ChristLife celebrates our 20th Anniversary this year! We are grateful for the Lord’s faithfulness and the opportunity to serve Him through this ministry. We hope you enjoy these memories and reflections from ChristLife staff as we approach our 20th Anniversary Celebration.

You're invited to join ChristLife as we celebrate on November 21, 2015! RSVP on our website.

In 1989 I, Dave Nodar, received the following verses from Isaiah during prayer:

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

Isaiah 43:18,19 (NIV)

I heard it as a prophetic word in my own prayer times, but it was also providentially offered to me from various unrelated people over the course of that year. The people who shared it also believed these verses were for me. 

My response in prayer was to say, "Lord, know you are doing something new, but honestly, I don’t perceive it."  I didn’t see it. Yet.

The Lord was calling me to new things, which were birthed out of a prolonged season of darkness, brokenness, sin, apparent failure, and great loss. I was experiencing death to a vision before it came to pass. In the history of God’s people, it seems this is often how the Lord works in us so He can work through us.  Out of the wasteland and wilderness, He promises to bring forth streams.

Over the next six years it gradually became clear the Lord was calling us to begin a Catholic ministry of evangelization. From the repeated promise and summons of Pope Saint John Paul II to the new evangelization, calling us to see this could become a time of apostolic fervor if we responded with generosity and holiness; to the privileged occasions teaching at schools of evangelization for young adult Catholics from the former Soviet Union in central and eastern Europe; to the practical experience we gained over many years in evangelizing and making disciples. These things helped us perceive what the Lord was calling us into and we began.

In December 1995, Leo Rudegeair, Lee Thomas and I met with Monsignor Joseph Luca, Bishop William Malooly, and William Cardinal Keeler, the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Archbishop, to tell them of our desire to begin a Catholic ministry of evangelization. Cardinal Keeler was so enthusiastic that Catholics would want to evangelize and help others to do so and he recognized us as an Apostolate of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

And that is how ChristLife began!

 Dave Nodar was apprehended by God's love and made a personal commitment to follow Jesus Christ as Lord as a member of the Catholic Church in 1971. He served as a leader in a renewal movement for 20 years and after a period of prayer and discernment began ChristLife in 1995. His passion is to help others to know the love of God the Father in Jesus Christ through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.