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[00:00:17] The Missional Life - Dan: All right. Welcome back to Mission Live Podcast. Today, we are honored to have Jason Graham on the show with us. Jason is the director of Cedarville University's Business and Assistant Program, where he's shaping a new generation of healthcare professionals through a faith based approach. With a background in sports medicine and years of academic leadership, he's passionate about integrating Christian values into healthcare.

[00:00:36] The Missional Life - Dan: Jason, over to you. Welcome to the show. Thanks Dan and Amanda. It's great to be here. Absolutely. We're glad you're here. Hey, let's just hear a little bit more about you personally. Can you share what led you to pursue a career in medical education, particularly at a faith based institution like Cedarville?

[00:00:52] The Missional Life - Dan: Yeah, sure.

[00:00:54] Jason Grahame: So first of all, I became a PA because I loved working with patients. I graduated with an athletic training degree from Cedarville University. So I was already trained as an athletic trainer coming from Cedarville University, who has a very specific mission to train future healthcare professionals, as well as just anybody coming through their program in biblical integration and foundational living for Christ.

[00:01:16] Jason Grahame: And so I became a PA because I wanted to work with patients and really enjoy, enjoyed bedside care with patients. I moved into education to take one step behind coming to Cedarville. I moved into education because I had the opportunity to multiply what I was teaching at the bedside with students to teaching a whole class of students.

[00:01:37] Jason Grahame: And God has gifted me with the ability to Teach and to be able to convey information in different ways. And so early in my career, I started off teaching lectures for the school I graduated from in Norfolk, Virginia. And then when an opportunity arose that seemed to fit well with where our family was at that particular time, I jumped in full bore in 2007 teaching and actually training the next generation of teachers.

[00:02:03] Jason Grahame: P. A. Is there at that school? Had the opportunity to work through the ranks and be there for about 12 years before God really opened up the door for us to come back to Cedarville to start a P. A. Program. It was never my intention or on my bucket list to start a P. A. Program. But God really clearly made open doors for us to move back to this area.

[00:02:25] Jason Grahame: Probably would take the whole 30 minutes to tell the whole story, but I'll give you the highlights. So my family is a family with my wife who also graduated from Searville and seven kids. And at the time when we were expecting our seventh, we kind of knew something was going to change. Either we were going to need to move to a different location because of housing space or something.

[00:02:42] Jason Grahame: We might need a bigger vehicle. We weren't quite sure what it was going to be. But God brought our youngest into this world about six weeks early, and so we got some time in the hospital with Primi and spent some time just thinking about what God was doing. And just before he was born, I was having a conversation with our pastor who said, Hey, what is your future looking like?

[00:03:01] Jason Grahame: What do you think you're going to be doing in five years? What does your future look like? And so over coffee, we were just chatting about the future, and I said, you know, I love what I do at the institution that I'm at. All of my family and all my wife's family's here. We've got a great church, great ministry opportunities.

[00:03:16] Jason Grahame: There's no other PA program around. So if in order for me to stay in education, I'd be looking at moving, which we really don't want to do. I said, but if God would open up a door of doing what I'm doing at a Christian university, I said, that would be really interesting. Well, I kind of forgot about that until about four months later in February when Dr.

[00:03:36] Jason Grahame: White, who is the president of Cedarville, came down to speak at our church, and we're not a big church, but he was there, and so we said maybe he would like to get together with alumni or family who have children at Cedarville, and so he did a little spiel about Cedarville and what's been going on and how God led him to Cedarville, and on the way out the door with our preemie in tow I shook his hand and said, Hey, Dr.

[00:03:57] Jason Grahame: White, I'm familiar with Cedarville having graduated from there. You guys have a great school of pharmacy, a great nursing program, doctor or a nurse MSN program. And I said, if you guys are ever interested in starting a PA program, I'd love to help out. I did not define what help out meant at that moment because I was thinking along the lines of consulting or giving advice.

[00:04:18] Jason Grahame: And lo and behold, two years later with a lot of interim there we were moving back to Cedarville away from all the things that we thought were anchoring us there because God clearly made it evident that he wanted us to help start this PA program. And so we've been here since 2019. Building out the program's curriculum, helping hire the faculty and staff working through all of the processes to get the curriculum accredited and getting to the point where we could launch with our first cohort starting in 2023.

[00:04:45] Jason Grahame: We delayed a year because of COVID, which made sense. But we've just started with our second cohort this past May and are already interviewing for our third cohort to start next May.

[00:04:55] The Missional Life - Dan: It's so amazing how when God puts something in your heart, it's like, Kind of begins usually months or years beforehand to your point, how you started speaking that out, you know, and then all of a sudden it began to unfold and just need how God puts those seeds in our hearts long before they come to fruition or when he wants to bring that to pass in our lives.

[00:05:16] Jason Grahame: No, it's because they looking backwards, you can see all of those things that started way before. But it's just interesting to see how God continues to be faithful each step of the way. ,

[00:05:23] The Missional Life - Amanda: yeah, it was just for people that aren't as familiar with the health care structure systems, you know, people might have heard of physician assistant.

[00:05:32] The Missional Life - Amanda: So I just want to, you know, coming from a nursing health care background just add to the point that I was reading recently that physician assistant is the number one or in the top growing professions in the United States currently, and just even from a personal experience that PAs are crucial to our current healthcare system.

[00:05:56] The Missional Life - Amanda: So having good programs in place is so important and I just want to let people know that doctors perform much better having physician assistants working alongside them. I've met some amazing physician assistants, working in hospitals in Colorado and Michigan In Ohio. So I just wanted to throw that in there for people that may not be as well versed in.

[00:06:20] The Missional Life - Amanda: What does that actually mean?

[00:06:22] Jason Grahame: Yeah. So P. A. S. Are just to give a further fleshing that out. So P. A. S. Are health care professionals that are nationally certified and state licensed to practice medicine. With the collaboration of a physician that they're working with. And so we are trained in the medical model to care for patients.

[00:06:38] Jason Grahame: Health care studies show that we increase access, increase the quality of care have the time to be able to spend educating patients about their care. And really do make an impact in the health care workforce and with projections of. Decreasing availability of physicians or needing to have more access because of a growing population, at least in terms of the population in America getting older.

[00:06:59] Jason Grahame: There's definitely a need for more health care providers, not only physicians, but even non physician providers as well.

[00:07:05] The Missional Life - Amanda: Absolutely.

[00:07:06] The Missional Life - Dan: So we're looking at the, the PA industry, the medical industry. You recently were actually invited to share at a Physician Assistant National Convention and you were against a resolution that threatened faith based programs.

[00:07:20] The Missional Life - Dan: What was at stake and how did your team that was there respond to that?

[00:07:24] Jason Grahame: Yeah, so this was an interesting development that happened earlier this year that somewhat came out of the blue. You know, Cedarville is unique in one sense because We are a program that's in a graduate school that actually requires the students coming into the program to have some faith expression and personal relationship with Jesus Christ as their Savior.

[00:07:46] Jason Grahame: That's the same across the undergraduate and graduate programs at Cedarville. And as I was doing some research, even before God opened up this door to come here. It was interesting to me that out of the 311 PA programs that are. In the United States, about 80 of them, 75 to 84, depending on which how you categorize them actually exist in faith based institutions.

[00:08:08] Jason Grahame: That could be a Jesuit school. That could be a Catholic school. That could be an Adventist school, a Baptist school of those only about 16 exist in Christian universities. And then if you go down to like an evangelical institution, you're only talking about four and What's interesting is that Cedarville at the time and still is as of right now, is the only one that was really trying to not just bring in any student, but bring in Christian students.

[00:08:35] Jason Grahame: And so, the resolution that came before the American Academy of PAs back in May came to our attention in March. And basically one of the constituent organizations of the American Academy of PAs, was putting forth a resolution that was asking the AAPA to strongly oppose any program that had narrow admissions criteria, specifically relating it to gender, gender ideology, religious or philosophical belief.

[00:09:05] Jason Grahame: And then went further to say that they resolved that the accrediting body should not accredit such schools. And then when they gave the rationale for the whole, Resolution. It was basically coming off of our website, all of our information about our particular program. So they really were singling out our particular program, mainly saying that we were non inclusive in our admissions policies and therefore shouldn't be an accredited program.

[00:09:32] Jason Grahame: So we worked. initially behind the scenes trying to get people on board to stand up against the resolution. Those were rebuffed and certainly weren't heeded and that particular resolution was accepted to be debated at the floor at the House of Delegates in, in May. So a student of mine of our program elected to go down with me and the two of us in, in addition to several other organizations.

[00:09:57] Jason Grahame: One being the Fellowship of Christian PAs, which is a special interest group in Caucus of the American Academy of PAs. They're supported by the Christian Medical and Dental Association. Several other individuals spoke out in opposition to this resolution and fortunately that resolution ended up dying in committee.

[00:10:14] Jason Grahame: Well, it actually went to committee, then was resurrected by this particular constituent organization again to be defeated again, and then resurrected a third time and then finally died. But they were pretty adamant about the fact that we shouldn't be included in PA schools because we were being exclusionary in our admissions practices.

[00:10:32] Jason Grahame: And It was a little bit, it was somewhat surreal to be there to try to debate this on the floor. One of the persons who was pro the resolution started reading off of our doctrinal statement, basically saying, I don't know that I could be a faculty member here. And we're like, well, that's not the purpose of admissions criteria, but the actual department of education's manual on accreditation says that.

[00:10:57] Jason Grahame: An accrediting body cannot take into consideration. It's actually illegal to take into consideration the mission of an institution when granting accreditation. So the institution Cedarville's mission is to transform lives by academic excellence and intentional discipleship. Under the submission to the word of God, and that flows all the way down through to our P.

[00:11:18] Jason Grahame: A. Programming. And our intention is to disciple students who love Christ to be able to use their degree and their interest in health care to literally further the kingdom of God in some way. Where they're serving people and their medical needs. And so this became a real issue for the AAPA. And so there's a good, I don't know, 25, 30 minutes of debate on the floor plus additional debate in the closed house session the next day.

[00:11:44] Jason Grahame: So it was, it was an interesting experience. And I don't know, you know, if it'll come up again, but it certainly has the potential to because I know of at least one other PA program at a Christian evangelical school that's going to be starting hopefully soon. And so, you know, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out even in the following months.

[00:12:02] Jason Grahame: Wow,

[00:12:04] The Missional Life - Dan: you know, it feels like, it feels like the enemy, right? And we know how the enemy works. The enemy comes in and looks for just a little bit of space, right? He looks for just a little bit of small area that he can begin to widen and widen and widen and, you know, . And we see that happening obviously in so many different other areas in our government and throughout our society today.

[00:12:27] The Missional Life - Dan: And it seems like he's just trying to enter this space. And so I'm just wondering, you know, what are your perceptions? What are the biggest challenges that faith based medical schools are facing and will face in the current,

[00:12:41] Jason Grahame: Yeah, it's a good, good question, Dan.

[00:12:43] Jason Grahame: I think what is really going to come down to and what we're seeing even on the individual level for individuals in health care is whether or not an individual can practice medicine in accordance with their conscience. You know, we have a strong tradition in health care of, you know what we call medical principalism, you know, the four tenets of Hippocratic Oath and, you know, this idea that we want to do right by our patients.

[00:13:08] Jason Grahame: Many of us take some type of an oath to, to uphold these tenets and to work for the betterment of our patients. But there's also a sense in which our personal conscience comes into play when forced to or expected to comply with patient's wishes. One of those four tenants of medical principalism is patient autonomy.

[00:13:29] Jason Grahame: And in our current society in America, the the emphasis on personal autonomy is so out is blown out of proportion in comparison to the other tenants of medical principalism that were sort of expected to be not professionals, but just clinicians or just medical practitioners that are simply there to meet the needs of whatever our patient asked for.

[00:13:56] Jason Grahame: So whether it's coming in and saying, you know what, I don't feel like I'm in the right body and I need to just change out the parts of my body to make me who I feel like I am, or to be acting in contrary to your conscience when it comes to providing medical care. One of the key things about a professional is that They uphold a standard that's outside of them.

[00:14:18] Jason Grahame: It's not a standard that they determine. And it's not just simply providing for the wishes and whims of whatever your patient is. We actually counsel them when we think that whatever they're asking for is actually going to harm them. And right now, one of the challenges within healthcare is that so often patient autonomy is given so much weight that when somebody stands up and says, you know what?

[00:14:44] Jason Grahame: I don't think that's the best thing for you. That gets blown out of proportion. And so the ability for medical Christians in healthcare, whether that be at the nursing level, whether that be at physician or PA level, whatever level is simply being able to operate in accordance with your conscience.

[00:15:01] Jason Grahame: And so I think some of the cultural things that we're, we're seeing happen, you know, with transgenderism or with abortion or with you know, think about a pharmacist who's getting orders to provide You know, do they have the right to be able to, to refuse to fill that prescription because of their conscience and participation in what they consider to be an unethical act?

[00:15:24] Jason Grahame: And so those are the kind of questions that we're grappling with, but that's sort of the societal piece of it. But Does an institution have the right to be able to teach their students according in accordance with what we feel scripture is demanding of us. And, you know, in America, currently, right now, we do have those freedoms to be able to have a private institution that is operating according to its mission.

[00:15:47] Jason Grahame: And we, we feel strongly that God has, you know, the Bible has very clear indications about who a person is and what their who they were created to be. And so we want to be able to operate and to care for patients with that in mind. One of the students, the student that actually went down to Houston with me for that conference, wrote an op ed piece just talking about the Imago Dei, the image of God that.

[00:16:13] Jason Grahame: Everyone is created in and how we want to approach patients. In that way gives the patient the dignity that they deserve, but also helps us show the compassion and empathy that they need. And so we're, we're excited to be able to do that. But those are some of the things I think that that medicine in general is facing in America today.

[00:16:32] Jason Grahame: And then again, just the training programs for that many Christians who go to. A secular university especially when they get into med school, struggle with their faith identity because the environment is so caustic to their faith. That's why the Christian Medical and Dental Association has so much emphasis on helping encourage and meet the needs of students who are aligned faith.

[00:16:56] Jason Grahame: And with Christian faith in those settings because they really need mentoring. And so we're excited here at Cedarville to have a program where we can start off at least at the, you know, level at the base of the cross, like at least people come in with an understanding that Christ is their Savior.

[00:17:11] Jason Grahame: We know that they're all at different places, but we can have conversations that are much deeper, much quicker because of that same foundation and giving us the opportunity to talk with them about How we approach patients that may be differently or they may be different and holistically in comparison to somebody who's just there to provide physical medical care.

[00:17:31] Jason Grahame: So those are some of the things that come to mind when you ask that question.

[00:17:35] The Missional Life - Amanda: Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, again, remembering that hospitals actually have very strong Judeo Christian values embedded in them inherently, and you even look at names of hospitals. Yeah, definitely. A lot of them are Saint something

[00:17:50] Jason Grahame: or Methodist, whatever.

[00:17:54] Jason Grahame: And that's because in reality, medicine, not, not so much medicine, but care for the poor and the indigent actually grew out of the church. I mean, that's where many of this, these movements started orphanages. You know, hospice care, those kind of things really grew out of the church, recognizing the inherent dignity of the people that were in need that were not being served well by their community.

[00:18:18] Jason Grahame: And that's kind of where we got. And so, as we unloose ourselves from those moorings. our culture is finding itself really hard pressed to to stabilize the medical care and community. I mean, some of the things that are coming out now with regards to transgenderism, the CAS report, some of those kinds of things are just turning upside down.

[00:18:39] Jason Grahame: What we have been hearing for the last 10 years have been the medical establishment norms. And you know, I think so many people are rushing to prove what they want to prove that they're not. They're, they're ignoring the patient and the harm that it's going to do to patients. And so, you know, we want to teach our, our patients to be, or our students to be patient centric, address the whole, the holistic patient, the whole, the whole picture, and look for ways to, to introduce spiritual care where, where appropriate.

[00:19:10] Jason Grahame: You know, Jaco, if you're familiar with the Accreditation Agency for Hospitals, actually requires that any patient coming in has to have a spiritual assessment done. And being able to leverage that as a PA working in a hospital system, using that as a springboard to maybe talk to patients about what is it that they find, or what is their community of faith that helps support them and, and maybe even introducing some concepts or Jesus to them that they may not even have considered otherwise would be a, is a great opportunity.

[00:19:40] The Missional Life - Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and even in the Bible the only non Jew writer was actually a physician, you know, the gospel of Luke and the book of acts were written by Luke, who was a physician and just reading about that more recently, you know, Luke is actually the most comprehensive gospel and.

[00:19:59] The Missional Life - Amanda: In my notes in my Bible, it was saying that most of Luke 9 verses 51 through chapter 18 through 30 verse 35. It's actually not found in any other gospels. So God actually handpicked a physician to write part of his word. And how much he emphasizes Jesus compassion. You know, and the biblical definition of compassion is doing exactly what Jesus did, holding on to the truth of what he says.

[00:20:26] The Missional Life - Amanda: What his father says, what God's word says, that is compassion. You know, they want to skew all these definitions where compassion is allowing people to do whatever they want to the point of harming their body and cutting off perfectly good, healthy body parts, et cetera, and really compassion is saying, no, hold on, wait a second.

[00:20:46] The Missional Life - Amanda: Let's, let's go back a bit and why are you feeling this way really is the true question that should be asked, , and showing compassion to these patients.

[00:20:56] Jason Grahame: Yeah, there's a, there's an interesting dichotomy between patients who undergo surgery for morbid obesity have to have a psychological evaluation done before they can even undergo that surgery because the amount of change that's going to happen to them, both inner, inside themselves and socially and personally with the people that are around them.

[00:21:15] Jason Grahame: Most surgeons, bariatric surgeons won't do that without some type of psychiatric evaluation to make sure that the patient is stable. That same. Standard is not applied to people who are making decisions about at a very young age, about what they think is true about themselves. And if all we're doing is perpetuating a lie, that that is not how God created them to be.

[00:21:36] Jason Grahame: And given them enough support, especially from a psychological standpoint, many of those students, many of those patients will grow out of that. And unfortunately there's an ideological drive to too much of what we're seeing in medicine rather than being evidence based, which is what we think about when we think about medicine is that we think it's evidence based.

[00:21:56] Jason Grahame: But what's unfortunately happening is that the ideology is really driving the research that's therefore biased in what they're trying to present. And it's unfortunate.

[00:22:08] The Missional Life - Dan: So a question is kind of two parts and I'm wondering as Christians. We want to be informed, right? And we need to be informed. And oftentimes we become informed when it's almost too big of a problem, right? We don't get to hear about it from, from the get go. And then when it's big enough, we finally hear about it.

[00:22:24] The Missional Life - Dan: And we think, how do we, how do we stop this thing? So my first question, our first part of the question is how can Christians begin to stay informed and hear about situations like this so we can be on top of situations that may begin to evolve and snowball effect into something much larger in our society and affecting kind of the medical medical arena of our society.

[00:22:47] The Missional Life - Dan: And the second is basically how can Christians then support institutions like Cedarville and how can they make a stand on issues like this as well? Can you speak to those things?

[00:22:57] Jason Grahame: Yeah. At the risk of like, Promoting a bunch of other podcasts because that's what I listened to. Oftentimes you know, people who are speaking into cultural issues of the day are where I would encourage listeners to start thinking about, you know, getting their information.

[00:23:11] Jason Grahame: So I have no vested interest in Al Mohler, but his briefing daily briefing really helps. think through issues that are happening on a regular basis that have biblical and world view significance. And he's doing it from a conservative approach, which is very, very helpful. There's a lot of resources within the Christian Medical and Dental Association as well.

[00:23:31] Jason Grahame: If you have somebody that you know who's a Christian practitioner or provider, a health professional, getting them in touch with You know, CMDA and some of their resources, having them become a member there. They've got training programs that, that they've actually developed for churches to be able to talk about some of these issues, everything from you know transgenderism to abortion to assisted dying medical assisted dying.

[00:23:55] Jason Grahame: So they have some really great resources that if anybody in your church is a medical professional can be a part of CMDA can get access to that. There's some great training materials that help. The church think biblically as well as critically about what's going on in medicine today. So those are just some of the resources I think that are that are available that I've been privy to, to at least review or see and find helpful as I'm thinking through some of these things.

[00:24:21] Jason Grahame: And then in terms of just support You know one is prayer. That's certainly one thing to know that people are praying for institutions like Cedarville or programs like ours, or even praying for health providers that are trying to stand up for truth. That certainly is 11 thing to do. We're at Cedarville looking to partner with other health professionals, P.

[00:24:43] Jason Grahame: A. S. M. P. S. D. O. S. You know who are not solely Christian, but who are interested in taking students from a Christian perspective. But if you're a Christian healthcare, healthcare provider who wants to precept students, we're looking for and continue to add to our pool of preceptors to be able to send our students out to places where they can get the experience during their second portion of the, of the curriculum.

[00:25:07] Jason Grahame: And we do that across all different disciplines. We have, rotations in family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, women's. Health surgery, emergency medicine and behavioral health. And then we do some electives, but you know, partnering with institutions like ours for precepting opportunities or just even, you know, as a, as a health consumer, and I don't like to use that word because it gives the idea that it's all about me and consuming, but when you need to have, healthcare offering to pay.

[00:25:37] Jason Grahame: as a, as a Christian patient offering to pray for your health care provider is opening the door for them to maybe even take opportunity to talk about their faith, and just shows care and concern for your health care provider and their team. So those are just some of the ways that I think, you know, Your listeners can can help support not only programs like ours, but even just the health health sector, you know, think more biblically or to think more spiritually when they're caring for patients.

[00:26:07] The Missional Life - Amanda: And I just wanted to add into that, , for those who may not realize this again, that even in the healthcare field, , that there is such a high rate of suicide among healthcare providers. And it is an unfortunate. thing that doesn't always get publicized. It's kind of kept under the radar a lot of times and just there's so much pressure in the system today and having just those, Christian, biblical values, that support system is huge.

[00:26:38] The Missional Life - Amanda: And I just want to reiterate what you said about people offering to pray for their providers that goes much longer than I think people realized. And Yeah, definitely make an impact.

[00:26:50] Jason Grahame: Yeah, you're right that, you know, especially with COVID and everything that happened with that whole period of time, you know, not only the burnout rate, but like you mentioned the suicide rate, the recidivism rate of people leaving healthcare just increased dramatically.

[00:27:04] Jason Grahame: And so we're still suffering some of the effects of that. And I think. You know, when you, when you do something, I mean, nobody goes into health care. Well, I can't say that most people going into health care usually have some bent towards compassion and empathy, but if it's not, if that is only rooted in the way it makes you feel because you're doing something good for somebody else and it's not rooted in a biblical worldview of why.

[00:27:31] Jason Grahame: Christ has called us to serve those in need. It only lasts for so long. And with, unfortunately, the the number of patients that, you know, maybe don't listen or the challenges of healthcare, even today, you know, healthcare has become much more of a business than it ever used to be, you know, 10, 20 years ago.

[00:27:50] Jason Grahame: It's now all about the numbers of patients you see and the output and the RVUs, that, that just, Sucks a lot of the empathy and compassion out of providers. And so, you know, there's there's different models of health care where, you know, patient or providers are able to do the kind of health care that they intended to do from the very beginning.

[00:28:10] Jason Grahame: But that's a system change like that takes a long time to, to work itself out. And so, yeah, the more we can support the healthcare providers that are in our local churches that are from a Christian standpoint or from who are Christians, just we need more and more of them. And so our desire here at Cedarville is to equip and disciple the next generation of Christian PAs that are going to go out.

[00:28:32] Jason Grahame: And the way I like to describe it is to be you know, sold out Christians that are further in the kingdom of God, cleverly disguised as physician assistants in the healthcare system. So.

[00:28:41] The Missional Life - Dan: Yeah, I was looking at a stat I pulled up that in 2023, a study published in the JAMA network says that more than 50 percent of physicians experience burnout due to the lack of emotional support and empathy within the health care system.

[00:28:55] The Missional Life - Dan: That's, that's mind blowing. So we want to be conscious of your time here, but what what would you say to someone who is. an aspiring healthcare professional or even a practicing healthcare professional who wants to integrate their faith into their practice.

[00:29:12] Jason Grahame: Yeah. Well, one, you've got to be well grounded in your own relationship with Jesus Christ.

[00:29:17] Jason Grahame: So, you know, spending the time with him in the word, spending your time with him in prayer, walking and knowing your scriptures well. I joke with people that we, You know, being a Christian program in health care doesn't mean that we're prescribing Bible verses for people's high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but it is important that we understand where stress and anxiety come from and how we deal with it that can also affect people in their physical health.

[00:29:41] Jason Grahame: Like we are integrated bodies, so having a good understanding of the human person and what the Bible says about that is so important. When we talk about. caring for patients well. So having a good anthropology and having a good theology is really, really important. And then, you know, seek opportunities to get involved in health care, especially somebody who's aspiring to be in that in that role.

[00:30:03] Jason Grahame: You know you need to get involved with caring for patients at the bedside and figuring out if that's really where God has gifted you and where God is leading you. And the more time you spend with patients, you'll find either one that it's just not the same thing. Cause there's so many different ways that you can participate in healthcare.

[00:30:18] Jason Grahame: Doesn't have to be as a PA, it doesn't have to be as a provider. It could be support personnel, but figuring out where, where you're gifted and figuring out where God has called you to be, and then pursuing, you know a goal. a good education that will get you to where you want to be. You know, I used to say that a seat in a PA program is a seat in a PA program, but you know, obviously now in a program where I've helped start build it and I see what we're trying to do here at Cedarville that's so unique in the PA landscape.

[00:30:46] Jason Grahame: I obviously want to take as many 30 a year. But I want to take as, you know, The best 30 students that are interested in furthering God's kingdom and growing in their relationship with him and then being able to use health care as a platform and as a ministry for the gospel. And that may be here locally.

[00:31:06] Jason Grahame: You know, one of our goals is to help prepare students and train them to be seeking to serve those who are in need. I mean, they could be working in a full time job as in surgery, plastic surgery, but yet. They find themselves wanting to serve those in need by working in a free health clinic or serving on missions trips or something to that end.

[00:31:23] Jason Grahame: And so, yeah, we want to see as many people as we can proclaim the name of Christ in health care and you know, push back the darkness where we can and to stand up for truth in that, in that arena. So having Having people be, you know, on fire for the Lord, involved in healthcare, having a sense of what they want to do and what God's called them to do and then pursue an education that's going to get them to that point.

[00:31:46] Jason Grahame: So good.

[00:31:46] The Missional Life - Dan: So how can listeners find more about your program? Because it seems like you're doing something right. Because if you're in the sites of organizations that want to take your program or remove your program, that to me, that says, huh, I should watch this program.

[00:32:00] The Missional Life - Dan: How do we learn more about the program? How can we follow you, Jason? As you're probably able to share more information as well from the front lines of this. Yeah,

[00:32:10] Jason Grahame: well, you can certainly find us on our website, you know, cedarville. edu forward slash P. A. That'll put you in touch with just our program in general.

[00:32:18] Jason Grahame: We're not on social media that much yet. That's one of my goals. But in the midst of trying to You know, through all of the accreditation steps and and getting through our first couple of cohorts. That's a long term goal. But yeah, we're mostly on the website is probably the easiest place. You can find my contact information.

[00:32:33] Jason Grahame: They're happy to continue to engage with people about, you know, where God's leading them. Where God can use them in healthcare and you know, continue to give updates on what we're doing. We'll see what the next House of Delegates meeting that'll happen again next May. We'll see if this becomes another issue again.

[00:32:50] Jason Grahame: Would not surprise me, but again, we know that the Lord is His loving kindness endures forever and we trust Him. And no matter what man may do God is still in control and sovereign. So but we'd love to connect with people as they Have interest and they can find us on our website.

[00:33:06] The Missional Life - Dan: Amen jason thank you so much for being on the show and sharing this really really important issue with our listeners Thank you.

[00:33:14] Jason Grahame: Yeah, my pleasure. And thanks for having me on. It's great to talk with you.

[00:33:18]