A Seed

When reading this article of "The Other Sheep", I quickly found a parallel between this article and the book we read in class "Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel". The obvious parallel between the book and sections of the article was medical missions. If you are reading this you may be thinking, "Okay??....a lot of missions programs do medical missions." The reason why I brought that up was that I found a bit of a contrast in the views of how well medical missions worked in converting souls. In "Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel", the Sudan Inland Mission believed that doing medical work was sort of a last resort for witnessing to people. What I got from the book was that medical missions was not their first choice of witnessing to people, but they would rather straight out preach and evangelize. However, the view of medical missions in "The Other Sheep" article was different; it was a positive one. A writer of one of the missions updates wrote, "There is not greater opportunity for personal evangelistic effort than in the wards of a mission hospital" I think it is interesting to see the differing views on the efficacy of medical missions, even though both places were involved in medical work.
Since this is my blog post I thought I would throw some of my own opinion in here. I personally think that medical missions is a great way to show the love of Christ to people. If the hospital claims to be a missions based hospital, those who come for treatment will be interested to see how they will be treated. I feel really strongly about showing God's love through action, and not just in word. I think that attending to the needs of a persons body can open up doors to attend their spiritual needs as well. The nurses being trained (in both articles) were also taught how to attend to a person spiritually, which is a great way in which a nurse can attend to a persons physical and spiritual needs. Though the spiritual "fruit" of medical missions may not be able to be seen right away, I believe it is a seed that is planted in that persons heart which will blossom in God's timing.