Thursday, May. 08, 2008

Man returns to ministry in Edgerton

A retired fire captain, former minister and current Sprint campus employee is now the pastor of Edgerton Baptist Church.

Last fall, members of the Southern Baptist congregation asked Chris Madsen, who lives in Lenexa, with his wife, Carol, if he would be interested in serving as the congregation's interim minister. After he had preached on Sundays for several months, Madsen said members of the church's minister search committee told him people had been coming to them asking if he could stay on as the church's permanent pastor.

"We felt maybe God was leading us to do something like this, but I didn't say anything," said Madsen, who is manager of the floor safety marshal program at Sprint through a contract with Securitas USA. "I wanted to see what they (the church people) said," he added.

When the congregation voted March 16 to call Madsen as its new pastor, he said, "We felt that was God's confirmation that what we had been feeling was correct."

Madsen began his career in firefighting in 1971 when he became a fire protection specialist in the U.S. Air Force. After a four-year tour of duty in Germany, he returned to the Kansas City area, where he received an associate's degree in fire services administration from Johnson County Community College.

When he retired from the Overland Park Fire Department in 1999 after 25 years of service, Madsen enrolled at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo., and graduated in 2003. He was pastor of Southside Baptist Church in Spring Hill for more than two years while he was in seminary and also served as a full-time pastor in Idaho for four years. The Madsens came back to Kansas City in 2006 to be closer to their families. Between the two of them, the couple has five adult children and Carol, a registered nurse with Olathe Medical Services, has four grandchildren. In his work at Sprint, Madsen trains employees how to evacuate buildings at the Overland Park campus in the event of a fire, a tornado or another disaster.

Along with helping the Edgerton Southern Baptist congregation grow and become healthier and "to see lives transformed," Madsen said he and others in the church hope to start a Celebrate Recovery ministry under the auspices of the Kansas City Kansas Baptist Association. Celebrate Recovery, which Madsen described as "a Christian 12-step program," was founded in 1994 by the Rev. John Baker, a ministerial staff member at the Lake Forest, Calif.-based Saddleback Church. According to its Web site, www.celebraterecovery.com, the program was designed "to help those struggling with hurts, habits and hang-ups by showing them the loving power of Jesus Christ."

Madsen said Celebrate Recovery, which is based on a small-group format, can minister to people with chemical dependency, codependency, anger and sexual abuse issues and to those who are involved in unhealthy personal relationships. He said a group of Edgerton Southern Baptist members recently traveled to Moore, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City, for a Celebrate Recovery seminar.

"We're looking to set up Monday night meetings at the church," he added. "It's a very good program, and the church should be a place to find healing."

Madsen said the months since he and Carol came to the Edgerton church have been "very good. The church has grown some and I can see some positive things going on."

"It's a lot of work," he said of his bivocational lifestyle. "You've got to plan your time to get things done."

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