Washington Sanitarium Medical Missionary Training Class

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 30, 1908

Washington Sanitarium Medical Missionary Training Class

NEARLY a year has passed since the Washington Sanitarium at Takoma Park was opened to receive patients. During the year the work has been greatly blessed. The Sanitarium has enjoyed a very good patronage for the first year.

God has given us a devoted class of young men and women who entered the Sanitarium training-school for the sole purpose of becoming more efficient in ministering to the needs of others, and thus better equipped for carrying the last message of mercy to the world. Those who are receiving training here stand ready to go wherever they may be sent.

While the course of training covers a period of three years, at any time during this period the General Conference Committee feels free to select and send out those who have given evidence of being capable and reliable home missionaries. A good home missionary is the only one that will make a good foreign missionary, for a foreign missionary is merely a home missionary in a foreign field. During the year two of our students were sent to China; for while they had not completed their course, they gave evidence of that faithfulness which will make their work a success in that field.

The medical missionary work is to be carried forward in the future with an earnestness that has not characterized it in the past,—not as something apart from the gospel ministry but in connection with it.

To the wise, intelligent, and well-trained medical missionary worker, doors will open, and access will be found to hearts. Many will be reached in this way who otherwise would never have had an opportunity to hear the gospel message.

The medical missionary training work, when properly conducted, will not take men from the ministry, but will place them in the field under the direction of our local and union conferences and the General Conference. There is but one commission given to the disciples of Christ, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,” “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” This must be the burden of every worker. But combined with this work of education, these workers will lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

We are informed that “from our sanitariums trained workers are to go forth into places where the truth has never been proclaimed, and do missionary work for the Master, claiming the promise, ‘Lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.’”

Sanitarium workers have the satisfaction of knowing that while they are