The Seoul Statement emerged from the 4th Lausanne Congress on World Mission, which was just held in Seoul. Two theologians from the Global South, one from Sri Lanka and the other from Zimbabwe, led the effort to produce the Seoul statement. Western Christian leaders crafted previous Lausanne documents. They have chosen issues vital to the advancement of Christ’s work on earth and done so in a language that helps us both proclaim and display Christ together to the nations. It also directs us as Christian healthcare professionals to repent and change our ways.
As someone who works in healthcare and promotion, you might think that doctrines about God have little relevance to our work. After all, don’t we use the tools of science and technology to advance global health? You might think, “Yes, I am a Christian, but how we understand the gospel must surely be left to experts such as theologians. They can’t have a big effect on my work or ministry.” You would be dead wrong.
Men, medicine and machines only?
Our work as healthcare professionals is centered around pathological processes, evidence-based interventions, and efficient service delivery. Or, more simply, as pathology, pills, and programs. Modern medicine addresses physical needs powerfully but in doing so we sacrifice the significance and meaning of our work. How can this be so?
Anthropologist Paul Hiebert suggests that as modern people, our core belief is that the world is mechanical rather than organic. As scientific, rational people, we understand the world at the root in terms of the chemistry and physics of matter. We place our hope more in the physical means to heal than putting disease and healing in the context of our relationship with God and others. Christian healthcare professionals too, absorb these modern “maps of reality.” Is there a better way?
Lausanne’s Seoul Statement calls us back to the bigger story, the true story of the whole world. The gospel story puts disease and health in context. Scientific healthcare is powerful, but the blessing of health (and suffering) can most clearly be understood as it relates to God’s purposes in the world. The first section of the Seoul Statement, “The Gospel, the Story We Live and Tell,” begins:
“It is the story (in the Old and New Testaments) that tells us who we are, what we are here for, and where we are going. This story of God’s mission defines our identity, drives our mission, and assures us that the ending is in God’s hands”
The gospel helps define our work in healthcare. The gospel is a story about spiritual reality which underlies physical illness and health. Seoul says, “In the beginning, God created the universe as a wondrous interdependence of spiritual and material reality, filled with meaning and mystery. All that God made was ordered and beautiful and good. God blessed all he made, that each part would exist for the flourishing of the whole.” God made human beings, both male and female, in the image of God, calling us to live under his authority to become a blessing to others. Healthcare is one sphere of human activity (alongside education, governance, justice, etc.). Bodily illness tangibly highlights our brokenness and need for healing and salvation.
How does the gospel speak to us in healthcare?
Rather than reduce healing to mechanism only, we invite others to God, the source of healing. God’s mission in the world is to bless the nations of the earth by filling the earth with people who have new life, culturally diverse peoples united in the worship of God and oriented to blessing others rather than themselves.
The gospel is not just a ticket to heaven or a means of gaining health and wellness. Sometimes, faith doesn’t even result in physical healing.
God has designed things so that life arises out of death.
“When God blessed human beings, he warned them that the ongoing flow of life would cease were they ever to seek independence from him. Since God alone is life, that choice would be death. Adam and his wife Eve joined in the Satan-led rebellion and so sin and death entered the world. Commissioned to fill the earth with culturally diverse peoples united in the worship of God, humanity filled the earth with violence, fracturing the unity for which they were made. Exiled from God’s holy presence and cut off from life, humans found themselves in bondage to self-will and enslaved to a meaningless existence.”
The gospel provides a framework for our work as Christian healthcare providers by helping us understand that Jesus has been raised from the dead as victor over sin in order to give birth to a people – a people who bless the nations of the earth. This is a far cry from the “prosperity gospel,” which says that we can manipulate God to get healing or success for ourselves. The gospel orients us away from ourselves: to God and the people of the world.
Recovering a gospel-saturated worldview
By itself, healthcare is a dead-end street. God cares for our bodies; he created and sustains them. He sent Jesus to the world with a human body, showing the importance of bodily health in creation. The reality is that physical and chemical processes alone cannot define us. They are important, but they express the deeper reality of God’s creation and sovereign control and care for the world. The gospel of Jesus Christ does not take us out of the world, but puts us back in the world to love and serve Him and others.
The “body-only” approach to healthcare is inadequate. It is a false view, not grounded in the reality of what God has done and what he continues to do. It undermines the gospel story and separates what God has joined together: body and soul, earth and heaven, God and man.
God calls us to treat sickness and healthcare as a sacred profession. The road to recovery of a Christian worldview starts with a correct assessment of the problem. As Christian healthcare professionals, let us turn from a narrow and distorted understanding of our work. Let’s place our calling, once again, in the context of the gospel, the work of God in history. I commend the Seoul Statement to you as a good place to begin.
Future blogs will explore the connection of healthcare and other themes in the Seoul Statement, helping us integrate healthcare and mission. These include Bible interpretation, the Church, the Human Person, Discipleship, the Family of Nations, and Technology. What is your understanding of the the “big picture” of healthcare?
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