Inner City/Domestic Missions: “To the ends of the earth... and Memphis”
Dr. Andrew Kim
Resurrection Health
Date: June 24, 2016
- Speaker: Dr. Andrew Kim
- Source: GMMA/KAMHC 2016
- Language: English
- Length: 22 Minutes 07 Seconds
Synopsis
For many, there is a big difference between inner city missions and international healthcare missions. Yet, they are really two sides of the same coin. The best inner city missionaries I’ve met have been those people preparing to go overseas. And, similarly, working in the inner city is one of the best training grounds for going overseas.
We are called to be missionaries- and we need to go through the same process and preparation whether we’re called to international healthcare missions or to the inner city. The unreached and unengaged groups throughout the world are such because they are in difficult places which are often hostile, lack resources and fraught with political instability. Many inner cities also suffer from these same problems making them equally difficult to reach. Both are places where injustice is the norm and the lack of a witness is destroying communities.
Biography:
Andrew Kim grew up in New York, and graduated from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire before returning to New York for medical school at SUNY Downstate. He then said goodbye to the East Coast (hopefully not forever) for the South, to be a part of a unique Christian family medicine residency program in Memphis, TN. He has stayed on as a faculty member with Resurrection Health with special interests in HIV/AIDS and obstetrics.
Our clinic is notable for providing community-based, Christ-centered primary care and hospital care. Most of our providers live in the underserved communities of the patients we serve and participate in house churches within those same communities. Over the last 10 years, these house churches have sent long-term medical missionaries to Central and South Asia and the Horn of Africa.
Dr. Kim and his wife, Esther, who is in her last year of the same residency, currently live in the Mitchell Heights neighborhood. They are in the process of planning for a similar clinic in another city in the near future.