Mary Visits the Cure International Hospital in Uganda

Yesterday we spoke on the phone with Mary about her visit to the children's hospital in Mbale, about an hour's drive from where she is staying this summer near Jinja. (She and another med student from Rochester are doing a malaria study near Jinja with an organization called Soft Power Health.)

The Mbale hospital is run by Cure International. According to the website:

The CURE Children's Hospital of Uganda (CCHU) in Mbale Uganda, is a 30 bed teaching hospital that specializes in treating the neurosurgical needs of children with an emphasis on hydrocephalus, neural tube defects, spina bifida, epilepsy and brain tumors. CCHU also maintains a large outpatient clinic and operates monthly mobile clinics in remote regions. CCHU was opened in 2000 and serves children with physical disabilities regardless of their ethnic background, religious affiliation or ability to pay.

CCHU serves approximately 7,000 children each year with a wide range of medical services. Approximately 900 surgeries are performed each year. The hospital has 30 in-patient beds and 10 intensive care beds and maintains a busy out-patient clinic. The hospital operates mobile medical clinics that find hundreds of children who are suffering from disabilities in remote areas and whenever possible, transports the children back to the hospital for care.
I'm looking forward to a write-up from Mary on her visit, but she doesn't have ready access to the Internet to do so on her blog. So for now I will do my best to pass on what she told us.

She knew about Cure International because the organization has a hospital in Kjabe, next to the AIM hospital. She visited those hospitals during her two years teaching at RVA, taking students there each week to visit the patients. When she arrived in Uganda in June, she asked Sarah, one of her missionary friends who lives in Kampala, whether Cure has a hospital in Uganda, and Sarah told her about the one in Mbale. Mary emailed the director to ask whether she and her friend from med school might be able to visit. She added that she had been diagnosed with hydrocephalus as a child and has a Ventriculoperitoneal shunt ("VP shunt").

The director responded immediately, issued an invitation, and asked Mary if she would talk to the mothers of the little patients there about her diagnosis and treatment, because he knew it would be a great encouragement. (This is the same reaction Dr. Bransford and his staff had at the AIM Kjabi hospital, when they learned that Mary is a VP shunt veteran.) So yesterday, Mary and her friend made the trip to Mbale.

She said that the hospital is a fine facility, unusually squared-away, with up to date equipment, clean and well-staffed. Mary said that CURE is definitely a worthy place for contributions.

She met one of the neurosurgeons who was just getting ready for surgery, and he invited her and her friend to scrub and watch. (Later, one of the staff said that this surgeon never allowed visiting med students to watch, so he was apparently pretty impressed with Mary.) He warned her that she might find the surgery a little uncomfortable to view, but Mary said she would have no problem with it, and she didn't.

The surgery involved a two-month old hydrocephalic baby, which the doctor said was old for the VP shunt procedure. The operating room was well equipped, even to the CT scanning apparatus that guided the surgery. (Mary said that ours is a great country, that its people would supply a machine like that to a hospital in a little town in Uganda.) Before the surgery commenced, the surgeon and the other operating team members prayed together. (We might pray for that baby too, even now.)

After the surgery, Mary, through a translator, spoke to a group of mothers that the hospital staff had gathered for her, and the staff made a video of her talk to show other mothers later.

(The photo is of Ian.)

Jonathan Edwards, Corporate Prayer

Foster, in his discussion of corporate prayer to which I refer in the previous post, cites, in addition to direct scripture references, a "slender book with a bulky title" by Jonathan Edwards. The title is, indeed, bulky: An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People, in Extraordinary Prayer.

Could I find a copy of that "slender book" on the interent? Of course!

Corporate Prayer

I mentioned earlier the Caldwells and their prayer program at Windsor Village UM Church in Houston. It has set me thinking about prayer in a way I haven't thought about in years. The Caldwells showed a series of photos during their presentation at the PGF meeting of about 500 of their members parading down the grassy median of a 4 lane highway through the heart of some acreage the church was acquiring to build a gigantic new church building, establish certain commercial centers, including a bank, and develop a tract of housing. The members lined up, left shoulder to left shoulder, right shoulder to right, so that the line had people facing both sides of the street in alternating fashion, as the subject property is on both sides of the street. Then the people prayed about the vision that they had for the real estate, prayed according to a script that had been written by the church leadership.

It all seemed a little regimented to me, maybe manipulated by the church leadership, but that's what they did, and apparently that is standard fare for this struggling little church of now 17,000.

I came home and looked at the books I have, now plainly visible on this great wall of books that Macon constructed for me while he was here (more on that in a future post), and among them was Richard J. Foster's Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home that was published in 1992, which was when I bought it at Montreat. The index had an entry on "corporate prayer", and here is part of what Foster writes there:

[A Korean pastor] brought me a newspaper article (complete with his excellent translation, for it was written in Korean) that describes the story of the Myong-Song Presbyterian Church, located in the southeastern part of Seoul. The Korean churches are well known for their early morning prayer meetings, but even so this story is unusual. This is a group that began about ten years ago with forty people, and today twelve thousand gather each morning for three prayer meetings - at 4:00 A.M., 5:00 A.M., and 6:00 A.M. Jung-Oh [the Korean pastor] explained to me that they must shut the doors at 4:00 A.M. to begin the first service, and so if people arrive a little late, they must wait until the 5:00 A.M. meeting.

* * *

There are indications that, as we approach the twenty-first century, the greatest prayer movement in living memory is already under way. In much smaller but still significant ways the story of Myong-Song Presbyterian Church can be repeated many times over. One congregation I know has forty prayer meetings per week involving a total of a thousand people. I am acquainted with churches in which anywhere from 15 to 24 percent of the congregation are engaged in organized, corporate, intercessory prayer weekly. I have met with national prayer leaders, and none of them has seen anything like what is now beginning to occur. It is too early to tell how significant this new awakening toward prayer will be, but the signs are encouraging.

More on the Myong-Song PC here UPDATE: This link is to an essay by Danie Vermeulen. He is the director of "Dawn Ministries" in Africa, and did church planting in South Africa. The Dawn Ministries Africa website has this reference to Kijabe (scroll down to "God Brings Somalia to Kenya"). Small, small world.

Kirbyjon and Suzette Caldwell

These two people, husband and wife, spoke at the PGF conference that we attended. Kirbyjon Caldwell is the pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the US, the 17,000 member Windsor Village UM Church in Houston. Wikipedia has quite an article on him here.

His wife Suzette T. Caldwell also a pastor at the church, has a prayer ministry, the Kingdom Builder's Prayer Institute.

The Caldwells presentation at the conference jarred us. We were rocking along, swinging with the fairly moderate though challenging curricula, when WHAM these folks appeared and hit us with what sounded like a "name it and claim it" Gospel in the context of a Super Target church program, raising eyebrows and some hackles in our group. I have to confess, though, that they fascinated me.

Here is the question: Would you prefer a church where there was virtually no prayer ministry? Just the prayers during the worship service and the prayers at the beginning and the end of church meetings? Where individual prayer was left to the hit or miss convenience of the members? Or would you prefer a church that has a highly structured, deliberate, and consistent corporate prayer discipline, mainly top down in its content, and maybe over the top from time to time, maybe a lot of the time?

Would you prefer a prayer theology that viewed prayer as essentially a means for us to conform our wills to God's sovereignty, whatever that sovereignty might turn out to be? A sort of view that believes that God's will is mostly unscrutable, and so the more general and hedged we are in our prayers, maybe the better.

Or would you prefer a prayer theology that moves from praise and worship to a search for God's will in a given situation, with particular confidence that his will is not inscrutable but is a will he will allow us to discern; that once discerned for that given situation holds that God's will as it is in heaven so shall it be on earth, specifically, here and now, a specific will for that situation that one can then declare; that moves from there to seeking forgiveness for self and others, thence to a petition for protection; and closing with more praise and worship?

The Caldwells left no doubt as to where their positions are on these questions.