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From Luke’s Journal May 2025 | Vol. 30 No. 1 | MIMBY

One of the reasons I had for doing medicine was because the profession would be a vehicle for mission – hence, the choice to look overseas, where the need is greater and the opportunity to be involved in medical education, multiply the vision and bring in other workers.  It has been a privilege to be involved in many facets of medical education mission and theological reflection.  So, I am particularly keen to explore the question of medical missions. 

The International Christian Medical and Dental Association (ICMDA, the international umbrella association of which the CMDFA is a member) has a number of Zoom training programs.  I am involved in the Thought Leadership stream.  My topic is Questioning and Listening. 

The question of questioning led me to look at Kipling’s six honest serving men:

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who^[1].  

These form a useful framework for considering mission and medicine. 

What is mission?

There has been a lot of missiological reflection on this topic^[2].  Part of mission is preaching the Gospel, but mission is much more than proclamation.  It involves developing mature congregations of Christian believers embodying and promoting the Gospel by word and deed to the world, in their own local culture, to the glory of God. 

But the church starts with the Gospel.  This is a rich multi-faceted story.  Most of us have been introduced to the “Holy God, sin, Jesus’ atoning death, and the call for me to accept,” model of the Gospel.  It is loosely based on the outline of the first four chapters of the book of Romans, and it is popular in the Campus Crusade for Christ (known present-day as Cru) and the Billy Graham movements. It has been useful to bring many to faith.  However, as a summary, it is self-oriented.  By contrast, the book of Romans is about what God has done in Christ, and how we can be incorporated into that work.

Some have distilled the Gospel preaching of the apostles in the book of Acts into what is technically called the kerygma^[3], a Greek word meaning proclamation.  A study of this kerygma shows that it is the story of Jesus, a proclamation of His humiliation on the cross and vindication by the resurrection, with the prospect of His coming again.  There is a call to repent from sin and to surrender to the Lordship of Christ.  Subsequently this kerygma has been distilled into the creeds of the church – the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, each of which addresses the question of who Jesus is, as well as what he has done.  Consequently, every time we recite the creeds, we proclaim the Gospel. 

Mark’s Gospel plunges us straight into Jesus’ teaching where he proclaims that the Kingdom of God is at hand, so repent and believe the Gospel (Mark 1:14-15).  At that time imperial proclamations were also called Gospels – usually the announcement of a new emperor, or the birth of his son.  This acknowledges the strand that relates the Gospel with the announcement of the Kingdom of God – a large theme in Jesus’ teaching.  That teaching showed the radical nature of God’s Kingdom because of the radical nature of the King – Jesus, born in obscurity, laid in a manger, entering Jerusalem on a donkey, crowned with thorns and enthroned on a cross after being mocked by Roman soldiers.  The suffering servant brought a radically different style of leadership – servant leadership – to be central to His Kingdom. 

Jesus proclaimed the good news that the Kingdom of God has come, and that people need to repent to become part of the Kingdom of God.  Further He embodied that Kingdom of righteousness, justice, mercy and peace in His deeds as well as His words.  That Kingdom came in the person of Jesus, but is still to come with Christ’s return.  In the meantime, His disciples are told to act as witnesses of Jesus throughout the world.  Jurgen Moltmann makes the point in his book Theology of Hope^[4] that the church, with the prospect of the coming of the Kingdom, cannot be satisfied with the status quo but will always be working with hope towards a more just and compassionate society, witnessing to that Kingdom yet to come. Everything we do as Christian disciples is Kingdom business in light of His return.

“Everything we do as Christian disciples is Kingdom business in light of His return.”

Further, if we look at Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we see the story of Jesus himself, how He lived, what He did, what He taught and how He mentored His followers to continue what He started.  These Gospels tell us how Jesus practically acted out the love of God to sinners, especially people like Zachaeus the tax collector, the woman of Samaria and other people of indifferent reputation, bringing them into the love of God.  Central to these Gospels is the mentoring of the twelve disciples who learned the ways of the Lord. During this time Jesus commissioned His disciples to preach the same good news he preached, to heal the sick, and to exorcise demons.  Medical missions derives from this commission, and our going, preaching and healing are a continuation of the mission Christ set His disciples. 

Paul had other brief summaries of the Gospel. They are so varied that it is hard to simply have one single formula to cover the full range.  “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:24ff) is a case in point where in a few words Paul expounds the wonder of the indwelling Christ, the hope He inspires and the glory of the riches of His majesty.  Him we proclaim, Paul urges.  His enthusiasm is infectious. This is heartwarming stuff which inspires us to press on to also share that same good news.  

I have surveyed some of the strands of that rich Gospel that shapes mission: the story of sinners reconciled, of the Gospel of the Kingdom, the story of Jesus, who He was, what He did when alive, and how the cross affects us now, the story of God indwelling us in the power of the Spirit and how God is shaping a new body of disciples to live out and proclaim the love of God to all through their community life. 

If I were asked to summarise the Gospel most simply, it would be this – that God loves the world so much that He gave His Son as a ransom for sinners.  That love is not just talked about but actively embodied in the way His disciples care for all.  That love is seen in the action of the church living out God’s love in the community, to the praise of God.  That is the mission of the church. 

The who of mission

When we see that the whole church is involved in mission, indeed that it lives for the mission of the Kingdom of God, we can then ask the question of our own individual role in that project.  There will be those who proclaim, those who teach, those who care and those who serve.  Business leaders are involved in generating work and this will help the many unemployed or under-employed in today’s society.  In fact, there are no occupations outside the purview of the Kingdom – journalism, law, environmental protection, sanitation, prisons, justice – the list is endless. 

Central to this is of course the need of godly leadership within the Body of Christ and the prayers of its saints as they seek God’s will in their mission. The church needs to attend to its body-life (indeed the bulk of Paul’s letters are addressed to issues within the church), but it also needs to be outwardly focussed to the world she is called to serve.  There is also the important task of expounding Scripture to the church and proclaiming the gospel to the world.

We have seen a major shift in missiological thinking in my lifetime.  When I started as a medical student, we tended to think of low-income countries as the recipient of mission and high-income countries as the source of sending.  The “majority world” developed greatly, and the churches in Africa and Asia are booming when compared to the decline in the West.  Mission is now much more about going everywhere where there is need and building up the church of God in every place.  We still have gifts and skills to share with them, but we also need to hear their voices and be inspired by their commitment and imagination.  

The good news is that I do not have to do it all.  I need to find my part in that body to contribute my gifts for the building up of the Body for her mission. But I do have a part, and with my fellow believers I can find that part, finding it not just for me, but for them.  

The why of mission

At the end of each gospel and the start of the book of Acts, Jesus commissioned His apostles to go into all the world, to every ethnic group, and to preach the good news witnessing to the extraordinary coming of God in our midst.  He called them to disciple and to baptise. He told them to go into a hostile world of darkness with the light of His truth, just as He did.  He told us to pray because the harvest of souls is great, to pray that labourers will go.  This is the go rather than come aspect of mission.

“He told us to pray because the harvest of souls is great, to pray that labourers will go.  This is the go rather than come aspect of mission.”

In going into the world, we will inevitably have to overcome language and cultural barriers.  This calls for skilled anthropologists and translators to bring the Scriptures into the culture, and it also calls for church planters who can set up new local communities of believers, expressing the Gospel within that culture. 

But there is more.  In 2 Corinthians Paul must deal with a community where His motives have been slandered.  He responds in chapter 4 by reminding them that the Gospel is about reconciliation, and He has been entrusted with that gospel of reconciliation.  He insists that it is the love of Christ that compels Him, and us.  We preach reconciliation because we have been reconciled.  The church is a body of reconciled people, motivated by the love of God, reaching out into a yet-to-be reconciled world.

But in the end, the goal of mission is that God is glorified by the people called out from the world into a community of love who witness to an alternative reality – that God is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  

The when of mission

Mission started when the disciples were commissioned in Acts 1.  But they were told to wait for the promised Holy Spirit who would guide and empower that mission.  When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, people from all the known world heard the Good News in their own language.  The curse of Babel was reversed and the Gospel spread, from Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria and then to the ends of the earth.  Paul received a particular call to take the Gospel to the Gentiles and His ambition to preach the Gospel wherever it had not yet been heard.  Paul’s companion, our colleague, Dr Luke, chronicled the story in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.  Since then, global mission has gone forwards in fits and starts, but today we seek to spread the Good News until Christ comes again.  Indeed, one of the incentives is that when the Gospel is preached throughout the world, the end will come (Matt 24:14). 

Where is mission?

It is the essence of mission to go, but where?  The book of Acts tells the exciting story of how the Gospel spread through the known Roman world, but we also know that other disciples took the Gospel to India, through Thomas, and to Ethiopia through Mark and maybe the Ethiopian eunuch described in Acts 8.  But the Gospel started in Jerusalem and there is still a need to spread the gospel of peace and reconciliation right there.  There is also the need to ensure that our own families will know and live the Gospel of love.  One sadder story in mission is the story of missionaries regrettably neglecting their families for the sake of the work. 

So we start in our own backyard, but from there we go to every culture. The Christian church is at the forefront of multiculturalism, encouraging every culture to embody the Gospel in their own idiom and thoughtforms.  Each culture has its strengths and shortcomings, and we all need each other to enlighten our blind spots so that together we may more fully complete the grand story of God reconciling the whole world to Himself.  

There is one very challenging culture in Australia today – the culture of secular naturalism and materialism.  This has become a supra-national movement with its own size and power, often driven by profit and greed.  It disrespects the poor, the marginalised and the environment. It will require particular missiological skills to encounter that culture in our own backyard, and globally. 

Jonathan Sacks, a former British Chief Rabbi, writes^[5] after the traumatic events of 09/11 that there is an urgent need for people of goodwill from every faith to stand together against fundamentalist extremism – whether that fundamentalism arises out of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism or Christianity.  That extremism has arisen, in his view, as a reaction to the impersonal scientism and reduction of humans to mere functions by some forms of secular materialism.  Addressing both the reductionism and the fundamentalist reaction to this is an urgent need that Christians of love need to take seriously across different faiths without compromising their commitment to the Lordship of Christ and the call to repentance.  This is one of the key missiological challenges today.

The how of mission

Jesus said to His disciples, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20:21).  So, as Christ came as light into darkness, we too go, bringing light to darkness.  Jesus embodied the gospel by His life and actions and brought reconciliation to broken people.  In the words of Lesslie Newbigin, “The word explains the deed and the deed expounds the word.” But He goes further to show that it is the transformed community of the body of Christ that is a powerful witness to the values and vision of the gospel^[6]. 

Where do doctors and dentists fit in?  If we look at the first Christian doctor, his outstanding contribution was a beautifully sympathetic account of the early days of Christianity, from before Christ’s birth in Luke’s Gospel, up to Paul’s pending trial in Rome at the end of the book of the Acts of the Apostles.  Luke chronicled Christ and His church.  The story of medical missions is a wonderful story of pioneering adventure bringing the gospel to needy people and communities.

“The story of medical missions is a wonderful story of pioneering adventure bringing the gospel to needy people and communities.”

Since then there have been many stories of missionary doctors and dentists who have contributed in some way to the mission of the church – from mainly mission administrators who were also medical, like Hudson Taylor, to medical researchers who also spread the gospel, like Francis Collins, to Ida Scudder, the founder of a Christian Medical College and hospital in Vellore in South India.  There are countless others.  I encourage all doctors and dentists to continue to reflect on the mission of the church and their own role in that mission.  I certainly did not expect to finish up as a general physician and addiction medicine specialist, but being open to God’s guidance daily and at key points in our lives as a married couple has helped us serve him and contribute to the Christian community we belong to.  The Gospel shaped our ambition, our imagination, our prayers and our action, to the praise of His glory.

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[1] Kipling, R. The Elephant’s child. Just so stories. 1902.  

[2] Two very useful resources which have shaped a lot of my thinking are Verkuyl J. Contemporary Missiology: an introduction.  Eerdmans Grand Rapid. 1978, and Newbigin L.  The Gospel in a pluralist society.  Eerdmans, Grand Rapid. 1989. For a more contemporary and far-reaching survey of the state of play in medical missions today see proceedings at the ICMDA World Congress 2023.  O’Neill D.  Health care missions pre-congress, ICMDA Pre-congress Arusha, Tanzania. In Christian Journal of Global Health. 2023;10:85-94. https://cjgh.org/articles/10.15566/cjgh.v10i2.863. Accessed 20 January 2025. 

[3] Dodd CH. The Apostolic Preaching and its Development. 1935. https://postbarthian.com/2012/10/15/the-apostolic-preaching-and-its-developments-by-c-h-dodd/ accessed 20 Jan 2025. 

[4] Moltmann J. Theology of Hope: On the grounds and the implications of a Christian eschatology. SCM Press. London. 1967.

[5] Sacks J.  The Dignity of Difference: How to avoid the clash of civilisations.  Bloomsbury London.  Revised 2013.

[6] Newbigin L. Op cit. Chapter 11. Word, Deed and New Being. p128-140.