| The Christian Medical Commission (CMC) was created within the WCC in 1968 to assist its member churches to deal with these tasks and to encourage church-related health programmes cooperate with each other. During CMC's early years, the emphasis was on promotion of primary health care as a means of redressing the imbalance between sophisticated and expensive institutional medical care for those who could afford it and lack of care for those who could not.
Primary health care became a global movement, adopted by all World Health Organization members at a conference which CMC helped organize in 1978. During the same period, however, growing dissatisfaction with the so-called "garage-mechanic" approach in modern medicine encouraged Christian groups in many countries to search for a type of health care which more fully addressed the needs of the whole person. Today the WCC, in collaboration with a network of Ecumenical Christian health associations, assists churches around the world to address health issues as a demonstration of God's love and concern for the whole person, to make clear his loving, eternal purpose to heal and reconcile all people to him in Jesus Christ and to restore wholeness to all creation. |