AIC Kijabe Hospital is a network of Kenyan hospitals and clinics that seek to provide holistic healing of body and spirit.  The dream is for these facilities to be sacred spaces where patients encounter God’s love.  Patients come because of a rumor that circulates far and wide, that God lives in Kijabe. They know their clinicians will not only provide honest, skilled care, they will also pray for their healing.  

Dr. Howard Thurman, half-a-century ago, wrote a beautiful description of healthcare as ministry that describes what Kijabe hospital aspires to be: an altar where the love of God burns for his children.

“I think that the ministry of healing, through all of the uses. . .all of these are part of the redemptive process by which the God of the lost is seeking his own. All of the things that we do to help in the rehabilitation of children, all the things that we are working on in helping to release creative forces that can restructure disturbances of the mind and the emotions—all of these are part of the redeeming process of God! 

I think that the work is holy, and those who, with their training and their minds are vehicles for that kind of redemption, should be men and women of great reverence, great spiritual discernment and awareness. The illusion that these processes are secular processes, so objective, so scientific that they are not involved in the deeply moving spiritual thing with which life is imbued is perhaps the most tragic delusion of modern man. 

What can happen when one with discipline and long-brooding with the mind and exposure to the need can have that whole process illumined by a recognition that God is at work in him.  Every hospital, every clinic, every consultation, every consulting room becomes an altar where the love of God burns for the redemption of his children.”

– Howard Thurman, The Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep, 1951