Madison Pentecostal Assembly celebrates 25 years
A spiritual silver rights struggle

By Jonathan Gramling

Part 2 of 3

It certainly must have been by faith alone that led Bishop Eugene Johnson and his wife Carolyn to come to Madison in the fall of 1983. It was like some Old
Testament tale of obeying the call of God in spite of the logic that must have caused them some concern and then have God throw a veil on their minds to
shield them from the worst that God was demanding of them.
Who would have thought that this couple of meager resources and without jobs or a home would come to Madison to found Madison Pentecostal Assembly
that would eventually own a church complex on E. Buckeye Road worth $1 million and own 57 acres in the country for future church growth? No one could
have predicted, but God surely knew.
After three years of holding their prayer services in borrowed facilities and people’s homes, Madison Pentecostal Assembly purchased land on Nygaard
Street in the Capitol Heights neighborhood of South Madison in 1986 with the intent of building a church and educational facility on the roughly one acre
of land. “We just wanted to build a 2,400 sq. ft. facility, at the time, 60 ft. by 40 ft. building to have a place to worship with the possibility to expand, which
we did eventually,” Johnson said during an interview with The Capital City Hues. “But we needed a church home and coming from the south, we didn’t see
that we were in an adversary position that would disturb the community.”
Since they needed a conditional use permit from the Town of Madison to make improvements on the land, the church was about to go through a
tumultuous political process to secure the necessary approvals. Unbeknownst to the church at the time, their next door neighbor had designs on the land the
church had purchased. And he began to stir the neighborhood up against the church. “That’s when the neighbors began to oppose it,” Johnson said. “Some
prominent Black citizens also opposed it such as the Manns. They just didn’t feel a church should be in their community. Some of the other landowners
over there, some of them doctors who owned vacant land there — Zimbrick wasn’t there at the time — opposed it. We had a great deal of opposition
stretching from Nygaard Street over to Todd Drive. These were people who opposed us in a petition.”
The church appealed the town board’s ruling against the granting of a conditional use permit. The church appealed it to the county board. An African
American sat on the county board at the time whose district included the Nygaard property. Johnson was expecting support. “We thought we had an ally,”
Johnson said. “She had attended our services. However, speaking truth, when we got down to the county board and all of the residents were there — we
thought she would be an ally since she was African American and worshiped at our church — she sided with the residents. However, we believed our destiny
was to be there.”
After the defeat, Jerry Hancock introduced Johnson to Attorney James Doyle, who went on to be elected attorney general and then governor. Doyle
interceded on behalf of the church with the neighbors. “He met with them and got some terms and conditions,” Johnson said. “He wrote them up. The
residents had Dick Lehman who was a land-use expert associated with James Grasskamp at the university. We met the neighbors at the Town of Madison. At
the time, Tom Solberg was the town chair. We met and aired our concerns with them. And we listened to them. We were always respectful.”
Doyle crafted an agreement between the neighbors and the church that all parties could live with. 100 percent of the residents of the neighborhood signed
on and the church, once again, went to the county board. “The county board then approved the conditional use permit,” Johnson said. “That was one of the
first times that a town board’s recommendation had been overturned. The town board had voted no and we appealed to the county board. Bill Lunney and
Judy Wendell were very effective. Judy was a Republican, but I knew about her. We presented our case to her. They instructed us on how to approach
county board members. I called each county board member individually and explained our case. They were quite supportive. Lyal Lensingdorf, a neighbor,
spoke up for us. For me coming from the South, to have a White man speak up for me against, in this particular case, a predominantly White group — the
African Americans weren’t out front as such — was a good introduction to me of the goodness that Madison possessed in terms of race relations. It was a big
eye-opener for me to have that kind of friendship.” The vote was unanimous.
Although the county board gave their approval, the church still ran into opposition. While Park Bank had originally indicated they would give them a
$125,000 loan to build the church, they backed away from their commitment by requiring the church to find someone to sign for the entire cost of the loan
even though the church was putting $30,000 of its own funds into the construction of the church. The church withdrew their funds from the bank and after a
referral from Joe Daniels who would eventually build the church, secured a loan from AnchorBank.
Johnson feels that some of the opposition was due to people’s bias against Pentecostal churches — they built their walls thicker than normal. He recalled
an incident that occurred right before they broke ground for the church. “There was a Wiccan group in the area when we had our groundbreaking,” Johnson
said. “Someone wrote on the building ‘We hope and pray you will go away; we’ll take the witches any day.’ We understood there were some Wiccans who
lived on the street. We painted over that before the television cameras showed up for the groundbreaking because we didn’t want to give them publicity and
we didn’t want any animus in the news toward us.”
The church was built and in 1970, the church expanded the building to include classroom space. “We didn’t have protests from the community that time,”
Johnson recalled. “We had proved to be good neighbors. And we did generate a lot of goodwill to the community. We reached out to people in the area in
places like Gaslight Square. We had open-air services. One of the residents from Nygaard came and said ‘You said you weren’t going to have open-air
services’ and he called the police on us. I said ‘Look, we’re trying to help get rid of drug dealers and people with this, that and the other.’ So the police let
us continue. But we really came to be known as a church that was really aggressively taking our services and love and concern for the poor and children out
and about. That helped everyone to understand what we were about. So when we came to the governmental authorities to get a conditional use permit to
build a second part, they were more receptive to us.”
The church stayed in the Nygaard Street church until 2000 when they sold the church to a Latino church and purchased their present church on E.
Buckeye Road for $1 million. AnchorBank not only loaned them the funds to purchase their new church, but also loaned money to the Latino church as
well.

Next issue: The growth of the congregation
Bishop Eugene Johnson (l) and his wife
Carolyn moved to Madison 25 years ago to
found MadisonPentecostal Assembly.