Blog
This blog explores how our medical work can align with God’s purposes. We don’t have to guess how to connect our work to the Kingdom of God. Understanding how healthcare fits into the whole story of the Bible will help us recover a sure foundation. A solid integration of healthcare and mission will help us move ahead with confidence and joy.
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“Many times we give answers to problems of local churches without taking the time to find the questions. We come with prefabricated solutions.”
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"Every Good Endeavor"
Tim Keller tackles the dualism of sacred vs secular work head on, helping us integrate our faith and work. We are not immune to this dualism in healthcare missions. One of our medical missionaries said to me that she was…
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Competence and confidence
I’ve been talking about a lot of big ideas in these posts: how to share the love of Christ in healthcare ministry ‘over there.’ You may get the impression, “Hey, there are a lot of big ideas here. Am I…
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The LORD, a God merciful and gracious
Last week I wrote about a possible erosion of compassion in our healthcare service. Those of us in healthcare as a profession can be inundated with the suffering in this world. And beyond the physical aspects of suffering there…
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Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church
What would the resurrection have to do with the mission of the church? NT Wright makes a plea for us to connect the two. Our modern assumptions about life after death seem to disconnect the reality of life in this…
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Are we losing our compassion?
When we reflect on the reasons to come alongside those who are hurting physically and serve them around the world, compassion must be the #1 reason. It was the foundation of the early church’s response to human suffering around them,…
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How should we do justice?
I’ve mentioned Tim Keller’s “Generous Justice” before. Today I’d like to underline a practical and theological issue about “how.” Keller tells us about Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and statesman who ‘remade the churches into voluntary institutions’ in Holland over…
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Medical Missions, an assessment by a historian
Christoffer Grundmann writes, “Most nineteenth-century people, medics and theologians alike, paid little, if any attention to medical missions — even if they were addressing mission. And when they did, they almost always did so in very limited confines, leaving their…
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How can local believers show compassion through healthcare ministries?
As we communicate the love of Christ in another culture, it is easy to think that the ministry revolves around our activities. In fact, the key word in Christ’s “Great Commission” is to make disciples. That means enabling others to…
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Highlights shared by SIM medical missionaries
We have 250 medical professionals serving in SIM. We recently surveyed some of them. We asked each one to share a highlight of their ministry. Here are some of their responses. One bullet point per person: The opportunity to develop…
