Dr. Michael Elmore: God changes hearts, and mission work changes lives

Dr. Michael Elmore has been volunteering his medical expertise in third-world countries for decades, and along the way he has inspired countless others to do the same.

It is something he is passionate about and something he encourages everyone to do — not just to spread God’s love as an expression of their Christian faith but also to enhance their own perspective about their own lives and blessings.

However, it was not always the case. In fact, he was once downright averse to taking his talents on the road.

“I had never really wanted to do mission work,” Elmore recalls. “I saw a lot of my fellow physicians who I didn’t think lived particularly faithful lives in service to God by their behaviors, but suddenly they would leave and land on foreign soil and — wham-o — they were missionaries. I had to ask God to forgive me for that.”

He still was not inclined to do international missions, but since he had asked God to forgive him for having judged others, he figured he should have an open mind.

“I basically told God, ‘Listen, I don’t want anything to do with that mission stuff. If you want me to be involved, you have to change my heart’,” Elmore says. “He’s all about that — changing hearts.”

His first mission work would be in Guatemala, but it didn’t start with a trip from Indianapolis to Guatemala. Instead, a little slice of Guatemala came to him. Elmore was working with the Christian Medical Foundation based out of Tampa, Fla., and they were trying to set up a regional meeting in Indianapolis. Through those efforts, he met a surgeon — Dr. Julio Fuentes out of Guatemala.

Dr. Fuentes wanted to see an endoscopy performed, and Dr. Elmore, a gastroenterologist, was happy to host the visiting doctor for a couple of days. Though Elmore did not speak Spanish, nor Fuentes any English, Fuentes’ wife was able to serve as translator. That helped the two doctors become fast friends, and her invitation at the end of their stay changed everything:

“Julio and I would like to invite you to Guatemala.”

“I heard myself saying that I’d love to,” Elmore remembers. “I remember crying, literally, on the way home and saying, ‘God, you tricked me. What have you done?’”

The next year, he took his 12-year-old daughter, his pastor’s daughter who wanted to be a nurse and a friend who was a pharmaceutical representative on his first trip to Guatemala. He did gastrointestinal clinics and performed 40 endoscopies. He left the equipment behind so that the work could continue.

“That’s how everything got started,” Elmore says. “So, every year I would go back. After three or four years of just going back and working with Julio, he came up and lived with us for two months while he did a sabbatical at Saint Francis. The year after that, Julio returned to work with a friend.”

As his friend from Guatemala became a familiar face, Elmore’s work in Guatemala also became well-known. Everybody started asking about his trips to Guatemala and how they could get involved. He and wife, Chris, began taking medical teams to do clinics in the country. The teams ranged in size from 15 to 56 people.

After his first trip to Guatemala, Elmore shared some slides from the trip at his Parc-Way Assembly of God. He noticed Jeff Cardwell nudging his wife, Cheryl, in the back of the room and saying it looked interesting.

“It was this presentation by Dr. Elmore at my church that planted the seed and inspired for me to do international missions,” Cardwell says. “I remember seeing the photos of the adventures during his travels and thinking that would be something I would love to do. I loved his adventure travel, but I knew I had no medical gifts to offer. You could hear the passion in his voice as he told the stories of his mission trip. He was able to merge his medical gifts of being a doctor by putting his faith in action serving those in need.”

Cardwell’s company was building custom homes in Indianapolis, and he had become involved with Habitat for Humanity. Elmore’s talk further resonated with him because he knew that Guatemala was Habitat’s first international affiliate.

It was another 10 years before Cardwell would himself go on a life-altering mission trip to Central America as his then 11-year-old daughter, Sara, dragged him “kicking and screaming” to El Salvador.

“I had no intentions on going at that time since it was in the peak of our business season, but God had other plans!” Cardwell recalls. “This trip changed my life. After seeing the needs in El Salvador, I found my place on the mission field where my skills could be used.”

Cardwell and Elmore lost touch for a while after a senior pastor left their church. Then, a few years after the trip to El Salvador, they reconnected when Cardwell’s then 4-year-old son was experiencing a medical crisis.

“We had taken him to several specialists and ended up at Riley’s Children’s Hospital,” Cardwell says. “It was a very difficult time in our lives when we needed help in dealing with all of the medical issues and that was when I reached out to my friend, Dr. Elmore, that I hadn’t seen in years.

“Like old friends he invited Cheryl and I to come over to his house that evening. To make a very long story short, I can honestly say he saved my son’s life. It is a long story, but it was a miracle.”

The two friends had reunited, both now having expertise in helping their Central American friends — Elmore on the medical front and Cardwell in housing. They may not have known it at the time, but the elements of The People Helping People Network’s holistic HOPE Equation (Housing + Hunger relief + Healthcare + Education x Faith = HOPE) was beginning to take shape.

“We brought our passions for missions together,” Cardwell says. “In 2003, we chartered a 737 with 160 volunteers and hosted a mission trip to San Marcos, Guatemala, to build houses with Habitat for Humanity, host medical missions and distribute food with the World Food Program distributing food to the communities we were serving.”

Elmore is now a board member of The People Helping People Network and is proud of the holistic approach the nonprofit ministry has taken to not just help people but also to empower them to help themselves and their families in the future.

“In Guatemala I often wondered, ‘What did we really accomplish?’” he says. “Many times those people would say, ‘That was the best day of my whole life.’ That was hard for us to comprehend. I often wondered how does that really affect the family and everything as a whole. We’d go into a community that is perhaps destitute — people living in shacks made of tin and wood and plastic that they could scrape together, no running water, sewage everywhere, just awful.”

The partnerships on multiple fronts of nonprofit work — including with The Fuller Center for Housing, whose board of directors is chaired by Cardwell and has built more than 500 homes in El Salvador — are what Elmore insists has led to recent years of remarkable progress in the country.

“We’re now able to build communities in cooperative partnerships,” he says. “Now they say they don’t just live in a ‘bario’ — they live in a ‘colonia,’ a community. There are lights at night, they have water in their homes, they have septic systems. I’ve always said that if you want to solve 90 percent of the health care problems in those places, give them (bathroom facilities) and give them clean water to drink. Our housing projects have done that. And People Helping People has a variety of medical services that continue to expand.

“We’ve always said that from an education standpoint that hungry kids living in a bad situation can’t learn,” he continues. “So now they’re in their own safe home, and we’ve eliminated 90 percent of their health problems. Through the food program, we’re making sure they’re fed well, so now they can study and learn. When you look at the thousands of people who have moved into the homes, it completely transforms their lives. What has happened is sort of mind-blowing.”

Perhaps Elmore’s greatest ongoing legacy is the one that started when he first inspired Cardwell and a few others by sharing slides at his church — inspiring others to travel and serve. The greatest inspiration, though, comes when people actually join him on the ground in the mission field.

“When you start going into third-world countries and you start going into remote areas where the need is greatest, it changes everything,” he says. “The first phase when you first start going is just shock and awe about what the heck is going on in these countries — you can’t believe it’s that bad. The next phase is when you start taking teams. You’re over the initial shock. You’re used to seeing the poverty, the disease, the suffering. But now you’re taking people who are impacted by that, as well.”

He gets tremendous joy from seeing others have their hearts changed to the point that they follow in his footsteps.

“What’s cool about that is there are some, not all, who God taps on the shoulder and goes, ‘I want you to do this or that,’” he says. “So they get involved — sometimes with you, sometimes with their own ministries. I can’t tell you how many medical students I’ve taken down there who’ve started their own ministries.”

Elmore is looking forward to his next trip to El Salvador with The People Helping People Network later this fall.

“Now when I go down, I love seeing the work that we’ve done, but even more I love the challenge of the new stuff that we can still envision doing,” he says. “And I love watching the actions of the people on the trip. Some have been in these situations many times, but others are there for the first time. I watch how God impacts them and gets them excited.”