Bethany Celebrates 100 Years

One of Madison’s original evangelical churches is celebrating a centennial of Christian ministry this weekend. Bethany Evangelical Free Church,  at 301 Riverside Drive, is the mothership of the evangelical church in Madison. It parented two of the city’s largest congregations. Few other evangelical churches have been a part of the city’s history for such a long period.

The centennial celebration will take place this Sunday, October 22^nd, at the church, with a continental breakfast at 8:30am and the morning worship service at 10:30am. The previous day, Saturday October 21^st, a Centennial Lunch Banquet has been planned for Olbrich Botanical Gardens. Music, memories and photographs will be featured, covering ten decades of ministry at the church on Madison’s near east side.

Similar to some of Madison’s other evangelical congregations, Bethany’s beginning stemmed from a series of evangelistic meetings. In this case it was tent revival meetings held by evangelists T.T. Hansen and Ingvald Loe, in the summer of 1906. On August 18, 1906,  founding members signed the church charter at a meeting presided over by the Rev. C.T. Dyrness of Salem Evangelical Free Church in Chicago.

The first meetings were held across the Yahara River from the church’s present location, in a home at 1352 Williamson Street. The church settled in its present location in 1912. At that time the Yahara River was more of a wetland. Norwegian was spoken by most of the Madison residents who worshipped at Bethany. The first English hymnals were not purchased until 1927.

The church grew into a congregation of several hundred under Pastor Bernhard Rom, who filled its pulpit from 1924-1957. Outreach in the 1930’s included ministry over local radio. College students from Bethany started Badger Christian Fellowship on the University of Wisconsin campus in the 1940’s, one of the earliest groups to affiliate with a new collegiate ministry called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

In the 1960’s, as Madison and Bethany both continued to grow, two new congregations were launched closer to the eastern and western edges of the city. The congregation that first settled on Buckeye Road, eventually outgrew that location and rebuilt further east. It’s now known as Door Creek Church. The westside congregation settled first on Blackhawk Avenue, outgrew that location and resettled on Whitney Way. Now Blackhawk Evangelical Free Church is building again, further west on Mineral Point Road.

While Bethany has not seen the same growth as its daughter churches, it has remained a congregation that overflows with vital ministry. And it intends to stay that way judging by the selection of its new logo: “A Place to Begin.”

 “’A Place to Begin’ is both testimony to the Lord’s goodness over the first 10 decades of Bethany’s life, and a statement of vision for our 11^th Decade,” says pastor Dave Carlson.