Healthcare Mission and The Core Missionary Task

About course

Every healthcare provider serving in missions eventually asks the same question: how does my medical work actually connect to reaching the lost? In this five-lesson e-course, Tom Hicks — a pediatrician with 27 years of field experience in East Asia and current global health strategy leader with the International Mission Board — gives you a clear, practical framework for answering it.

You'll learn the six components of the core missionary task (entry, evangelism, discipleship, healthy church formation, leadership development, and exit to partnership) and see exactly how healthcare providers contribute to each one — not just as an entry point, but across the entire task. Along the way, Hicks dismantles common myths about healthcare mission, from "it's just clinical medicine" to "it's a distraction from the real work."

The course closes with an extended, real story from Hicks's own field experience — tracing a single relationship from a nursing home bedside all the way to a church-planting movement — showing how every component works together in practice.

Whether you're preparing for the field, currently serving, or simply trying to understand how your professional skills fit into God's mission, this course will give you both a shared vocabulary and a practical vision for healthcare missions.

Lessons