Christian Worldview Concepts

Church Based Medicine

The Need for a Christian Model of Health Care

I have previously argued that it is essential for Christians to walk the moral tightrope and remain active within the medical mainstream. In this article, I want to extend my argument into a proposal for a model of health care that may offer Christian practitioners (and their Christian patients) a way to maintain biblical fidelity and meet the needs of people.

This is important for two reasons. First, without a workable model the views I've expressed are little more than philosophy. Second, the mass organization of society on a purely secular basis represents a powerful threat to the wellbeing of believers, which calls for an alternative. For the Christian community to have any hope of penetrating a culture of lost people with the Gospel, believers themselves must become adept at resisting the secularizing influences of society. This is particularly true in the field of medicine, where a naturalistic worldview dominates the thinking of most medical practitioners.

The failure to effectively resist this onslaught aggressively over the last fifty years has been one of the main factors in the overall weakening of the Church, resulting in the Church and its message being largely relegated to the intellectual and public policy fringe of society. We don't seem to understand that a marginalized church is a powerless church. If the church is seen as irrelevant to the problems people face on a daily basis, the church has lost its power to influence a culture.

Evidence of this powerlessness can be found in the fact that even many Christians have come to "medicalize" morality, applying medical solutions to what are essentially moral problems. Today, the church faces problems with out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortion, substance abuse and other moral issues that are more often than not treated as medical ones. People increasingly seek solutions for their problems outside of the local church. As medical researchers supply an increasing number of genetic explanations for human behaviors, explanations that challenge biblical teaching about human depravity and sin, the church faces an even greater challenge to its interpretations and its solutions.