First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person: Odessa Settles - Extended Conversation

In this extension of the studio conversation, Wayne and Odessa talk further about using music to teach about the struggle of overcoming slavery. Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company: FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting Company P.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007 Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Duration:: 9m
Broadcast on:: 05 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

In this extension of the studio conversation, Wayne and Odessa talk further about using music to teach about the struggle of overcoming slavery.

Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:
FEBC National Processing Center
Far East Broadcasting Company
P.O. Box 6020
Albert Lea, MN 56007

Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Well, Bruce, it's often the case that we run out of time on the radio, but thankfully we have the internet to continue this conversation. So I want to hear more about the vision that God has given you through the experiences you've had primarily in Africa in the medical field. Talk to me about some of that vision. What is PAACS? That stands for the Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons. This was the group that came out of that meeting at Brackenhurst, Kenya in 1996, and is now the the structure for the surgical training program that we have. The Pan-African Academy of Christian Surgeons is a subsidiary of the Christian Medical and Dental Association here in the United States. Our legal entity is within that organization, but all of our activity is overseas in Africa. We utilize eight mission hospitals in four different countries. Actually, there's one in a country that's not in Africa. We consider it East-East Africa, but our goal in this situation is to use these training hospitals, these mission hospitals, as training hospitals, in order that we can effectively minister to the patients, train the residents, and disciple them in the word as we go along. You have to take the long view, don't you? You don't do that overnight. No, it's a five-year program, and you know, that's part of our problem when we talk about raising funds. You know, when you go to somebody and say, "Well, gee, here's a wonderful concept. We'd like you to support it for 20 or 30 years." That doesn't go over well in most churches, but this is an exciting project. It is cost-effective. The average cost of a medical missionary from the North America going over is between 80 and $120,000 a year, depending on how much money they have to raise for their ministry funds and so forth. For approximately $90,000, the cost of a missionary from the United States for exactly one year, I can train somebody for five years, and they don't have culture shock, and they don't go home, and they'll be there for a lifetime. So it's a very cost-effective episode, and they can replicate themselves eventually as well, I would imagine. That's our goal. We want to teach them to teach others, and to make a difference, and that is happening. All over. These guys have amazing stories. You know, a lot of times, we'll go to our church, and we'll stand up, and we'll say, "Gee, God, you're really kind of lucky to have me on your team." But when you meet some of these people, you realize that if you're standing in line getting them to heaven, you're going to be way at the back of a line behind some of these folks that just have amazing testimonies. We have people in our program that have gone through wars, they've seen their families killed, they have struggled with poverty, they have the kinds of things that you and I would give up on, and they're striving, they're making a difference, and they go, and they make a huge difference. We have one fellow who is from Madagascar, and he was working as a general practitioner there, and they sent him to this very arid, very poor area of almost a million people, and by himself, he and his wife walked and started 30 different churches and two or three different medical clinics, and then he heard about pacts. Then he came to our program, and when he got there, he had just gotten there when he began to cough up huge amounts of blood, and he nearly died of pulmonary TB. He got through that program. He struggled academically with it, but he finished it, and he's now gone back to those same people's, to those same areas, and he's got a new 50-bed hospital sitting down there now, and when I say new, it's new, only in existence. It doesn't have a whole lot. As a matter of fact, in the last six months of this year, he has done approximately 600 cases with only a single set of instruments. He would do the surgery, clean them, and then do another one, clean them and do another one, but over 600 people have come to the Lord because of his testimony. This is the kind of difference that we're making. These are people that, if he works on them for a surgical problem, if he's lucky, he might get 40, 50, 60 years of cure, but if he tells them about Jesus Christ, there's an eternal healing that occurs, and that's the exciting part. And I can tell you story after story, after story, of the rest of us are doing this. It's exciting. That's why I want our listeners to know about this, and we'll put links, of course, on the website, so they can follow and perhaps even support this ministry. There's something else that recently has come up that I know you're very excited about, and I am, too, because it involves radio. Let's talk about hospital radio. What's the vision for this? The first time I went in 1998 to Togo, West Africa, I realized that the thing that struck me most of all was that there were a lot of people just sitting around. In Africa, it takes you $30 or $40, maybe, to get a taxi fare to go to the hospital. Now, $30 or $40 is a 30 or 40 days worth of work, and so there's no such thing as a phone system appointment, etc., so you will come and you will wait, and you will wait all day, and if you're not seen, you'll wait the next day, and if you're not seen, you'll wait the third day until you're seen, and if you get admitted to the hospital, we have to keep you a little bit longer because there's no way to get you back if there's a complication, and then sometimes they have to sit there because they can't afford to pay for their care, and they sit even longer. Many people were there on board. It's not always their village, it's certainly not their people group, and so it struck me that we could be a lot more intentional about our faith, and so I began to think, well, what could we do? Well, one thing we could do is to set up a series of speakers and have some programming. That would just keep them entertained at one level, but on a spiritual level, tell them about Jesus Christ on a public health basis, tell them about water and immunizations, and quit putting cow dung on fresh baby's belly buttons, and all the other things that they do. So you're talking about a low-power radio station on the hospital grounds? Yeah, that was our goal, and the problem with it is I had the idea, but I didn't know enough about radio. Recently, I ran into a gentleman, Bill Mile, who has been with Transworld Radio all of his life, and in the early 2000s, he had the situation. He saw the same thing. He wanted to have hospital radio, but didn't have the hospital. So I had the hospitals, and didn't have the radio, and he had the radio, and didn't have the hospitals, and God put us together just last year. So we have been pursuing the best option for this, and what we are looking at right now is that for most of these countries, we can get by with a single watt. Now, in the days of multi-million watt radio stations, that seems kind of a joke, but a single watt transmitter can be bought for about $1,200, and would cover an entire hospital ground, and through that, then we can deliver it to waiting rooms, we can deliver it to hospital beds in most of them areas, or areas where sometimes it's dangerous to listen to the hospital. We can even use pillow speakers, so those speakers that nobody else around you can hear what you're listening to. So for an entire hospital, let's say a 100-bed hospital, it might cost something between $2,500 and $3,000, we'd be equipped with that whole hospital with a radio program. That's absolutely correct. Absolutely correct, and if we had to install it, then there would be some money to fly someone over to install it. And I can do some of our bigger hospitals, the 400 and 500 bed hospitals with large campuses at most $20,000. Now, the nice thing about this is these preachers don't get tired, they don't take furlough, they don't have to worry about support, you know, they just keep going. You're thinking, you're really thinking on this one, all right. Yeah, I am. Well, let's give everyone an opportunity to be a part of this project. Again, we'll put the information for this hospital pilot program, radio pilot program, on the website, and donations are really necessary right now, aren't they? Absolutely. We have made a commitment. My wife and I have made a commitment through our 501(c)(3) that we will underwrite four hospitals. That's enough money that, in our present situation, as a missionary, it's an issue of faith. But we trust that God will do this, and we are talking with the hospitals. It's a new concept there as well. They have never seen anything like this, so we've got kind of a selling job to do on the other side of the ocean. But as people begin to see, they're really getting excited, and I'm really hoping that we can make a difference. This is an opportunity for somebody with a relatively small amount of money to do something that will truly leave a legacy for themselves and for the kingdom. Well, Bruce, I've known you a long time, but I really love how God has led you these past few years and the vision that He's given you right now for all this. God bless you. Thank you so much Wayne.