October 7, 2002

IMB transferring Yemen hospital to Muslim-run charity
___By Bob Allen
___Associated Baptist Press
___FORT SMITH, Ark. (ABP)--The Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board is preparing to transfer control of Jibla Baptist Hospital in Yemen to a local charity.
___Officials of the Richmond, Va., -based IMB call the transfer an "answer to prayer" that allows Southern Baptists to continue to minister through the hospital while providing new opportunities for expanding health-care ministries in the Mideast nation.
___A retired medical missionary who opposes the deal, however, says it will in effect turn a high-profile Baptist institution over to Muslims. John Wikman, a retired missionary to India who lives in Fort Smith, Ark., said the IMB rebuffed efforts by him and others to find a way to keep the hospital going as a Christian venture.
___The IMB is negotiating with a group of Yemeni nationals to take over administration of the 35-year-old medical facility, the centerpiece of Baptist work in the Republic of Yemen. The proposal would save Southern Baptists $500,000 a year and allow IMB medical staff to continue working at the hospital.
___The IMB's New Directions strategy, recently criticized by the Baptist General Convention of Texas Missions Review & Initiatives Committee, has led the board to disengage from institutional ministries worldwide in order to focus almost exclusively on church-starting movements.
___In this case, IMB officials said, keeping the hospital staffed has become increasingly difficult. The board reports 35 requests for medical personnel at Jibla but only one response in the last four years. The hospital's current administrator, Bill Koehm, plans to retire in a year, with no replacement in sight.
___Board officials said financial and staffing needs are issues behind the transfer, but the main reason is to reach out to a broader spectrum of the population through mobile clinics that provide basic medical care, health education and nutrition classes.
___"We have felt very strongly for several years that change was needed to reach out to parts of the country where health-care ministries are desperately needed, and we began to ask God to show us a way," John Brady, the IMB's regional leader in northern Africa and the Middle East, told Baptist Press.
___A charity started by Yemen's foreign minister, a Canadian-trained medical doctor named Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, has offered to take over administration and financial responsibility for the hospital. The People's Charitable Society already works with a psychiatric hospital in Hodeidah on the Red Sea. IMB officials met with the group in August to begin negotiating the transfer.
___The IMB says Qirbi already has succeeded in getting dismissed a bogus $6.7 million complaint against the hospital for 30 years in back taxes, filed recently by a local official.
___While the society is chartered as a secular charity, Wikman told Associated Baptist Press the move would essentially remove a uniquely Christian presence in a country that is officially listed as 100 percent Muslim.
___Wikman described the People's Charitable Society as "supposedly a secular society--but of course Yemen is a total, 100 percent Muslim country--so it's really a Muslim charity."
___Yemen's constitution declares that Islam is the state religion and that Islamic law is the source of all legislation. Most Christians are foreigners who live in the country temporarily.
___Under Islam, the conversion of a Muslim to another religion is considered apostasy, a crime punishable by death. Yemen allows freedom of religion for non-Muslims but doesn't allow them to proselytize.
___Christian missionaries operate in Yemen mostly in providing medical services, but some are involved in teaching and social services.
___The IMB for years has turned over institutions to indigenous Christians when they are able to support them and has closed institutions when they are no longer needed. Critics like Wikman, however, say the agency now is unloading institutions as a matter of policy, because they no longer believe they are an effective way to reach the masses.
___"Basically, it's all passed down," Wikman said. "The reason they are doing this is they don't believe in institutions anymore. The poor medical missionaries have been told what they are doing isn't really evangelism."
___Wikman believes hospitals--with their ability to help people through crises and build relationships over time--are more effective in making an impact on individual lives than simply handing out medicine or providing dental care in a mobile clinic.
___IMB spokesman Mark Kelly said the agency continues to value medical missions as a "platform" for evangelism but is trying to expand it beyond brick-and-mortar institutions. "If good missions strategy meant never changing your missions strategy, Jibla Baptist Hospital would never have been established," he said.
___Kelly said the IMB considers medical work a valuable ministry, but without a verbal witness it is "pre-evangelism." He said the IMB's stated purpose for decades was "evangelism that results in churches," and Jibla Baptist Hospital fit into that strategy. That will not change, he said, because Southern Baptist medical personnel will continue to serve and be recruited for the hospital.
___Transferring the hospital, Kelly said, gives the IMB "the best of both worlds" by both maintaining a current ministry and sharing the gospel "with Yemenis who never would hear if our outreach continued to be limited to the building in the city."
___Wikman said he and seven or eight others offered to start a Baptist foundation to raise money and gradually take over the hospital over five years, in order to keep its Christian identity.
___Wikman said he met with an IMB committee at a recent board meeting, but the decision had already been made. "Other options really were not considered," he said.
___Kelly said the individuals who approached the IMB had not demonstrated they could succeed in raising money and weren't ready to take over the hospital. He said the board's top priority was to find a way for its personnel to remain free to minister at the facility, and the arrangement with the Yemeni charity accomplishes that.
___Wikman said missionaries at the hospital are opposed to the change but were told not to discuss it with anyone.
___Kelly said he has not heard any Southern Baptist workers say they were told not to talk about the transfer.
___Wikman said missionaries there are "heartbroken and hurting" about the decision. Some, he said, are struggling with whether to stay or leave.
___"If you are a pastor, and you were going to be made an associate pastor, and a Muslim cleric were to be put in as pastor, you would understand how these missionaries feel," Wikman said.

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