Laity to Do Medical Missionary Work

To lay members, as well as to physicians or gospel workers, is given the privilege of participating in Christian help work in their own homes and with neighbors and friends. This is the picture that is ever to stand before Seventh-day Adventists as the place of the health message committed to them. This calls for careful study, that every worker and every church member may be intelligent in regard to health principles in the care of the sick. It calls for loyalty, in personal life, in following those principles which are ordained of God for the physical and spiritual well-being.SHM 436.1

In the earlier days, when the instruction regarding healthful living came to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, there were but one or two physicians among them. That instruction was then cherished as a wonderful blessing by the many comprising the church membership. With the training of professional doctors, nurses, laboratory technicians, and dietitians, there is danger that the responsibility of heeding this instruction—and with it the blessings following obedience—will be regarded as not for the many, but for the comparatively few. And those who do become experts in the knowledge of health principles have constantly before them the temptation to become first professional and then commercial.SHM 436.2

There is another grave danger, that in striving to meet requirements and standards imposed by registering bodies, some may lose sight of, or regard lightly, the cherished heritage of instruction which called the medical missionary work into being, and which has sustained it through the years.SHM 436.3