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“He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18-19. 

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ commissioned His followers to proclaim His name and carry the Gospel to all nations as His witnesses, and ophthalmic surgery provides an excellent platform for achieving this goal. Unlike most fields in medicine that require long-term follow up and repetitive treatments in order to attain favorable patient outcomes, ophthalmic surgery offers rapid and substantial functional improvement with limited postoperative care often after just a single operation. Cataracts are responsible for millions of people losing their vision each year in developing countries and remain the number one cause of blindness in the world, yet they are potentially curable with surgery. In the United States, cataract surgery can often be performed in less than 15 minutes with a greater than 99% success rate, and a vast majority of patients experience beneficial effects of the restored vision on the very first postoperative day without further rehabilitation.  However, a lack of effective governing, an inadequate number of properly trained eye surgeons, and limited financial resources sadly deny the majority of people residing in developing countries access to cataract surgery.  These challenges make ophthalmic surgery a particularly attractive discipline to the missionary arena.  

Christian Ophthalmic Surgery Expedition Network (ChOSEN) was founded in 2014 as a 501c3 charity in order to provide high-quality eye surgery and share the Gospel to the developing world.   Throughout these years of service, ChOSEN has strived not only to perform a greater number of surgeries during each successive project but also to improve upon the working conditions of these projects.  We can now closely replicate the environment of our own surgical suites in the United States while in the foreign mission field, and our patients in the developing world typically experience similar postoperative outcomes to our patients in the United States. ChOSEN is inter-denominational and principally concerned with sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ as displayed in the Holy Bible through prayer, preaching, discussion, song, scripture reading, and the gifting of Bibles to patients and their families. 

Help us continue the vital work of restoring sight to the blind and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor to these people in great physical and spiritual need. Whether by monetary gifts, gifts of service or both, you can make a difference. ChOSEN works as the healing hands of a compassionate God who commands His confessors to look after the needs of our impoverished and downtrodden neighbors, while at the same time pointing them to The Great Physician, Jesus Christ whose death on the cross covers over all of our sins and offers definitive healing to our sick bodies and minds! 

Ryan Rush, MD
President and Founder of ChOSEN