AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

David Haupt

Pastoral - Getting involved in blended ministry in your church

So is there no level that training doctors or allied medical staff can become involved at the local church level in any form of healing ministry?

I'm going to start, flip your cards so I can see.

You just facilitated that, but you were very much involved.

How did the church, and more importantly, how did the pastor link in with that and with you?

Yeah, so the pastor, in terms of their involvement in the program.

Yeah, so this was a Walsing church, which is in...

Because I want to agree with you that if we withdraw until we've got a qualification, we'll never really engage.

And because it becomes a lifestyle, a whole change of mindset that my life is not just, I am in actual fact a total Christian in every aspect of my life, every sphere, and wherever I can get that opportunity I want to be engaged.

It becomes more and more difficult, Joy, for the medical team, My wife is a nurse, for her to live her spirituality out in the workplace.

There is an old lady over 120 years ago that wrote to this church and said that 90% of diseases is where?

The greatest need that humanity have today is the need of human connection and empathy.

So you don't need qualification for that, to really connect and really show that empathy and that is 1 of the most basic things that people need today in society.

I'd also like to recommend that you make use of mission trips, opportunities to go on mission trips.

Don't go there as a doctor or as a student doctor, just go there as 1 of the people helping out, but mingling with people that can really give nothing back to you, but what you will discover is how much you have received once you come back.

Once you get yourself into that that spirit of missionality, you'll see how much enriched your life will be.

And a very important thing is number 3 and that is how would you like to, Sorry, who would you like to mentor you in this regard, in this relationship between doctor and mission connection?

Does all of you have a mentor in that regard?

Doctors that are already in the field or what discipline are you in?

So do each and every 1 of you have a spiritual mentor that is working in that field?

Someone that is passionate about mission, as well as your area that you're studying in?

And AIMEN is looking for students that they can mentor.

They're looking for students that are willing to be linked in with our current doctors or practitioners whom they can mentor and I would strongly recommend that you take this opportunity to network with the practitioners on the other side, find out who would be willing to mentor you.

Or put your hand up to these 2 doctors and say, guys, take our name, we are interested.

Don't leave this weekend without making that connection, Because it is that network of mentoring that really is going to inspire you.

Because once you've studied and you're out there in the field and you've not made that connection, you've lost the opportunity.

You're going to become so busy that the connection, the desire to want to live missionally in your practice might be gone.

I want us to look at question number 4 and really tier it out as a group.

What plans of action can we put in place to engage your local pastor, your church, your board in a Christ-centered, evangelistic, medical missionary work that responds clearly to identified needs in your community.

Do you guys have any health committees at church?

Sounds as though you've got work that needs to be done.

Looks as though that you need to put, help your pastor, help your church board to put some plans in place.

As a pastor, I'm going to share with you some of the struggles that we face.

As a church, we sprinkle the community with programs.

And most of the time, we sprinkle it with programs that we think the community needs.

While as a church, we are so disengaged from the community that we do not even know what the needs of the community are.

So in most cases, we are in actual fact not relevant to our community.

The 1 I would call the fortress kind of church.

It is the church that some of our more traditional churches look like this.

We keep everyone that's inside very safe, protecting them from the influences from the world out there.

And every now and then we lower the, what do you call that bridge in English?

We lower the drawbridge and a brave soul ventures out and grabs a person on the outside, pulls them in and very quickly we close up the drawbridge again.

And we sanctify them inside and we dry them out until they're cold and they've lost their vigor for God and then we say now they're safe to stay inside.

Church number 2 is the church that sprinkles the church with programs.

We can look at these churches in a different way.

I'm going to bake a banana loaf and I know that 1 of the ingredients must be salt.

So I put all the ingredients together and I dump the salt shaker with the salt securely preserved inside into the dough, into the pan and I put it into the oven, bake it, bring it out, and I cut it and take a bite of the first slice.

Did you get the salt shaker in the slice?

Unbroken, preserved, like a fortress church.

And that's how most churches today are to the community outside that is unchurched.

The second church bakes their banana loaf and once we've taken it out and it's gone cold we can throw it out of the pan and then we take the salt shaker with salt and we sprinkle it over and we take our first bite.

Especially if I put, you know, garlic salt over it.

The Bible Society invited a lady who is an ardent woman's libber.

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Pastoral - Getting involved in blended ministry in your church

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