Breakout 1, Friday, Feb. 24 7pm

We all want our healthcare organizations (practices, clinics, hospitals, etc.) to function at a high level. We all have at least a theoretical appreciation for what a healthy culture could look like. And, as believers we want to integrate our faith in consistent and meaningful ways. Yet, if we’re honest, most of us feel like we are mostly failing, most of the time.

Whether we are a physician, a nurse, a support team member, or an administrator, there are things we can do, ways we can think, words we can use, actions we can take, and behaviors we can model that will help move us in the directions that we want to go.

We’ll discuss some of the following:- What are our real desires and goals?- Why there’s no such thing as a “Christian Clinic”.- How do we build and keep a good team?- How can delegation help us focus on what’s most important?- What is culture, and how is culture set?- How can we integrate faith in natural ways?- How can we involve our team members in the solutions?- What can we learn from our brothers and sisters doing this around the world?

Jonathan Hallsted holds a blended combination of experience in pastoral work (5 years), missionary service (7 years), and private medical practice management (13 years). His wife Rebecca and he founded and now lead an organization called Healthbridge Global. Their mission is to connect the beauty of healthcare to the hope of the gospel. They partner with doctors around the world on medical projects that are intentionally gospel-centric and financially viable. He is currently working in Eastern Europe, North Africa, India, and the United States.

While on earth, 75% of Jesus’ recorded miracles were healthcare interventions. Healthcare is still one of the most strategic tools at our disposal to build bridges to closed nations, closed cultures, and closed hearts.

In Jonathan’s healthcare management experience, he developed a passion for, and a calling to, operational excellence combined with a high-touch, relationship-oriented management style. Admittedly, he learned this perspective via a series of mistakes, a misguided pursuit of perfection, and a revelatory understanding that he was called to “pastor” his team.

He resides in Northern California, just outside of Sacramento, and has four fantastic children - one of whom is a student here at CBU.

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Passionate for God?  Dynamic Christian leader?  Destined for missions?  Yet struggling with sin, addiction and lust... how do we find a way forward?  Come hear stories of real people who had these deep callings to follow God and yet wrestled with personal struggles and how they found a new freedom.

Dr. Mitchell Schoen has experienced deep healing and freedom from addiction, first hand. Now, however, he has the joy of seeing God give that freedom to others. He serves as an addiction medicine consult physician and has been part of support groups as well. Together with his wife, he has a passion for equipping people to love their neighbors. They hold interested in international health and exploring it now! Dr. Robin Schoen and Dr. Mitchell Schoen live in San Bernadino.

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763-218-4490

Chrisitan maturity and fruitfulness cannot happen without the refining presence of hardship, suffering, and divine discipline. Any disciple who longs to advance Jesus' Kingdom must prepare for periods of suffering as a prerequisite for meaningful ministry. It's not fun, but the end result is a "harvest of righteousness" (Hebrews 12:11).

Rick Donlon grew up in New Orleans and graduated from Texas Christian University in 1986. He completed medical school at LSU-N.O., and a combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency at the University of Tennessee, Memphis. In 1995 he and three medical school classmates opened a primary-care health center in Memphis’ most medically underserved neighborhood. The work eventually grew to include eight health centers, three dental clinics, and a family medicine residency program—providing over 170,000 patient visits annually.

Beginning in 2003, many of the medical and dental providers, including Dr. Donlon, moved into the underserved communities where they work. In those same low-income settings, they’ve planted over a dozen house churches. That house church network has subsequently sent dozens of long-term medical missionaries to North Africa, Central and South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa.

In September of 2020, Dr. Donlon became the Memphis Area Director for the Christian Medical and Dental Associations (while continuing to practice medicine half time).

Physicians, dentists, and other healthcare workers who’ve trained with Dr. Donlon in Memphis have started or joined similar ministries in low-income communities across the US. Dr. Donlon, his wife Laurie, and their seven children live in the Binghampton neighborhood where he serves as an elder in the house church network.

Our current healthcare culture is deeply rooted in a mindset of performance that believes that excellence is produced by exemplary knowledge, diligence, decision-making, and skill execution. Unfortunately, this can produce a punitive and stressful culture where clinicians are made to bear the massive responsibility of health outcomes by almost constant analysis of their performance.

Throughout our careers, our performance is constantly being reviewed and criticized, enforcing this belief that our value is inextricably linked to what we do.

The gospel Jesus preached, however, is that our value is linked to our identity as sons and daughters of God. Who we are (unique, powerfully creative beings mirroring a Creator Father), who we are created to be (the special gifts we have to use), and who we belong to (to Christ versus to other counterfeit masters), are much more important factors influencing our value and the worth of our work. How can we, as believers of these truths, allow them to permeate and restore our thinking so fully that we begin to truly be the salt of the earth to our healthcare culture? What if our own thinking about our medical work was more influenced by our connection to the Holy Spirit and to those He brings us to love, than by the standard performance measures?

Join this discussion to discover that the way to excellence in God's Kingdom is connection and that everyday clinical work could feel radically different for a clinician who values connection and identity affirmation above performance.

Dr. Jennifer Kang is an Obstetrician-Gynecologist actively practicing in Redding, California, where she resides with her husband and four children. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience and M.D. at the University of Rochester, and then completed residency training in Ob/Gyn at Brown University/Women & Infants Hospital. She then served in the US southwest Indian Health Service, where she began to discover the reality of her dual-realm authority, synergizing her medical and scientific training with Jesus-centric lifestyle and values in a way that more comprehensively meets the needs of individual patients, systems, and communities.

In 2013, she moved her family to Redding, California and founded Selah Women’s Health, a private medical practice where partnership with the Holy Spirit is regarded as central to healing and the practice of medicine. She also founded a non-profit, Selah Health International, that has a mission to elevate the health and value of vulnerable individuals, communities, and healthcare provisioners. As part of this, she leads Restore Healthcare Project, which seeks to inspire, recruit, and connect healthcare innovators who believe that healthcare can be a living manifestation of the gospel and power of Jesus Christ.

Despite the recognition that successful mentoring experiences are usually the result of committed relationships between mentor and mentee, there are still challenges in achieving consistent, positive outcomes for mission driven Christ-followers in healthcare. Healthcare missionaries, whether domestic or foreign, face unexpected challenges, failures, and disappointments, both on and off the field of service, across a broad spectrum of life, work, and ministry. This talk will focus on the essential commitments of both mentor and mentee during the early career of cross-cultural workers who serve in diverse living and working environments.

1. Understanding of the vital role played by mentoring for healthcare professionals in the setting of cross-cultural ministry

2. Describe the key ingredients of a fulfilling and successful healthcare mentoring experience

3. Consider the basic commitments required from both mentor and mentee in order for both parties to consider the experience worthwhile

During his fourth year of medical school, he volunteered for two months at Tenwek Hospital in Kenya where he met CEO Dr. Ernie Steury and Medical Director Dr. David Stevens. During his third year of surgical residency, God brought Mike’s high school sweetheart Pam back into his life, and they married in August 1991. A few months later, they traveled to Kenya and Tenwek Hospital in 1992 for two months where both enjoyed getting to know the Tenwek community while Mike was immersed in surgical care in a busy surgery referral center in rural Africa.

Mike completed a general surgery residency at Methodist Hospital in 1993 and then joined Southwestern Medical Clinic, a group in Southwest Michigan dedicated to global healthcare missions. Former CMDA and ICMDA president Dr. Bob Schindler and his wife Marian mentored Mike and Pam until their departure for Tenwek in 1996. Mike was board certified in general surgery in 1995 while working with Southwestern.

Mike was drawn to the orthopedic surgery service as Tenwek had no long-term bone surgeon. He was also named Medical Director in mid-1997. Tenwek grew remarkably during Mike’s tenure as surgeon and medical director to a clinical staff of over 80 physicians and clinical officers and more than 700 total staff. Training programs for interns, family medicine, general surgery and orthopedics were also developed and launched during those years.

Mike and Pam left for Kenya in August 1996 with two small children and added two more while at Tenwek Hospital: Steven, Melody, Kayla and Ashley.

In 2015, Dr. David Stevens invited Mike to consider returning to the U.S. to assume the role of CMDA Executive Vice President. After seven months of prayer and seeking counsel from mission leaders, mentors and close friends, Pam and Mike decided to leave their Kenya home and mission life of 20 years and moved to Bristol, Tennessee in July 2016. Mike has counted it an amazing privilege to serve alongside David Stevens and Gene Rudd and all the national CMDA staff for nearly four years. In September 2018, after an eight-month CEO search process, the Board of Trustees asked Mike to become the next CEO of CMDA and he began September 1, 2019, when Dr. Stevens stepped down. Mike’s life verses are from 2 Timothy 1:6-7: “For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you…for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (ESV). To God be the glory, great things He has done!

Email Mike

As a healthcare provider, you have a wealth of knowledge in practical ways to diagnose and provide care for illness. This knowledge and experience can be utilized to advance the kingdom in developing countries. This workshop will look at ways to partner with local mission partners to open doors and minister to national healthcare providers through medical education programs.

“The earth is the Lord’s...and those who dwell in it” (Psalm 24:1, AMP). God has one great mission, and it is global. From God’s perspective, it is all domestic. America is a growing mission field that is a significant and strategic part of God’s global mission to fill the earth with His glory through the knowledge of His son. This session discusses ways medical Christians are living out the gospel through healthcare in areas of strategic need here in the United States, and how many of those efforts tie in to advancing Christ’s kingdom globally.

Steve has been the Executive Director of Christian Community Health Fellowship (CCHF) since 2007. He has been involved inchurch planting and Christian leadership development in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Southern and Central Africa, India and Central America. In 1993, he founded City Builders Youth Organization, a youth-based Christian community development organization in urban Memphis, Tennessee. “There is no great field of need or opportunity than among the underserved. Christian healthcare to the poor is a major key in helping the church to break out of its bubble and reconnect the world with the message of Christ and His kingdom.” In addition to his work with CCHF, Steve and his wife Victoria continue to work with urban youth in a under-resourced area of Memphis. They have two grown daughters and a foster son, all of whom love Jesus and are committed to serving Christ by serving others.