How Southern Baptist Medical Missions Is Still Thriving

Overall, Williams and Naylor agree that the shift from institutions to local leadership was beneficial because it empowered local leaders to grow beyond what IMB could provide.

“When I first arrived in Bangalore, we were struggling to get patients. Now, the hospital treats 1,000 patients a day,” Williams says. “When I arrived there were three missionary physicians, a nurse and six to eight Indian doctors. The hospital has just grown and grown and grown.”

“It’s the same with Paraguay,” Williams continues, his eyes brightening. “To watch it go from a small hospital to a large medical complex with a heart center, a nursing school and the best emergency care in the city is truly enriching.”

Doing Things Differently
As institutional transitions continued to play themselves out, IMB’s commitment to medical missions never wavered, says Naylor. Instead, the methodology shifted to incorporate health strategies into evangelism and church planting. “Preach and heal”— utilizing health strategies to share the Gospel — was born.

Access to the world’s hardest-to-reach areas is one of the primary benefits of this holistic approach to health care and Gospel ministry, says Fielding, author of the book, Preach and Heal: A Biblical Model for Missions.

In 1985, Fielding was a 24-year-old college graduate in creative writing and psychology when God called him to go to places “where missionaries can’t go.”

“I’d never considered missions and never met a missionary,” Fielding says. “But I realized it might be hard for missionaries to go to places like East Asia, Central Asia or the Middle East. That day God told me to go to medical school so I could serve Him in hard-to-reach places.”

Ten years later, Fielding was serving as a physician in a remote area of Central Asia.

“My wife and I worked out of the back of a truck,” Fielding recalls. During his first three years, Fielding treated thousands of patients and saw 300 people come to faith in Jesus Christ.

“We had been told it would take 15 years for a person in this area to come to Christ,” Fielding says. “We saw people come to faith in less than a week.”

For Trey Alexander,* a church-planting strategist who oversees a variety of human needs projects in Central Asia, community health projects allow health professionals to be the heart, hands and voice of Jesus in cultures where grace, forgiveness and healing are foreign concepts.

“Even if access wasn’t an issue, the traditional method of sending a missionary to preach the Gospel will fall on deaf ears if the people don’t have a context for it,” Alexander explains.

Instead, Christian health workers make the Gospel real when they live out the principles of grace, love and forgiveness in their daily lives.

Multiplying Effectiveness
By giving up institutional control, IMB broadened its influence and multiplied its effectiveness, Fielding, Naylor and Williams agree. The transition empowered medical institutions to expand their services and allowed IMB health care workers to reach into the world’s most impoverished areas.

“The majority of the poor are in restricted-access places,” Naylor says. “The majority of the lost are also in restricted-access areas. As we moved into public health and primary care, we gained sustained access to hundreds and hundreds of these people groups.”

Over the past 15 years, Fielding cannot recall a single time when this holistic approach to Gospel ministry has been unsuccessful in bringing people to faith in Jesus. The reason for the success is the “right to be heard” health care workers gain by taking time with their patients.

“Healing touches a felt need of the individual,” Williams agrees. “When you sit with people and meet their felt needs, you gain their respect and trust … They begin to say, ‘You are different from other doctors,’ and we say, ‘Yes. We are different because of the love of Jesus Christ.’”

To view the Preach and heal medical missions video, click here.