Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.

AMEN Australia 2018: Healing, Surviving, Thriving

<p>Presentation given at the AMEN Australia 2018 annual conference held in Adelaide, Australia, www.amenaustralia.org.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Andrew Pennington

Sanctuary Clinic Mission Report

Let me tell you a little bit about Sanctuary Lifestyle Clinic.

This is the clinic that I set up 2 years ago.

So in 2010 or 11, I think, the first Amen conference.

It was in Melbourne and it was a wonderful conference And we had a pastor there, Pastor Dobson.

Does anyone remember Skip Dobson from here?

He presented on a number of topics, but 1 of them was on how the medical and the spiritual – sorry, the medical side and the pastoral side had kind of diverged in our church over time.

And 1 of the things that came out of that was a quote that he put up, which I've said, given to you guys before in previous concerts, and I'm going to put it up in a sec.

But he showed a quote that Ellen White had mentioned, that actually Australia was going to be a place where the pattern would be re-established.

And I'm going to show you because that was an inspiring point in my life.

Now, around that time, I was in discussions with the Managing Director of Sanitarium, Cathy MacDonald, and they had started a clinic in Pyrmont in Sydney.

And Sanitarium wanted to do a lifestyle medicine clinic and they didn't have any experience, I mean they've got plenty of experience obviously in corporate health foods, etc., but they didn't have any experience in running a health clinic.

And how many applicants from Adventist doctors did they receive?

Which is a very sad indictment, but that's the reality.

And so they decided, well, we'll do it anyway, and they got 3 non-adventist doctors to start their clinic.

Lovely people, nice doctors, but they didn't understand the Adventist health message.

It's okay, I mean you can still run a medical clinic without understanding the Adventist health message of course.

But if you're going to do a missional clinic, how likely do you think that you are going to be able to achieve the mission if you don't actually understand the mission?

And unfortunately in 2000 and I joined the clinic in 2000, about halfway in 2013.

They'd already been going for about 2 and a half years.

And we tried to do some things, change a few things here and there, but Piedmont was a very difficult community to work in.

The finances were difficult, And I won't go into all of the ins and outs because my intention in giving you this is not in any way to defame Sanitarium, not at all.

They had a very strong desire to do this, but it's more to talk about the learnings that's happened from it.

And they spent a lot of money on this clinic, and unfortunately it failed.

And so there were some learnings to come from that.

And 1 you can already appreciate is that you can't start a missional clinic without missional focused people.

Number 2, you need to do your due diligence financially as well, and you also need to be careful about your location and not go forward ahead of the Spirit of the Lord and I think that's probably what happened in this situation.

Anyway, so I was part of this clinic and when I found out that it was going to close, of course, that I'd been there for 2 and a half years.

I'd uprooted my life and my family from rural Victoria where we had a very good salary.

I was doing very well as a GP obstetrician.

I loved what I was doing but I felt the calling to move and I moved and I significantly reduced my salary and had massively increased expenses.

So it was a difficult time but it was a good time still.

Anyway, at this point when it closed, I had a choice, and that choice was to either join a new clinic or start my own.

And this kind of quote really, I think, summarizes what I passionately believe and feel we need to be doing.

And you can see here what Ellen White says.

We need to do more for our people in our cities.

We're not to erect large buildings in the cities, but over and over again.

This is not just 1 little bit of information she received, over and over again, she was told that we should establish small centres of influence.

Now, Again, I have no desire to be disparaging of what's gone in the past, but we have tended to erect very large buildings, have we not?

And we have tended to continue to build them bigger and bigger, And it has not served our church well.

What we need to do is small centres of influence.

There are many places that need the Gospel ministry work and there should be small plants established.

God designs our sanitarium shall be means of reaching high and low rich and poor they are to be conducted that by their work attention may be called to the message that God has sent into the world, a strong connection between the health and the gospel.

And this is the quote that I want to share with you that Pastor Dodson made.

And this is in reference to the educational work and the medical missionary work.

So it was both education and medical mission that this context, this quote was made.

It was not God's design that the work in this country should be so hard.

And she was in Australia when she made this comment.

It was his purpose that shall be a true pattern in Australia, a sample of how other fields shall be worked, and the work should be symmetrical and a living witness for the truth.

So this quote hit me pretty straight in the forehead and I thought, well, I can be a part of this or not.

And I thought, I need to be a part of this.

So that's what led me to start my own practice.

There were many hardships in starting it and many miracles.

I don't have time to go through them all with you, but about 24 hours before our opening day it looked likely that I may not have had a provider number.

Now that's not very helpful for those of you who understand medicine.

You kind of need to provide a number to be able to allow Medicare to give rebates to the patients.

But through some very gracious circumstances and a lot of prayer, 1 came through just in time.

And IT problems, printing problems, computer problems, you name it, there were problems but somehow the Lord came through and most importantly the Lord linked me with good people because you can't do this by yourself.

We're not designed to do it by ourselves.

A few patients who graciously waited for about 9 months from Pyrmont came to see me and I had a few patients early on, but then it petered off and I had very few patients.

It was quite small, it was just me by myself and a receptionist.

And then probably I hadn't really been doing the due diligence that I should have to the financial side of the practice.

And 1 day I looked at the figures a bit more closely about 11 months into the practice and I realized that the money was going to dry up pretty quick and that I was going to go bankrupt and I went oh okay that might be a problem.

So my wife was possibly more worried than I was, but bless her, she is a woman of action and she is a woman with a sound mind.

And she gave me some very good advice and she got very involved straight away and she has a business degree and she said, right, these are the things we're going to start to do.

And I can say to you this verse was a very pertinent verse, and I'm sure many of you have read it before.

I mean obviously the context I guess is Isaiah prophetically saying this but he says, I formed you.

So remember when God comes to you, the first thing he tells you, he reassures you of who you are in him.

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Sanctuary Clinic Mission Report

Transcript

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