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Stephen: The challenges missionaries face on the field can vary from people group to people group. But one constant is medical care. From the beginning, Christians have followed the example of Christ in attending to physical needs as well as spiritual. For missionaries, that care can be extreme, suffering regular bouts of serious illness as they bring modern medical care to the unreached. In recent years, meeting medical needs in areas that don't have access to modern healthcare has spawned a subgenre of missions called medical missions. Brooks, in our question today, we want to go a little deeper into the relationship between missions and medicine. An anonymous friend sent us this question. What are medical missions, and what are the pros and cons?
Brooks: The question of medical missions and especially the pros and cons of it in the 21st century is a really interesting question because medicine and the alleviation of human misery through medicine and through different ways that missionaries have conducted themselves in that realm is really tied together, especially in the last couple centuries. You've got examples like David Livingstone, who did so much in Africa. He saw medicine as the key to unlocking many of the different things that the African communities were struggling with, and the entrance of the gospel would ride on the back of that. And he wasn't wrong. And Mary Slessor, who was just notable in the way that she not only used medicine, but she was also adopting children and she was kind of going beyond just the medicine side of it. You've got that, but you've also got Jesus and the way that He comes to the Jews is through miracles and through alleviating human suffering. You've got this famous statement in Luke 7:22 when John is starting to waver in his faith and he's in jail and he's not really sure if Jesus is the one. And his disciples go and ask Jesus. And it says this in Luke 7:22: "And He answered them, "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive their sight. The lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear. The dead are raised up. The poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by Me."" And of those examples, five of the six are the alleviation of human suffering. They're helping the human body, so to speak, especially the one where He's bringing people back to life. And so you've got this history not only in historic missionaries, but in the Christ. And we are not the Christ. We are not little Jesuses running around, but we see the audience and we see that the way that helping human suffering opens doors.
When we moved into Yembiyembi, we were part of that. We were trying to train people simultaneously. I remember taking big old hooks out of a guy's hand because he'd gone hunting for a crocodile and while he was wrestling it, the hook went right through the middle of his hand, and taking a metal cutoff tool and cutting off the barb and then pulling the hook out the back of his hand. And Nina was draining abscesses and just all sorts of things. And probably the one that stands out to me the most is a girl, really. I think she was six to nine months old. A death adder bit her, and we went down and opened it up and did some treatment to try and get the blood out before the poison could get to her heart and her nervous system. And she actually lived, and she ended up in later years coming to hear the gospel and got saved. Her parents never got saved, but she did. And so there are these examples all through life and through the Scriptures of Christians being willing to dive in on that level, the medical level. And so that's laudable, and that's a really good thing.
I guess I would have three cautions, though, when it comes to medical missions and especially going to unreached language groups, going to those last places. There are avenues where this is helpful.
And so caution number one would be that if you're involved in medical missions, make sure it has some tie to the church. Not just to the gospel, but to the church. I get nervous when I hear these stories of medical missionaries—dentists or doctors—and they operate and they heal someone or they fix some physical deformity, and at the end of it they hand them a tract. That's something, and that's not nothing. I don't want to make too light a thing of that. But better than handing them a tract is having a conversation with them about the gospel. And better than that is inviting them to a local church. They are grateful people when you have done much for them. Bring them where the gospel is preached every week. Invite them to a gathering of believers that will go beyond just the physical. The other side of medical missions is no matter how many cases of leprosy, how many doses of malaria medicine, how many broken bones are healed, how many teeth are pulled and fixed and this misery is alleviated, eventually every one of them will die. And so it's incumbent on us to think beyond the physical, to think to the eternal. How do we expose them to what is truly ailing them? Yes, let's not make light of physical ailments, but let's remember that eternal damnation, eternal punishment in hell is far worse than anything that could happen on the physical realm. And so that would be caution number one: to make sure that we're tying this to the church.
Caution number two is that as missionaries—I speak at a lot of high school and college groups and I'm routinely asked, "What are the best majors for going to an unreached language group?"—and medicine is way, way down there. And the reason is not because it's not useful, but because if you're a doctor, if you're a nurse, if you're skilled on the medical side, that's what you're going to have to do overseas. The avenue of planting a church, of actually being involved in something other than the physical, other than the medical, is going to be really slim. If you have an education degree, if you have an engineering degree, if you have a business degree, you're expected to be with people and you don't have to exercise those skill sets all the time to validate your being in the country. If you're in the medical field, you have to be involved in that quite extensively.
And then finally, the medical field takes time. It takes a lot of time to get up to a higher level, especially if you're going to be a doctor. And it also requires a lot of money. There's a lot of debt involved—not all the time, but if you're going to get to the higher levels, you generally are going to spend a lot of time and a lot of money, and that's going to pull you away for some of those critical years. If you've been listening to the podcast for very long, you know that the number one hurdle for missionaries going overseas who are going to work with unreached language groups is always going to be learning another language. The older you are, as a general rule, the harder that is. And so the longer you spend in your home country gathering these skill sets—not to say that they're not helpful—you don't want to get painted as the medical person because then you're not the language learning person. You're not the church planting person. You're not helping in that endeavor. You're not the translation person. You're going to have to be the medical person the whole time.
So those would be my three general cautions: the length of time it takes, that it paints you into a corner as the medical person, and if you're going to do medicine, let's tie that directly to the church, to a church that is close by that they can attend. Not a bad thing. Praise God for people that help on the medical side. But let's make sure that we're very clear-eyed about the pros of it and also the drawbacks.
Stephen: If you're interested in learning more about David Livingstone's mission in Africa, visit missionary.com/docuseries, where you can find our film on Livingstone in our sixth film, Missionary: Obeying the Great Commission series. Or if you'd like to stream it, you can find that episode, "The Cost of Family," on Amazon Prime or Apple TV.
If you have a question you would like to hear answered on Ask Missionary, drop a comment on this episode, get in touch with us on social media, or send us an email through missionary.com, and your question may be featured on this show. And don't forget to subscribe to the show to get notified when the next episode airs next week, where we'll explore what short-term missions are and what their pros and cons are.