Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Dr. Roger Youmans.
Dr. Roger Youmans was a general surgeon from Kansas City who knew at four years old that he was going to be a medical missionary. He served three terms in the Congo, the last as medical director of the largest hospital in Kinshasa. He later built a Christian healing center beside his surgical practice in San Diego and taught at the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine. He was a Methodist layman, never ordained, and had been attending Camps Farthest Out since he was a boy.
Roger was born in Kansas City, Kansas, the youngest of six children. His father ran a print shop. When Roger was two or three, he came running to find his mother, too excited to get the words out properly. He had seen Jesus walking on the water in the bathroom. He later told the story at CFO. “And what there was was a spider that was walking on the water.” He never had a dramatic conversion story. “I always wished I had a good dramatic conversion story. But I didn’t. Jesus was real from the time I was a little kid.”
When Roger was four, he nailed together a little ladder with three rungs and carried it around the yard. Behind his father’s print shop stood a cement-block burner about five feet high, where the shop’s trash was burned. Roger discovered that he could lean his ladder against it and climb onto the top. One day the top layer of tile gave way.
He fell into the burner. Tiles came down on his head, and he climbed out covered in soot, with blood running down his face. The neighbor girl’s older sister worked for his father in the print shop and came running out to find him. Roger’s concern was not the blood. He asked her to get the tin can off the seat of his pants. He told that story for years. The lesson was simple: people come to Jesus dirty and hurt, asking him to take away what is clinging to them.
Around the same age, while standing in that same yard, Roger got dust in his eye. As he wiped it away, he suddenly knew that God wanted him to be a medical missionary. “As I wiped the dust out of my eye, I was suddenly aware that God wanted me to be a medical missionary. Now, I didn’t hear an audible voice, but I knew that I was to be a medical missionary.” There were no doctors in his family, and he had never met a missionary.
Roger was already attending CFO camps as a teenager. “And I remember Glenn Clark and Roland Brown and some of the others. Went to camps in Kansas and down in Tennessee and a few other places.” He married Mary after his first year of medical school. Mary Youmans was herself a longtime CFO speaker. Her family lived in Clay Center, Kansas. Roger said she had never heard of a missionary until she met him and was certain he would eventually get over it.
He received his medical degree from the University of Kansas in 1958. Mary taught school to help put him through medical school. His surgical residency lasted five years, sometimes requiring 100 to 120 hours a week, with two small daughters at home.
In 1961, shortly after the Congo became independent, the country appealed for doctors. Roger’s chief of surgery agreed to let him go for six months on the condition that he leave his family behind. Mary had already bought the passports. A church dinner raised the money for their fares, and the family went with him.
Roger arrived with plenty of surgical training and very little experience of tropical medicine. “I was in a hospital where I didn’t know any tropical medicine. Couldn’t speak French and French is the official language.” His second term took him to the Methodist station at Wembo-Nyama in central Congo. He arrived just after the missionary Burleigh Law was shot in August 1964. “They shot him. He died on the operating table there at Wembo-Nyama just before I got there.”
The station closed, and the family was flown home. Roger later went on to Lodja and Luluabourg, where he contracted malaria and eventually returned home himself. He came back feeling that he had failed. “I felt in a very real sense that I was a missionary failure. That I was a dropout.” For the next three years he taught surgery at the University of Kansas and directed its emergency service.
In 1970, Roger went back to the Congo for a third term, this time to the capital. Mobutu’s personal physician recruited him. Roger became medical director of FOMECO and chief of staff and chief of surgery at Kinshasa General Hospital, a 1,700-bed hospital. The hospital saw about 3,500 outpatients a day and delivered about 135 babies a day. Roger developed a sixteen-question, color-coded triage system to sort the crowds.
Something else was happening at home. Mary had begun attending a Pentecostal church in Kinshasa and came home happy. One day she told Roger he ought to come and hear the American preacher there, who preached in English. She had seen poor, unschooled, sick Africans come before the Lord and receive wholeness, joy and health. Roger went. He was baptized in the Holy Spirit. For two months he told none of his colleagues at the hospital. They kept asking him why he was grinning. “I discovered I could pronounce the name of Jesus with conviction and with power.”
Roger’s first anointing with oil was for a Swiss mechanic with trigeminal neuralgia. He did it in the man’s crowded living room, with supper frying in one corner, because James 5 told him to. It was the first time he had ever used oil. The man went on vacation, cut his medication in half, then to a quarter, and finally stopped taking it. The headaches never returned. His neurologist repeated the tests and found nothing wrong. “If it’s not a spontaneous remission, we’ll call it a misdiagnosis. But God looks at it, and he calls it a miracle.”
After that, Roger began anointing patients on the open wards. “I can remember clearly praying for this nurse, this man who had a big liver full of tumor. And I and another surgeon and a pathologist went there, and on the open ward, that government hospital in Kinshasa, we anointed him with oil and claimed healing for him in Jesus’ name. And he was healed.”
Roger’s father-in-law was a retired army colonel. Roger had been a conscientious objector. The colonel was a Southern gentleman and Roger was a Midwestern liberal, and the two men did not discuss their differences. Roger was afraid of him.
Once, after landing in New York from the Congo, Roger had to telephone his father-in-law collect to find out where Mary and their four children were. He later told the story as “My Son Has Come Home”. The operator asked the colonel whether he would accept the charges. Roger heard him answer: “My son has come home.” “I cried.”
The family eventually settled in Chula Vista, and Roger spent about six years in the San Diego area. He built a free, nonprofit Christian Healing Center beside the Cross Medical Group, where he continued his surgical practice. The two facilities shared a waiting room but served very different purposes. The healing center offered noon prayer, counseling, Scripture therapy, music therapy, and lifestyle clinics. Roger was clear about what stood at the center of it all. “But the healing center is Jesus Christ.”
He was also chief of surgery at Chula Vista Community Hospital and chaired the Medicine and Religion Committee of the San Diego County Medical Society. He hosted a weekly half-hour television program, Call the Doctor, and each year conducted a course called Approaches to Healing, with Francis MacNutt as its principal speaker. Francis MacNutt was a longtime CFO speaker.
Around 1980, Roger moved to Tulsa to teach at the Oral Roberts University School of Medicine. He wanted to reach doctors while they were still young. “I wanted to work with the young doctors before they got caught up in the weeds and the thorns that grow up around physicians and entangle them in cares of the world where it strangles the gospel.”
He was concerned about what medical training could do to the people receiving it. “These are the healers that we’re training. Who will heal the healers? As they come out of medical school, out of residency programs, technically oriented and skillful, but broken, wounded people.” He developed that theme in “Who Will Heal the Healers?”.
On December 23, 1980, at forty-seven, Roger had a heart attack while playing basketball in the university gym. The internists he had been playing with gathered around him, joined hands, and prayed. He spent ten days in the hospital and six weeks away from work.
Roger never saw a conflict between scientific medicine and biblical healing. “There’s nothing unscientific or illogical about the way God heals people on a biblical basis. It’s our problem.” He developed his own definition of health: “Health is that relationship between an organism and its environment that enables that organism to fulfill its purpose.” He connected health, holiness and wholeness through their common root.
He also urged Christians to raise their level of expectation without exaggerating what God had done. “We don’t have to exaggerate miracles as Christians. We don’t have to squint our eyes and pretend things happen when they don’t.” Roger was a surgeon, a missionary and a man who believed in healing prayer, but he did not see those things as competing loyalties. He kept looking for better medical methods while also looking for what God was doing. “We are always looking for better methods. God is looking for better people.”
Roger spent his later years in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. In 2006 he published When Bull Elephants Fight: An American Surgeon’s Chronicle of Congo, drawing on his years as a surgeon and missionary in the Congo. He died in Springdale, Arkansas, on November 14, 2019, at eighty-six.
Roger Youmans had known since he was four what he was going to do with his life. He became the surgeon he had seen in that childhood moment, went where doctors were needed, and spent the rest of his life bringing together the things he had never seen as separate: medicine, prayer, healing, and faith in Jesus Christ.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.