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Reaching Farther Through Healthcare Ministries

By Becky Davey, Director, International Healthcare Ministries

For a long time, ABWE has used healthcare ministry as a tool to take the gospel to people around the world. Now, ABWE has created a new department, International Healthcare Ministries, to provide vision, oversight, and support specifically to healthcare ministries that further evangelism. This department will wrestle with concerns plaguing these ministries, such as the enormous expense of hospitals and the time demands put on missionaries who also have other ministry responsibilities. International Healthcare Ministries will oversee the personal healthcare of missionaries, ABWE healthcare work around the world, and an integrated recruitment program to challenge churches and individuals to become involved in both career and short-term work. With these three components all working together, we can reach more of our world with the gospel.

Why Healthcare Ministries?

During His ministry on this earth, Jesus touched the sick and showed His power and love by caring for those who were ill, blind, and lame. More than two thousand years later, the world is still full of suffering people. Healthcare creates exciting possibilities and opens many doors to reach these people. It provides a platform for evangelism and discipleship, and aids in establishing local churches, church planting movements, and local missions movements. There are multiple kinds of healthcare ministries, each tailored to specific community needs.

Hospice Care

People all over the world are terminally ill from a wide variety of causes: AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer, hepatitis, heart-related problems, and other diseases. In countries where doctors can no longer offer hope for a cure or significant improvement, the dying are left for the family to care for or neglect—whatever the cultural custom is. The local church has a unique opportunity to show God’s love through hospice care. Missionaries train volunteers in grief counseling, conflict resolution, and minimal healthcare, such as how to give a bed bath and perform a dressing change. Volunteers from the congregation donate as little as one afternoon or morning a week to visit homes as an expression of Christ’s love. The local church trains the national volunteers to evangelize and disciple as opportunities, which often extend to whole family groups, arise. It takes little to establish a ministry such as this: no special building is needed, and it does not challenge local medical care.

Community Health Education

In order for a community to be healthy, the people must practice good sanitation, health care, and be able to generate their own income. When a community health education team comes into a village to teach the people, excitement spreads to neighboring villages, opening doors to the gospel.

Community health education is a ministry that can be village-centered, church-centered, or individual-centered. However it begins, it is a wonderful way for the church to get involved in helping underdeveloped villages become self-sufficient. Missionaries train village people in preventive health care, good sanitation, and income-generating activities. A program like this would eventuate in local churches that are self-supporting and self-reproducing with a healthy, strong group of believers who spread the good news of new life in God. It has worked in every area of the developing world from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and South America. It has even worked in some poorer areas of the USA.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Health Clinics

Crisis Pregnancy Centers are an effective outreach in Peru, where the first ABWE pregnancy centers were started. Now several other fields are planning to start these centers as the Lord provides personnel and funds. Many babies have been rescued as women receive counseling and Biblical education about God’s view of human life. Mothers in despair and sometimes deeply shamed by their culture have found hope and salvation. As these women become believers and commit to learning how to raise their children according to God’s Word, they can be discipled further, finding more joy and purpose in Christ.

Itinerant clinics focused on curative medicine can be held in a closed area to open a door for evangelism or in association with an established church that needs help or encouragement. Fixed clinics can be held at regularly scheduled times in church facilities, perhaps daily, monthly, or quarterly depending on the availability of personnel and the desired impact. In areas with a high infant mortality rate, clinics devoted to children younger than five years old are effective for evangelism. And where HIV/AIDS is spreading, a clinic can not only provide physical treatments but spiritual instruction on how the dying can know for sure they will one day see Jesus in Heaven.

These are just a few of the many kinds of outreach possible through medical ministries. Many types of healthcare outreaches cost relatively little while still providing a venue for healthcare professionals to exercise their skills. It is God’s plan to reach the world with His good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, and there are many who have not heard this news. These types of ministries enable missionaries to extend their ministries and reach unbelievers right where they are. We must be committed to ministries of compassion in evangelism and church planting. By physically touching the lives of those in need, we gain opportunities to share how Christ provides spiritual healing. We aren’t finished reaching the world for Christ, but medical missions helps us reach farther. 


Shumima was a beautiful young lady who grew up in a tiny, rural village where she played happily. She dreamed, as all young girls do, of marrying and having children. One day she was traveling by bus with her dad to visit her aunt, when there was a terrible accident. She survived but lost a leg. Although her wounds healed, she soon fell into despair as she thought no one would ever marry a woman with only one leg.

Then her big brother came home with a flyer about a church that was running a camp where artificial legs were provided for free. The flyer included stories of people who had received this help. One story was about a woman who was such a good dancer that no one knew she danced with an artificial leg. Shumima was so excited when she heard these stories that she was determined to go to the camp, even though she was unfamiliar with what happens at church. “Why would anyone help me—a girl with only one leg,” she wondered, dreading that the stories she’d heard were just rumors. But she went to camp, and everything was as she had been told. She heard that the leaders ran the camp because they were so grateful to God for His love, that they wanted to help others. They even said that this God loved her, too.

Shumima and many others were fitted for legs the first day they went and worked hard to learn to walk with them. Their new feet even matched their own skin color: Shumima’s new leg was so close to her real skin color that when she was fully dressed, it was almost impossible to tell that one leg wasn’t real. Not only did Shumima receive a new leg, but she and her brother made new friends at camp who wanted to visit them in their own home and tell them more about the loving God that the missionaries serve.

Shumima was given a new start in life at the artificial limb camp. How many others sit in their dark corners, unable to move by themselves, not allowed an active place in their society because of their physical impairment? How long must they wait until a physiotherapist or prosthetist goes to fit them for new ambulatory aids, or someone provides them with a wheelchair? 

For more about artificial limb camps, see "Ministering to the Disabled."