Bauman, the founder of One Million Thumbprints, a campaign to end gender violence in the war zones of South Sudan, Syria/Iraq, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lippiatt is the director of Madison-based NGO We International. He founded We International in 2007 “to serve the most vulnerable in developing countries through economic development, advocacy, anti-trafficking efforts, and peace-building.” A couple of decades earlier, Lippiatt…

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A new sign has gone up at Bethany Evangelical Free Church, 301 Riverside Drive, showcasing the unique congregations that call Bethany home. The sign announces services in four different languages.

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Bishop Hee Soo Jung of the Wisconsin Conference of The United Methodist Church announces the appointment of The Rev. Dr. Mark A. Fowler to become the Senior Pastor at First United Methodist Church in Madison, Wisconsin, effective July 1, 2016. Fowler, who is currently serving as the Murray H. Leiffer associate professor of congregational leadership at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston IL, will retain his responsibilities at the seminary until June 30, 2016.

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I’ll admit it. Freely. When I was younger —I mean much younger — I thought that Betamax video cassette recorders were the bee’s knees. They were constructed better than any other video recorders, the sound quality was better, and the picture quality was superior. At one point, Sony, the producer of Beta video cassette recorders, had 100 percent of the video recorder market. Well, it doesn’t take a historian to know what happened with Beta. Market forces and better, cheaper, more-efficient technology made Beta obsolete in what felt like three-and-a-half months. I don’t mention Beta to wax nostalgic about my…

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As an American citizen traveling through remote corners of Colombia at the height of the nation’s civil war, Russell Martin Stendal offered an enticing prospect for left-wing rebels who often kidnapped foreigners for ransom. So tempting, in fact, that Stendal was abducted five times by different units of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc.“I would be moving through the countryside and they would see this gringo and –pah! They would grab me,” he recalls. (Stendal, and members of his family, have visited Madison numerous times to participate in the missions programs of City Church, on Buckeye Road. Now…

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Madison ranks #88 in a just released list of Bible reading amongst the top 100 cities in the U.S. The list is published by Barna Research and the American Bible Society.The most Bible-minded city in the U.S. is Chattanooga, TN, with the highest percentage of people “who report reading the Bible in a typical week and who strongly assert the Bible is accurate in the principles it teaches.”

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