While driving past the Dallas Country Club and the beautiful homes surrounding it, I flipped open my daily planner to make sure I had the correct address for Christ’s Family Clinic. Perhaps I had misunderstood the clinic coordinator’s directions. However, pulling into the Preston Road Church of Christ parking lot in University Park, my questions were answered as I saw the health clinic’s entrance sign in English and Spanish.

I was eager to learn why the clinic seemed not to fit the typical geographical area of the 17 other DCMS Indigent Clinic Forum members with which Dallas County Medical Society partners, in providing volunteer physicians and other assistance. Most of the clinics are located in underserved areas. However, after hearing how the clinic got started, its location suddenly made perfect sense.

According to Myra Austin, clinic coordinator for Christ’s Family Clinic, the idea of starting the clinic began with the church’s preaching minister, Scott Sager, who lives two houses away from the church. His family employed a housekeeper once a week. As with most people who work as domestic employees in the Park Cities, she lived in a low-income neighborhood that borders the Park Cities area. Each day, most travel into the Park Cities by bus, and then return to their poverty-stricken neighborhoods after work. One week when the minister asked his family’s housekeeper how she was doing, she said she had spent part of the weekend in the ER with complications from asthma.

Having asthma himself, the minister understood the challenges that come with asthma, especially if left untreated. Because the housekeeper was at an economic disadvantage to control and monitor her condition, he was determined to figure out a way to help her and the other domestic workers in his community who suffered with health issues, but were too poor to get medical treatment. The minister hoped that by locating a clinic in the Park Cities, the residents would be reminded that it was their responsibility to take care of those who took care of them.

The clinic is funded by donations, patient copays, and health advocates, members of Preston Road Church of Christ who sponsor a patient for $300 a year. Central Dallas Ministries partners with the clinic by providing staff and other necessities. Christ’s Family Clinic is located at the corner of Preston Road and McFarlin Boulevard. Although the clinic initially targeted the surrounding neighborhoods in Park Cities, word has spread about the clinic and it now serves families from 37 ZIP codes.

After visiting the clinic and seeing the congregation putting its faith into action, a new way of thinking is obvious in the world of the affluent—that with affluence comes responsibility to use one’s resources to help those who struggle daily with the challenges of poverty.

After much work, the medical clinic opened in December 2003. The clinic provides internal and preventive medicine, well-woman exams, and family practice, pediatric and geriatric medicine.

DCMS member Jim Walton, DO, is the volunteer medical director of Christ’s Family Clinic and of Project Access, a DCMS community service project. He says that his work with the clinic began as a spiritual journey. In the early 1990s, Dr Walton had a thriving private practice. He recalls that as he sat in church on Sundays and heard the Bible teachings that stated Christians were to take care of the poor and help those who suffered injustice, he felt that God wouldn’t have offered him His love and grace just to sit in the pew each week and do nothing. He has come to realize that his mission in life is to relieve the oppression of those in poverty and to seek justice for those who suffer injustice.

“When you step out in faith to help those in poverty, you end up getting more out of the blessing than the ones you are trying to help,” he says.

Seeing the clinic in action and the patients lined up in the waiting room, eager to receive the health care that many of them had put off, it’s evident that this community believes in taking care of its own.

The clinic sees patients each Wednesday from 1–9 pm. The church hopes to expand the clinic hours, but that requires additional volunteer physicians and nurses. The clinic also needs certified medical assistants to take vitals and draw blood for lab work. If you are interested in volunteering at Christ’s Family Clinic, contact Connie Webster, DCMS director of community service, at 214-948-3622, ext. 226, or connie@dallas-cms.org.

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