HIV/AIDS

Be missional!

How do you keep up with the demands of ministry while balancing the needs of family, not to mention your own needs?
How do you keep doing more with less?
How do you protect yourself from burnout while advocating for the least of these?
How do you establish boundaries without neglecting the needs of your community?

These are some of the questions Dr. Thomas hopes to explore as he shares lessons from the field. He serves as the Medical Director at Dayspring Family Health Center and co-pastors a local church, answering a call to serve vulnerable and marginalized communities. He is married and has three teenage children. Serving his family and discipling his children are some of his top priorities. Despite the busyness and numerous challenges of ministry and family life, he continues to learn the importance of balance, boundaries, and rest.

If you are experiencing burnout or having a difficult time keeping “afloat”, this session may give you some insights on how to maneuver through the ups and downs of missional living.

The harvest in plentiful in middle east missions. More than 90 million adolescents and youth live in the Middle East today. Adolescents are a key population group representing a triple return of investment, yet they are uniquely neglected in the regional challenges they face. Today, adolescents in the Middle East confront significant health, development, education, employment and socio-economic challenges especially related to the protracted crisis. Region-specific factors greatly influence their health, development, choices, and provision of public health and clinical services.
Over the past two decades, adolescent health issues increasingly made their way to national agendas in many regions of the world, yet it’s only a drop in a bucket. Adolescents are the population that benefited least from the epidemiologic transition. Why does the Middle East lag behind? What are United Nations Health Organizations doing to improve the health of a billion adolescents who live in the world and in particular in the Middle East? Why are we failing adolescents? Why do countries in the region have to care for adolescents, their potential backbone for a vibrant future? How can governments and leading medical institutions ensure gender sensitive comprehensive health and development agenda for adolescents living in the Middle East?
What can a GMHC participant do to help?

Every person has a worldview, a deep sense of what is real and how the world works. What we believe and value and what we do and say are shaped by our worldviews.

All cross-cultural ministry brings us into different worldviews in missions.

Our approaches to healthcare ministries whether in our home country or another are liberated and limited by (1) our own worldviews (2) our awareness of our worldviews and how they are formed and transformed and (3) our capacity to recognize and work with the worldviews of the people to whom God sends us.
By the end of this session, we will have grown in all 3 of those areas. We will leave with resources for continuing growth.
This participatory session will include learning from person reflection, discussion of Biblical stories, and the wisdom of other participants.

The Ten Questions Everyone Asks About Career Missions: How do I pick a mission agency? How do I know I'm "called?" What about raising children overseas? How can I avoid burnout? These and other questions are answered in this popular talk illustrated with real and sometimes humorous real life stories.