a conference for
graduate students,
faculty, and
professionals

Practitioners, researchers, and students in the health-care professions play a special role when taking up the call to be "servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries" (1 Cor. 4:1). In the Health Sciences track we will seek to address pressing issues confronting today's health-care providers:

• Given our central role as healers in the lives of people encountering health challenges and ultimately death, does our calling as health-care providers give us a place of ministry in the academy and the profession that is comparable to that of ministry in the church? How can we help forge the intersection of "church" and "mission" so that we are sent and released to be ministers of the gospel in our health-care settings and institutions?

• As cutting-edge technologies bring into question the core of what it means to be human, created in the image of God, how will we continue to be co-creators with God, preserve the sanctity of life, and develop boundaries and guidelines that protect, value, and define ourselves as a "people dependent upon God for our well-being"?

• How can we discover and practice disciplines of life — for both our personal and professional lives — that foster and demonstrate wholeness to a fragmented, disintegrating world?

• How do we impart and embody hope in the midst of individuals and institutions caught in the conflict between good and evil? How do we recognize, name, and extend the grace of God to lives filled with impending crises, with unpredictable, unknown, and uncontrollable challenges to be faced?

• As Jesus' sent ones, how do we live and speak prophetically to a system of "care" where God is most often excluded for fear of giving offense?

We in the health-care professions face the God-given challenge of finding — and employing — the good resources he has given in the effort to ameliorate the physical, spiritual, and psychological breakdown of his creatures and our culture. We hope you'll take up that challenge and that you'll join us at Following Christ 2002.