Dauner News Update, September 2009
New Granddaughter
We are happy to announce the birth, on September 26, of Aurélia Dana to our son Philippe and his wife Dolores. Both mother and baby are home and doing well. Prisca, especially, is overjoyed at the arrival of a girl in this household overrun by boys.
Christians on Mission Class of 2010
The CEM class of 2010 comprises two young women and two young men, all fresh out of high school: Emily Young, Derek Twiss, Constantine Tertov and Maylis Blasco. The diversity of their backgrounds and their eagerness to learn promise to make this a good year.
The value of our modest program cannot be mesured simply in numbers. Every year, as I see our intern-students (“cemists”) use their experience at CEM as a springboard for active discipleship and church service, I give thanks to God for his grace in letting me participate in this ministry and for you whose love and support give me the means.
Longtime Coworker Returns Home
Denise Heroux, CEM class of 1998 and our coworker for eleven years, announced that she will be returning definitively to the United States in November. She has been such a vital part of the team—in both what she does and who she is— that we don’t know what we will do without her.
Evangelistic Thrust
One of the evangelistic projects for the coming church year will a renewed effort to multiply small study groups of catechumens (people who follow a program of instruction with a view to baptism). We hope in this way to exploit the conjunction of two recent developments: (1) a number of unchurched parents whose children participate in our youth groups have expressed an interest in being instructed in the Christian faith ; (2) in August, I completed a major revision of the (multimedia) version of the Purpose of God, which is now ready to be used for small group classes.
We hope that this tool—a succinct overview of the Christian faith—will help us to recenter on personal evangelism, which tends sometimes to be crowded out of our daily schedule by the demands of other ministries.
Lyons Seminar
The last weekend of September, Prisca and I visited the church in Lyons where I held a brief seminar, using my DVD presentation, on the book of Revelation. Sunday morning Bible class became an opportunity to show one lesson of the Purpose of God (the one on Christian virtues). People seem to respond well to the multimedia format, which is no surprise in our image-oriented culture.
Every September marks for us the beginning of a new “campaign”: new struggles to be engaged or continued, new victories and new defeats, new joys and new disappointments. But every new year brings us that much closer to our Father and to our true home. May he grant us all the grace to finish the course with honor and faithfulness.
Max and Prisca Dauner