The Doctor Who Puts Christian Missionaries to Shame

October 17, 2022

As I mentioned in my article How I Left My Church, I got pretty lucky; during the midst of my deconstruction, I graduated from college and took a job working only on the weekends, giving me an excuse to take some time away from church while I processed all the new information I was reading and learning.

Those weekend shifts were at a hospital, and I soon realized that one of the ER doctors who worked at that hospital put to shame even the most celebrated missionaries at my old church.

Here’s the story.

I’ll call him Dr. A. Dr. A was a kind, gentle, and soft-spoken man. He was straight forward in his work, did it well, was efficient, and the patients and staff alike loved him.

There were times when Dr. A wouldn’t pick up a shift for three or four months. He’d just be gone. Then, after many weeks, he’d reappear at the hospital again for a series of shifts in the ER. He’d stick around for a couple of months before vanishing again.

He didn’t talk about what he got up to when he was gone, but finally one day I asked him: “Where do you go when you don’t pick up shifts for a long time?”

He told me he was leading medical mission work.

This caught my attention. As I’ve written about before, around this time period I was taking the Perspectives class, which teaches a logical and efficient way to evangelize the entire world. I had also recently been on my very first (and only) mission trip with a team from my church.

Dr. A was quick to mention that his medical mission work had nothing to do with religion. Rather, he was bringing medical care to places and people who didn’t have access to it. That didn’t bother me. By that point, I’d begun deconstructing evangelical mission trips (particularly short-term ones) and had been considering whether meeting a need in a location in return for preaching to people was truly the best way to treat them.

I thought it was great that Dr. A was doing non-religious medical missions. At the time, I was just starting to open up to the idea that it was, in fact, possible to bring good to an underserved region of the world without trying to make them switch to your religion.

“That’s cool. Where did you go?”

He floored me with his response.

“Syria.”

Back then, the Syrian Civil War had just broken out. I’m not sure if you remember, but it was on the news literally all the time. They were talking about the three-way war between the Syrian government, Syrian rebels, and the terrorist organization ISIS. Between those three—and international intervention—the entire country had been devastated.

And Dr. A rushed in while everyone else was trying to get out. I pulled up a chair in the office and raptly listened as he told me his story. Here’s the short version:

At the time, it was illegal to fly to Syria—as it usually becomes illegal to fly to war zones—so he and his team flew into Turkey instead. There, they performed a very sketchy and dangerous border crossing into the country and set up shop in a town not far from there.

That particular town was, at the time, controlled by Syrian rebels. When Dr. A and his team approached, they were quickly stopped and questioned, to which Dr. A told them the truth: they were doctors and they were only there to provide medical care to injured civilians since many of the hospitals had been destroyed. The rebels reluctantly allowed them to do what they had come to do. They began treating sick and injured civilians.

Some time went by and a battle broke out for the town, at which point the Syrian government forcibly took the town back from the rebels. These new occupiers once again shoved guns in Dr. A’s face and asked him what he was doing there. He gave the same response. Again, these new government soldiers let him continue.

Some more time went by and the government soldiers were driven away by attacks from ISIS. Literal terrorist extremists took over the town and, for a third time, approached Dr. A and demanded to know who he was and what he was doing. For a third time, he told the truth. Surprisingly, these terrorists allowed Dr. A to continue his work. It seemed all three of these warring factions—at least the individuals who’d taken over that particular town—understood that injured and dead civilians weren’t their objective, so they didn’t mind if a politically-unaffiliated doctor was treating them.

Dr. A remained in Syria for a couple months before returning to the US, where he resumed working at our small hospital.

I was completely enraptured by his story. And I couldn’t help but think how the missionaries at my church just couldn’t even compare to what he was doing, what with their safe little mission trips to Italy or wherever.

After a couple weeks, Dr. A told me he was leaving again.

“Back to Syria?” I asked.

“Canada.”

That was a big difference.

He explained to me that he was going to live in a small, remote town in Canada for several weeks—where they only spoke French—so that he’d be forced to rapidly learn the language by way of complete and total immersion.

“That’s interesting,” I said. I’d read that immersion was the best and fastest way to learn a new language. When 100% immersed, one could become near-fluent in a matter of months. “But why?”

Dr. A told me that he and his team were heading to the Central African Republic, and in order to be effective there, he’d need to speak French with the locals. Back then, the Central African Republic was (and still is, unfortunately) embroiled in a dangerous and bloody civil war.

Once again, I couldn’t help but think of how Dr. A was putting my church’s missionaries to shame. In pretty much all international locations my church sent missionaries to, they relied upon interpreters. At that time, I’d come to the opinion that if one wanted to be truly effective among the population of a faraway locale, they needed to learn the language. And here was Dr. A, who’d obviously come to the same conclusion, and was doing whatever it took to quickly learn the language (in this case, one of the languages) of his target destination.

And that’s what he did.

I eventually left that job and went to work in a hospital overseas. I wrote about my experience in the article Travel Will Help You Deconvert.

Just a few weeks ago I looked up Dr A. It’s been ten years since I last saw him and I was wondering what he was up to. I shouldn’t have been surprised by what I found: he was in Somalia, treating the people there and training up locals to give medical care.

After working with and getting to know Dr. A, I never again met a single Christian missionary who had bigger balls than him. And I don’t think I ever will.