The undersigned dissent from the decisions of the Committee on Foreign Missions to appoint medical specialists as members of the staff of the Eritrean Mission and from its decision to establish a hospital as part of that Mission. Our dissent is necessitated by the following convictions:
1. There is no scriptural warrant for the church as church to establish or otherwise identify with its name institutions devoted to the practice of medicine or of any other profession which belongs in the sphere of the cultural mandate that God has given to men as men.
2. There is na scriptural warrant for the church as church to make official appointments of individuals to a ministry of mercy which is directed exclusively or even primarily to those outside the household of faith.
3. In so far as the church may properly support medical work in the exercise of its ministry of mercy the sponsorship of such undertakings would not be the province of the church’s Committee on Foreign Missions but, of its Committee on General Benevolence.
Read more»Paul Wooley and Meredith G. Kline | Minority Report Committee On Foreign Missions
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Darryl Hart
D. G. Hart teaches history at Hillsdale College. He is has written biographies of J. Gresham Machen, John Williamson Nevin, H. L. Mencken, and Benjamin Franklin. He is an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and lives in Michigan with his wife, Ann.
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Another excerpt: “However, since there is no biblical evidence of deacons or any others practicing ordinary medicine as an official ecclesiastical function, what the modem church has actually done is to invent the new office of the ecclesiastical medic.”
I’m on the side of the minority report, but I find it interesting that Gal 6:10 is not referenced at all by either side, as I continue to hear it referenced as biblical justification for the church as church (institution) to do anything good to outsiders as proper to its mission.