Date

11-13-2025

Department

Rawlings School of Divinity

Degree

Doctor of Ministry (DMin)

Chair

Andrea Michelle Burson

Keywords

Contextual Apologetic System, Contextual Apologetic Workshop, medical missions, evangelistic prayer teams, short-term missions, cross-cultural evangelism, Latin America..

Disciplines

Missions and World Christianity | Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

There is a lack of resources and a gap in the literature for training prayer teams for medical mission endeavors. The Contextual Apologetic Workshop, an intervention project, was designed to fill the gap in the literature by training participants in prayer, evangelism, and apologetics. It utilized the Contextual Apologetic System, a framework built around the Contextual Triad, which includes the cultural context, setting, and endemic religions that inform outreach dynamics and preparation. The cultural context identifies if the population is high- or low-context, and includes the subcultures. The setting refers to outreach types, such as medical missions or construction projects. Endemic religions are the prevailing beliefs in a region, which mission prayer teams must know beforehand to prepare theologically and apologetically. The workshop’s training focused on medical mission outreaches in Latin America, a high-context culture where Catholicism is syncretized with animism, and has competing Mormonism. The workshop emphasized three apologetic tools: the Two Question Evangelism, Conversational Apologetics, and the Continuity of Scriptures tools. The eight-week workshop was successful in training the participants in prayer, evangelism, and apologetics, as demonstrated by triangulated quantitative and qualitative analysis, and shows promise for enhancing the evangelistic efforts of other medical mission organizations.

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