CC 300 CX  Medical Missions Cr. 3 Mr. Grundmann
TR 2:50 - 4:05 (Cross-listed with THEO 346-AX)
(Fulfills Upper Level Theology General Education requirement)
(Fulfills Cultural Diversity General Education requirement)

Medical missions, both secular and religious, are held in high esteem. They are looked at as something unquestionably benevolent and thus exert a notable fascination. They stimulate commitment to dedicated service in response to urgent health-care needs of mainly poor people at home or abroad. While such service is a demonstration of genuine humanitarian concern and solidarity to the common public to Christians medical missions is a kind of tangible witness for God’s loving and caring presence amidst all suffering. Christian medical missions’ personnel were among the first who realized that relief work is not the sole one purpose of medical missions. The community based care for the prevention of diseases in order to avoid health-disasters especially among the underprivileged like malnutrition, leprosy or AIDS has become part and parcel of any genuine Christian medical missions’ concern today.

This course will unravel the coming about of medical missions in 19th century, its subsequent global expansion and its modern development of the Primary Health-Care program (PHC), which finally got accepted as official health-care policy by the World Health Organization (WHO). The rationale of medical missions and the various concepts propagated for its support as well as the controversies it created among mission boards and churches concerned will be discussed in the second part of the course. Special emphasis will be given to the theological arguments implicit in any such dispute like the valuation or devaluation of the human body and its needs as God’s creation (and its subsequent repercussions on the belief in the incarnation).

As will be seen, the concept of medical missions provides a powerful critique of conventional perceptions not only of the Christian faith and the practice and theology by the church but of the practice of medicine in general as well. In a final section the problems entailed by any medical missions’ initiative (clash of cultures; danger of dependence; medical missions as subtle justification for other vested interests) will have to be looked into. This is done for the sake of attaining as sober minded as possible an understanding what medical mission and the healing ministry is all about.

Literature:

Note: Students can obtain the required literature at the support staff office at Huegli Hall 124/126.

1) Christoffer H. Grundmann (2005), Sent to Heal! – Emergence and development of Medical Missions, Lanham/Boulder/New York, University Press of America

2) Heralds of Health - The Saga of Christian Medical Initiatives. Foreword by Rt. Hon. The Lord Porrit, Stanley G. Browne, Frank T. Davey, and W. A. R. Thomson, eds. (London, Christian Medical Fellowship 1985)

3) McGilvray, James C., ed. (1979), The Quest for Health and Wholeness, German Institute for Medical Missions, Tübingen: 1982