July, 2000 - The Year of the Great Jubilee!
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
What an amazing time the first half-year of the Great Jubilee 2000 has been in the work of this apostolate. There have been so many opportunities and developments it is hard to know where to start in sharing with you a little of what has been happening. We want you to know that we are grateful to you for your partnership in the work of ChristLife and see the following as a direct result of your personal support in prayer, service, and financial generosity.
Update
ChristLife Resource Center - Our Center is now up and operating, and as you may know, we distribute resources to help the Church to practically respond to the call of evangelization. We sell all of the Alpha resources as well as the video series that we developed, along with our written materials. Setting up and running a resource center like this requires great competency and Rich Cronin, who is part of our volunteer staff, has done an incredible job with customer service, helping establish pricing and overseeing distributions. We are now distributing Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa's video seminar, Drink From The Wells Of The Church, and Dr. Marcellino D'Ambrosio's series, Touching Jesus Through The Church!
Committed and scheduled volunteer staff - The Lord has graciously sent Rich and Maureen Cronin, Lee Kopera, John Skeith, and Pat Finnegan to help in serving on a regular basis! In addition, Julie Rizzello is now serving part time as our office manager. We also have many other brothers and sisters who help out on an "as needed" basis for mailings, etc. Thanks to all of you,
who have been praying for staff, and thanks for those of you who are answered prayer!
Conferences - This last April we sponsored our second Alpha Conference for Catholics in Baltimore. ChristLife had the privilege of administrating and teaching the conference. On July 7 and 8, we helped serve the Vancouver Conference for Catholics. It was the largest Alpha conference ever held, over 1400 delegates attended. Archbishop Adam Exner enthusiastically welcomed the delegates and challenged the Archdiocese of Vancouver to go from being maintenance oriented church to being mission driven. He believes that Alpha may be one of the ways to help bring about what Pope John Paul II refers to as a new springtime of evangelization. The Archdiocese of Vancouver sponsored the conference and intends to foster the use of the Alpha course as an excellent beginning to a parish based evangelization process. This fall they will have over 14 parishes starting the Alpha course. Over half of the parishes of the Archdiocese had delegates attend the conference!
Leo Rudegeair and Dave also presented seminars on Alpha for Catholics at ecumenical Alpha Conferences in Detroit and Minneapolis during the last couple of weeks.
Christlife.org web site - In the last 6 months, we have had 307,063 hits on the site, and 260,000 of our files downloaded (1,869,655 kilobytes) to over 60 nations! By September, we will have a re -designed web site, with a new appearance and an online book store with secure ordering capability. The on line book store gives us a further means of serving the Church at large, and will make it easier for many people who already order from us to do so on-line. Our friends at Piccirilli Group have been putting in a tremendous amount of work into redesigning the web site, and we are very grateful for their generosity and creativity! If you have access to the Internet take a look in September, and let us know what you think, and let your friends know about it!
Financial situation - Six months ago our Board of Directors was concerned about our financial situation. To maintain our level of ministry ? salaries, office expenses, projects, etc. - required us to draw from the grant we received to start ChristLife. We had been spending $90,000 per year over our income and were within 7 months of exhausting it. We are happy to report to you that in the last 6 months we have had a marked financial improvement based on an increase in donations from you, our benefactors, and from the development of our resource center. Currently our income approximates our expenses. Praise God! And thank you so much for your generosity and loving giving! We pray for you regularly, and are conscious of the reality and responsibility of shared ministry with each of you! We have been working on making known the various mission areas of ChristLife. There is so much developing in the work of the mission, with so many opportunities, that we cannot respond to all of it without additional funding.
Upcoming leadership forums. As we have the opportunity to talk with many people around North America regarding the use of Alpha, the other resources we offer, and the process of evangelization, we have been very inspired by the diversity of gifts and ministries the Lord has given to the Church and that are being raised up in the areas of evangelization and formation. It is encouraging to see first hand, the answers to the prayers for laborers for the harvest (Matthew 9:35ff). During the next year we hope to host some leadership forums to give people who are involved as practitioners in the work of evangelization a forum in which to gather and share our experiences, suggestions, concerns, etc.
Thanks to each of you for your interest in ChristLife. We are indebted to you for of your prayers, service and financial generosity!
Love in our Lord Jesus,
Dave Nodar
Please join us in praying for
- Many prodigals to come home to God the Father in this the Jubilee year!
- All of us as his Church to move from maintenance to a mission mode of living.
- The Holy Spirit's direction for ChristLife to accomplish his work.
- The Billy Graham Evangelistic Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 29-August 6 - up to 10,000 delegates from at least 185 countries will attend. Dave has been invited, along with Bishop Michael Warfel, Chairman of the Bishops Committee on Evangelization, Fr. John Hurley, CSP, Director of the US. National Conference of Bishops Office of Evangelization, and Ralph Martin, to represent the USA as Catholic observers at this conference. A delegation from the Holy See will be attending and 45 Catholics representatives from other nations have been invited. Quite a privilege for us and very gracious of Billy Graham to include Catholics and Orthodox.
- The International School of Evangelization in Rzeped, Poland July 10 ? August 27
- Funding for additional staff and for planned and hoped-for projects.
- Our next video series, Catholics Listening to God, another valuable teaching resource for many Christians! The new series will be presented by Msgr. Mark Coleridge of the Vatican Secretariat of State, an Australian biblical scholar, who has been working with the Pope on his writings including the encyclical, Faith and Reason. The series will show how God's word comes to us through Scripture, Tradition, and the teaching Magesterium of the Church. The filming will be done in the UK on October 7 - 15, 2000.
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Copyright (c) 2000 ChristLife Catholic Evangelization Services
Permission is hereby granted to copy or reprint ChristLife newsletters for personal use, research files, internal circulation, and bulletin inserts. Please include "Copyright (c)2000 ChristLife" and our web address: www.christlife.org. Written permission is required if the article is to be included in a book, or in newspapers or magazines with paid subscriptions.
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