Inspire Ohio 2013: Look Up!

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Advent HOPE Kettering

Wes Via

Medical Missionary Work

My name again is Wes and I'm the director of Simplicity Outreach.

And I want to pray and then I'm going to tell you all about what we're doing.

And I'm going to try to challenge you to do likewise where you're at or maybe come do it with us.

Heavenly Father, Lord, we just thank you so much for your Sabbath day.

Lord, we thank you for the opportunity to gather together to learn from you and be inspired by you.

Lord, I pray now that your Holy Spirit would be in this room, that you would guide us, that you would help us to know what is the work that is before us as your people living at this time.

So, Simplicity Outreach is a project that is seeking to create a replicable, sustainable model for urban evangelism.

If you've listened to Elder Wilson talk at all about the mission of the cities you've probably heard the term comprehensive ministry or comprehensive urban evangelism.

The basic idea is that we believe that we have an immense amount of counsel on how we should conduct the work as a worldwide movement, but also specifically referencing the city.

And so we started out basically, this was before I was brought onto the project, a study committee was put together in the Pennsylvania Conference to identify and catalog and codify all of the counsel in Ellen White and the Spirit of Prophecy in the Bible regarding how to work a city and then put that into a document that would give us a framework to work off of.

And now we're working with that document trying to bring all the pieces together into a city mission project as the Spirit of Prophecy has counseled us to do.

So we're taking all the things that we're used to seeing, Bible work and literature evangelism and medical missionary work and public evangelism, and basically what we're doing is we're saying we're gonna rethink how all these pieces go together.

And the reason that we need to do this is for the very reason that there's a call now in our church for a comprehensive approach to evangelism.

What we've done in the past and it's kind of necessitated by our structure, is that we may get some canvassers working in an area where there's some Bible workers out there where there's going to be an evangelistic series, but we're really not working together.

We're not having a melded, molded, combined approach.

What we're doing is the canvassers are doing what they do, the Bible workers then do what they do, and then the evangelist does what they do.

We don't have this blended approach that allows us to have the synergy that we've been hearing talking about that allows us to get this increased effect in the effort that we're putting forward.

And we decided to do this because of a quote found in the book Medical Ministry, and it's on page 304.

It says, There is no change in the messages that God has sent in the past.

The work in the cities is the essential work for this time." Now if something is essential, what does that mean?

So the work in the cities is the essential work for this time.

And she says, when the cities are worked as God would have them, the result will be the setting and operation of a mighty movement such as we have not yet witnessed.

So I want you to think about this quote with me for just a minute.

First of all, how many of you have heard that quote before?

Meaning that it wasn't happening then, it's going to happen some point in the future.

She says, when the cities are worked as God would have them to be, indicating that God has a plan.

It's not just going to work the cities any willy-nilly way or however we think it should be done.

God has a specific plan for how he wants the cities worked.

She says that when that happens, future tense, it will be the setting and operation of a mighty movement such as we have not yet witnessed.

Now this was Ellen White who lived through the great Advent awakening, the establishment of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

She says that when we work the cities the way God would have us to do it, it will be the setting and operation of a mighty movement, such as we have not yet witnessed.

Friends, that's the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

So the work in the cities is critically tied.

And I'm gonna show you that in a little bit.

The work in the cities is critically tied to this movement in our church now for revival and reformation because it is part and parcel to the mighty movement that's coming for our church.

She says, God calls for self-sacrificing men converted to the truth to let their light shine forth in clear and distinct rays.

So we know very clearly the pieces of the city work, and I've already laid those out for you.

Bible work, canvassing, medical missionary work, and public evangelism.

Now in our church, we've got a pretty good idea, a pretty good handle on making Bible work work effectively.

We can do that and have some success, and we can do public meetings independent of anything else, and we can have a little bit of success, and we can we can sell books all day long and have some stories to tell, but the piece that's really missing in our church, and it's what our church is trying to wrap its mind around, all of us that are working in the cities, we're trying to get our minds around what is the medical missionary work look like.

Jeff McAuliffe, who was the catalyst for this program to begin in the Pennsylvania Conference, was speaking at AMEN last year in 1 of the main sessions, and he was actually interrupted with this question.

In a main session, someone spoke up in the middle of his talk and said, what does medical missionary work look like in the 21st century?

The challenge is is that what we've done in our church is, and I use the example of the compilations, right, If you're kind of predisposed to medical missionary work, you're gonna grab a book like medical ministry maybe, and you're gonna say that it needs to be this very specific strict health work.

It's about the health message, it's about healing physical illness, and it should probably be done by doctors or you should at least be a pretty good self-taught natural path.

And a Bible worker or a public evangelist is going to grab evangelism and they're going to tell you that it needs to be evangelism and a call porter is going to grab call porter ministry and they're going to tell you that it needs to be canvassing work that needs to get it done.

The problem with that view is that exactly what I was talking about, we've segregated all of the pieces into their own little compartments and each group has this idea and they think that if you would just do it our way we'd have these great results, but the fact is is that when God gave us the messages, told us how to do it, it wasn't in call porter ministry and medical ministry and evangelism.

It was in a comprehensive message to his church and we've harvested that out trying to get a clearer picture and that's a good thing to line up all the counsel on something but we've detached it from its context and how it interrelates to 1 another.

And so we're having this problem with medical missionary work specifically because if it is just this physical healing work then that's really difficult to do in the modern context because there's legal ramifications if someone's running around trying to diagnose illnesses at the door or wrap somebody in a hot sheet and cooking them.

You know, there's, you know, And this is, you know, there's a few medical professionals in here.

We should know how to do some simple remedies.

You know, I'm leaning more and more as I study this to think that what she's talking about is the 8 laws of health, simple suggestions to help people.

It's never was intended for us to be able to go in and try to diagnose significant illnesses.

Let me just tell you what can happen, because I did this to myself.

I got really into natural remedies, and I was trying to learn these things and trying to learn how to heal these illnesses.

I actually started having a significant problem with my gallbladder.

I had been told by my friends, you know, the first thing they want to do is take your gallbladder out because you don't really need that and it's a cheap surgery and they can get the money and they can go.

And so when they told me I had a problem with my gallbladder, I didn't believe them.

And I dealt with it for a while trying to do some different things and then they told me, listen, you're really inflamed, you need to take it out.

So what I decided to do was call my friend and find a gall bladder cleanse.

And I did this gall bladder cleanse and when they went in to do my surgery that was supposed to be a routine surgery, they found that I was on the verge of dying because my gallbladder was about to explode.

And only by the grace of God, they were able to do it with the scopes.

And the Lord provided me the best laparoscopic surgeon in the country to do my surgery.

But I literally almost killed myself trying to diagnose and treat an illness that I was not qualified to treat.

So we have to be careful with that and and and so it's important that we get a proper view of medical missionary work and that we can can follow the council when Ellen White says that every member should be able to do a medical missionary work, what does that look like?

And I want to suggest to you that it looks exactly today like it did to Ellen White when she wrote it.

The problem is not that medical missionary work is not translated to the 21st century.

The problem is is that us as modern Adventists have made it something that it was never supposed to be and we've made it almost unobtainable.

And I believe, I was talking with my friend today, I really believe and I'm about to show it to you, that medical missionary work is the glue that can bind our work together in a way that we have never seen before.

And it can truly...I can see it with clarity now how when we work the cities according to God's plan that it can be a mighty movement.

And we're starting to figure that out by the grace of God in simplicity.

We now have an approach that the Lord has given us and we're still tweaking it where we can go into the center city, to the poorest people, to the West End, to the wealthy people.

We can find out their needs, whether they're a poor person has needs, even wealthy people have needs, and we're all the time going, we can't find needs of wealthy people.

As we've started to use this new approach, we're finding more and more people that are willing to open up to us about the things that are going on in their life and we're able to offer them pastoral counseling and different things.

Along with this approach we're also able to get Bible studies out of people, people that are those people that are there looking for how to understand the Word of God and we've also figured out how to leave a book with people and in response to this approach.

Like I said there was this question and as I was reading along and and really wrestling with how do I clarify this because I knew it because I've seen all the quotes and I've studied it out and I said, it's something simple, right?

It's from a manuscript, but it's easiest to find in Call to Medical Evangelism and Health Education, page 22, 22.

And it's long, I'm gonna read you the whole thing, so bear with me.

Medical Missionary Work

Transcript

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