This is both an indictment and a plea. It is made with the full knowledge that the medical work is not the only phase of our mission program that is understaffed. We realize that the staffs of many mission stations and schools are taxed to the breaking point. All are so busy endeavoring to compass the routine day-to-day round of activities—meetings, classes, study periods, correspondence, discussion and settlement of church problems, reports to governments and to our own organizations—that many have no time left for providing spiritual food to the church members and Bible class members, let alone taking an active part in field evangelism.
The seven hospitals in this division that employ doctors have a total of four full-time African evangelists. None have a European evangelist. One employs an African Bible instructor. The other two have no full-time spiritual workers, though both make use of part-time employees. Thus is seen how few full-time workers in spiritual ministry are employed in the hospitals of this division to care for their more than three hundred inpatients, to say nothing of the outpatients. In addition, two of our hospitals, which are not located in connection with a general mission station, have no chapel, though one of them has recently received $3,400 for the erection of a chapel. The employees and patients of these two institutions are, therefore, left without a convenient place of worship. One would naturally expect this situation to have an adverse effect on the spiritual life of the institution.
These are the figures concerning the evangelistic staffing of our medical missionary institutions in the Southern African Division. They are not presented as an excuse, for God accepts no excuses. They are presented as an indictment—a charge that we are not doing what we should, not planning as we should, for the prosecution of the work of the right arm of the message. Yes, we are busy, too busy, "here and there. '
Let us now make plans to use our God-given medical missionary program to its utmost. If any have the slightest qualms about whether such an investment and such plans might better be used on other phases of the mission program, let them consider this statement from the Spirit of prophecy:
"I wish to tell you that soon there will be no work done in ministerial lines but medical missionary work.
. . You will never be ministers after the gospel order till you show a decided interest in medical missionary work, the gospel of healing and blessing and strengthening."—Counsels on Health, p. 533.
Lest any should feel, that the work in Africa should be smaller in scope or lower in quality than elsewhere, the messenger of the Lord has written this:
"The same work must be accomplished in . . . Africa . . . as has been accomplished in the home field. . . We are to follow where God's providence opens the way ; and as we advance, we shall find that Heaven has moved before us, enlarging the field for labor far beyond the proportion of our means and ability to supply. , . . The purposes and ends to be attained by consecrated missionaries are very comprehensive. The field for missionary operation is not limited by caste or nationality. The field is the world, and the light of truth is to go to all the dark places of the earth in a much shorter time than many think possible."—Fundamentals of Christian Education, pp. 208, 209.
With this understanding of what is being done and of what should be done, let us proceed to a study of how to accomplish our task. The following suggestions are made by the medical workers, after prayerful consideration of the problems, and after discussion with a number of evangelical and educational workers, as a practical means of making our medical work into a real medical missionary program.
If soon there will be no work done along ministerial lines save medical missionary work, we certainly must train an army of medical missionaries to cover this subcontinent of the Southern African Division. We find it difficult to conceive of this army's being made up of European missionaries from the home bases, but we can picture an army of Africans trained in medical evangelism, who could set this field alight with the gospel. The only problems we must solve are where and how they should be trained, and how to instill into them a zeal for souls that will make them effective in their role of medical evangelists.
It would seem feasible that several medical evangelistic training centers would be required, because of differences in countries, customs, languages, diseases, educational standards, and governments. Each training center should be located at one of our hospitals, but with its entrance requirements, curriculum, and program closely integrated with that of one of our evangelists' training schools. Entrance requirements would need to be high enough to ensure that students entering the medical evangelists' course would have an adequate knowledge of English, or some other European language in which the course would be taught. This insistence upon a knowledge of a European language is based on the fact that textbooks and vocabulary are entirely inadequate in the African languages. An added advantage would be that all the wealth of our denominational literature, as well as scientific literature would be open to them.
The course itself, insofar as its scientific content is concerned, would be patterned after those for dressers, medical assistants, or orderlies, as these men are called in various places. In addition, considerable work in evangelism, Adventist health principles, and other denominational features would be emphasized. These would add one or two years to the length of a course containing only the scientific studies, since it is manifestly impossible to compress enough of them into a course of the same length, and still turn out real medical evangelists.
One of the most important features of any such medical evangelists' course would be its integration with the regular evangelistic program of the field in which the school is located. We envisage the active participation of these students in field evangelism. Their part would be that of assisting in the evangelistic work itself and giving Bible studies, in addition to the dispensary work and health-education features. It should also be planned for the training hospital to have a staff adequate enough to provide assistance in field evangelism. We are firmly convinced that at least one well-trained, full-time spiritual worker should be on the staff of every hospital in the division. The training centers would require more than one such worker if the proper instruction, supervision, and assistance are to be given the students in the field and in the institutional evangelistic program.
That brings us to the question of the staffing and equipping of the training hospitals themselves. It is out of the question, in our opinion, for a hospital with a European staff of one doctor and one nurse to handle such a program as this. The staff must be large enough to ensure regular classwork and practical instruction in the wards, plus the active participation of the staff in the field, as well as the institutional evangelism. Further, the hospital itself must be large enough to provide the students with a complete training in the diseases and problems of the area in which they will serve after graduation. This rules out, as training centers, hospitals of only thirty beds or so. We regret to say that very few, if any, of our hospitals are really equipped at present to put on this program of training. A hospital should approach a capacity of seventy-five to one hundred beds in order to give an adequate training, and be well enough equipped to care properly for the cases it receives. These statements are based upon the requirements of nursing and educational bodies of various countries.
Right here is an appropriate place to call to your attention the proposed School of Tropical and Preventive Medicine of the College of Medical Evangelists. This school will be a great help to all our tropical missions and workers. An article concerning it appeared in the February, 1947, issue of The Journal of the Alumni Association of C.M.E. It states :
"The faculty members of this school will be required to spend a portion of their time in tropical mission fields, and medical problems of the tropical mission stations will be their problems. More determined efforts will be made in interesting individuals in mission medicine because of the very nature of the school; it will be possible to expose the problems of mission medicine in a good co-ordinated exposure program. At the present time the greatest weakness of the College of Medical Evangelists is that there is no direct contact between the teaching staff of the medical school and our outlying medical institutions in the tropics. We do not have a mutual understanding of each other's problems. How can we expect the undergraduate to dedicate his life to mission medicine when the instructor has never seen the fields that he is attempting to interest others in? . . . The School of Tropical and Preventive Medicine will make accessible to the medical school funds which would not be available in any other way. Tropical medicine is of international importance and is not limited in its scope by either national or denominational boundaries. Foundation grants are available from various organizations throughout the tropical world. We should take advantage of them."
