On August 17th, 2021, Christian Healthcare Centers held their ground-breaking for their Newaygo health clinic location. Mark Blocher, President/CEO spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony, and here is some highlights from his speech:
“Let me tell you a little bit of background of how we ended up coming to Newaygo. It’s already been mentioned that Dave and Heather Allen, they are patients at Christian Healthcare Centers. They were one of the first families. Heather called me one day and said, would you take a call from Scott Faulkner from the City of Newaygo? He wants to talk to you about the possibility of Christian Healthcare Centers coming to Newaygo. And so we talked, Scott finally called and he said, “Have you at Christian Healthcare Centers ever considered coming to Newaygo?” And I said, “Well, let me look at our strategic plan. Nope. Newaygo is not on the strategic plan.” And so I just kind of laid out four or five steps that needed to be followed, things that had to happen. Which I thought then at the end of that call, that was the last time I was going to hear from Scott Faulkner. The next thing I know, he’s coming down to our office in Grand Rapids. From there he brought a delegation down. So we moved forward. And along the way, interestingly enough, we also had a general surgeon who lives in Fremont, Ted. But Ted said, “You know, God is giving me this dream that we would have, in Newaygo, a place where we could provide primary care and we could provide some in-office procedures and outpatient simple surgeries, things that I could do in my own backyard to benefit my own community.” And I thought, oh, that’s kind of a cool, for a general surgeon to have that interest, but we didn’t have any plans to come to Newaygo.
Our goal in coming here is not to say hey, now that we’re here, all of your problems are solved in terms of healthcare; we’re here to bring a different model of healthcare to the community, we’re here to be good neighbors, and we’re here to help the people of this community flourish. And to the extent that we can do that, we feel that we’re part of Newaygo.
This is something that we tend to have high impact in this community and frankly, my visionary mindset is this is kind of the template that we will use, the cookie-cutter, as we look to other communities that have similar needs and would invite us to come there as well. We dedicate this day and this project to God, who is the great physician and who is the one that really deserves all of the glory and all of the praise.”
You can find more information about the Newaygo location here.
