If the ministers are listening in, I would like to say a word to them. Fellow laborers, you are the divinely commissioned shepherds of the flock, and you are responsible for its safety and its increase. Do you really believe that the medical work is the right arm, the door-opening arm, of the Advent message? Do you think consecrated doctors, dentists, nurses, dietitians, or technicians could bolster your congregation and help spread the influence of our work by their deeds of mercy and love in your territory?
Then what are you doing about it, brother minister? Do you communicate frequently with that young church member of yours, now away at medical school or college, telling him how much you miss him, and how you hope he will succeed? Do you urge him to return to you when his education is finished, assuring him he will be a strong helper in your evangelistic work ? Do you write newsy letters to him, inquiring about his spiritual welfare? True, his church membership has probably been transferred, but are you not still his friend? Such tokens of personal interest are of great weight in the mind of a homesick youth.
As for myself, I spent eight years after high school getting my education. And during those years not one word was ever heard from the home church organization. As far as I knew, the attitude was, "Ephraim is joined to idol; let him alone." I do not say this in an unforgiving spirit, but to emphasize a truth. If the pastors back there had followed me with assurances of interest, I might have settled there. So might at least three other native sons of that city who have become physicians. And to this day that city of 400,000 people, with perhaps three to five hundred Adventist church members, has never had an Adventist physician, at least a C.M.E. alumnus, established within its boundaries. Who is to carry on the medical work there?
Do you who are conference and union presidents keep in touch with your young men and women in professional schools? Do you visit them, write to them, perhaps even befriend them when they are in difficulty? Even though time consuming, these are surely excellent ways to "win friends and influence people?
Perhaps your conference has no young members in school, and therefore no one to come back when his education is done. Then what? May I make a suggestion? Is your conference populous? Does it have natural beauty? Does it have openings for medical work? Does it have need for medical help? Then take some good kodachrome pictures to illustrate and emphasize these facts. Get on the train and come to Loma Linda and Los Angeles, and give us an illustrated lecture on your territory, its advantages, its needs, its openings. Now comes the most important part ! Stay three days, and personally meet all the students you can. Enlist their co-operation and inspire them with your spirit of consecrated service. And then do it again every year. And fallow it up with a good letter every three months to all those who seemed interested. In a few years you will reap a fruitful harvest. Takes persistence and time? Yes, but what doesn't that is of value?
"But," someone objects, "why bother with Loma Linda? There are only freshmen and sophomore students there, and our efforts would be wasted." But that is the very time to secure their interest, before they make other plans! Why do we baptize twelve-year-olds? So they will be church members when they are twenty-one ! Similar work with professional students while they are young professionally will yield good rewards. This, of course, is not meant to discourage interviews with juniors; seniors, or interns.
Do you have in your conference a plan for helping young medical workers get established in practice? How much do our medical and other students know about your plan? Why not publicize it?
The Alumni Association of the College of Medical Evangelists is deeply interested in placing our alumni in mission fields, both abroad and at home. But a young physician, once his roots are established in a certain soil, finds it hard to uproot. He probably has a $15,000 investment where he is, or a large debt, and he cannot shift around easily.
Why did he not plant himself in a needy field to begin with? Perhaps he should have. If he had been previously invited to such a field by someone already familiar with it, he might have made his plans earlier. In order to get ministerial help, do not conference executives interview ministerial students? Then to the doctors, why not contact them when they are students?
Do we really want the message spread quickly? The world is in its dying miseries, and our haste or delay in the Lord's work determines how long the agony must last. We wish to utilize every useful agency to finish this work, and surely the medical work is such an agency. Then let us, both ministry and medical folk, draw closely together and finish our task.
I know full well how many brilliant ideas collapse under impartial scrutiny. My ten years' contact with medical students has led to the ideas here expressed. You may take them or leave them, but I believe their adoption would be bountifully rewarded.
