Medical missions planners often struggle with how
to have long-term impact from short-term missions. While local capacity building in medical education and community development seem to lead to the best sustainable change, these efforts may take decades of commitment and often require a well- funded multidisciplinary team that engages across government and private sectors. This session will discuss opportunities and challenges associated with using curative short-term missions to open doors for more effective, long-term change.
Much time and money is put into international medical missions every year, yet many efforts appear to be coming up short. Team members voice complaints that trips seemed to be little more than a vacation; dangerous issues of dependency of the host develop, and little long-term change is evident. Effective planning and organizing short-term medical missions can reduce the likelihood of such negative outcomes. This session will discuss mechanisms to plan for, prioritize, and measure desired actions and outcomes.
While many doors for medical mission have closed over
the past generation, many new ones have opened. Also, medical mission is no longer a Western thing. A new breed of medical missionaries is passionate to use their medical expertise to reach unreached people groups. Join us to explore these developments and get to know doctors and nurses at the cutting edge of medical mission today.
The New Testament gives
not one but several models for doing missions. New Testament models of missions are far more flexible and less narrowly defined than the way we typically think of missions. The usual conception of a missionary as one who follows a “call” to go abroad is just one facet of missions. In this session we will explore the biblical patterns and trajectories of what it means to do missions—at home and abroad—and discover what the Bible has to say to us about being “missional” in the 21st Century.
