EUD Health Emphasis Day held on May 16.
May 16, 2020 was a Health Emphasis Day of the Inter-European Region of Seventh-day Adventists (EUD).
“I would like to invite us to look back, for a moment, to the beginning of the Christian church” said Valérie Dufour, EUD health ministry director.
She recommends the book Medicine & Health Care in Early Christianity, in which the author, Gary Ferngren, underlines that before the advent of Christianity there was no concept of responsibility of public officials to prevent disease or to treat those who suffered from it. On the contrary--and in spite of persecutions--“early Christianity was characterized by a strong emphasis on philanthropy that urged both individual and corporate care of those in need,” Ferngren points out in his book.
Ferngren also asserts, “Christianity rooted its attitude to philanthropy in theology. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan furnished the pattern for the Christians’ care of the sick; every stranger in need was a neighbor who bore the image of God and to whom the love of God ought to be demonstrated.”
Thus, in the first three centuries, wherever a church was founded it became a focal point for the care of the sick. And during the pestilences and epidemics of those centuries, the only care of the sick was provided by Christian churches.
Eric Robertson Dodds, an Irish historian, suggested that “it was the Christian’s success in creating a community that cares both for its own and for others that was a major cause, perhaps the strongest single cause, of the spread of Christianity.”
“Creating a community that cares is also our calling today as Seventh-day Adventists in the 21st century,” affirmed Dufour, “especially in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the need for physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing in Europe has so tremendously increased.”
This calling is to each one of us: The call to be A Healing Agent. To this end, Dufour prepared, in collaboration with union health ministries leaders, medical professionals, and Hope Channel, various audio-visual materials.
This article was originally published on the Inter-European Division’s news site