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Medical missions have been an ancillary service from the beginning of the missionary movement (Mission). Only in the 20th century did they come to be viewed as an independent task. This background is important as missionary societies relinquish medical missions in favor of the medical work of churches in the Third World. A new understanding of medical missions has become necessary. 1. Background In obedience to the command of Jesus to “cure the sick” (Matt. 10:8), early Christians cared for those who were ill. That ministry belonged in the first centuries (a.d. 100–400) to deacons an…

1. Protestant 1.1. Europe In Germany missionary training has an honored history (German Missions). A. H. Francke (1663–1727) founded the University of Halle in 1702 to train missionaries for India. In 1722 Count N. Zinzendorf (1700–1760) began an intentional community on his estate at Herrnhut of those who in the 1740s would go out as the first Moravian missionaries. The 19th century saw the flowering of mission studies in German universities. Karl Graul (1814–64), director of the Leipzig Mission, advocated a missionary professorship in each theological…

1. Early History Early requests for a worldwide missionary conference on the part of Protestant missionaries and mission leaders from English- and German-speaking areas (such as by W. Carey in 1810) met with no success. Only with the development of Protestant churches at the end of the 19th century did large-scale missionary conferences become possible at the turn of the 20th century. The development of these churches involved a rapid increase in the number of evangelical and fundamentalist mission…