With the Conference for World Mission (CFWM)

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Written October 2023

 
1980 took us to London where I became medical adviser at The Salvation Army's international headquarters for the next ten years. One of my tasks was to represent the Army on the medical committee of CFWM, a division of the British Council of Churches. Here I met people like John Townsend, who spoke for Tear Fund but also with a background in Thailand - we remain good friends 40 years later. Stanley Browne chaired the meetings. He came with the dual role of Baptist Missionary Society and The Leprosy Mission. John Wilkinson, who had conducted the review of church medical work in Zambia was now medical officer of health in Edinburgh and represented the Church of Scotland. I'd known Jim Wilkie as a United Church of Zambia minister in earlier years; he was the secretary. I was with like-minded colleagues. 
 
We listened to visitors from around the world. For example Stuart Kingma came from the Christian Medical Commission in Geneva. Daleep Mukarji, once with TLM at Dichpalli, but then with the Christian Medical Association of India was another.  Our view of global health was being broadened as we met. 
 
We shared experiences of visits to health services in our respective constituencies, of trends we saw emerging, of the challenges those services were facing. We recognised that we had a role that should be supportive. How best to provide that, was the challenge. The committee arranged a day for addressing the issue. I agreed to present a case study. I thought I was giving a good example of how to do it! Listening to colleagues gently offering comments was a sobering experience. I needed to submit myself to their collective wisdom. 
 
Another major project for the committee was to publish a history of medical missions: Heralds of Health. I learned so much from the exercise. For instance: the role of Catholic orders in earlier years; that leprosy in  their own country became a focus for 16th century British churches; that the more recent surge of medical mission in the two-thirds world had the dual purpose of caring for expatriate mission staff and seemingly of secondary importance, the local community. 
 
Stanley Browne became the overall editor. To my great surprise he asked me to review the draft. It was not easy, but we got together for a few conversations as I offered my comments. On reflection these decades later I see this as yet another example of someone practising the discipline of 'submission one to another out of reverence for Christ'. 
 
Thank you, Lord, for friends and colleagues like these. 
 
October 2023