Dr. Dennis Sale works on an exam office at Heartland Community Church at 619 Vt., where he plans to open a small clinic so he can see patients as part of the church’s new ministry.

Fittingly, New Life in Christ church is celebrating its coming-out party with a new ministry.

New Life in Christ for the past 20 years had been known as Heartland Community Church, 619 Vt. With the fresh name introduced a few weeks ago, the church is also launching a medical ministry. That outreach program is called New Hope Medical Ministry. And like New Life and Heartland, it’s a reboot — 11 years ago it came into being as the Heartland Medical Clinic.

New Hope is aiming to see patients each Wednesday starting Sept. 1 for free and minimal-cost health care, says Dr. Dennis Sale, who will oversee the operation.

“We just hope that we can serve the people any way we can. We will be drawing blood on-site, we’ll be able to do EKGs, some good basic medical treatment. We’ll be as full-service as we can at this location,” Sale says. “Obviously, if we have patients who come in who need more expensive care, scans or X-rays, they’ll have to go to the hospital to get those done. We have no way to get those free, but we want to get the ball rolling and help people to identify their problems and move on to whatever they need to be done.”

Sale also started the Heartland clinic after moving from California to Kansas.

“In ’95 I started a mobile medical clinic in California in a converted RV,” says Sale, who is the medical director for the Douglas County Jail, Shawnee County Jail and the Kansas Juvenile Correctional Complex. “When we moved here my wife and I knew we wanted to do something here as well as a medical ministry.”

Sale sent a letter out to pastors in Lawrence explaining his vision, the Rev. Paul Gray responded, and Sale eventually settled at Gray’s church, Heartland.

The need in Lawrence turned out to be overwhelming, Gray says. The clinic quickly expanded to a five-days-per-week service seeing about 300 people per month, powered by volunteer labor and donations.

“We had many days when we’d have 15-20 people waiting to get in at 8 o’clock when we opened,” Gray says of the former clinic.

Because of the demand, Gray got with other pastors in the community and turned the clinic into The Leo Center, a nonprofit medical outreach program located in the Riverfront Plaza. Sale stayed on with the clinic, working out of the Leo Center until April, when they parted ways. After taking some time to focus on his jobs with the jail system and teach at Veritas Christian School, Sale was ready to start practicing minimal-cost medicine again.

“I still wanted to do a ministry in town,” Sale says. “Paul said, ‘Well, we don’t have much space in the church, but we can accommodate something.'”

Gray had an extra office, vacant since the church’s youth minister and Gray’s son-in-law Brandon White passed away from complications of bone cancer in March 2009, that he offered to Sale to see patients. Gray’s own office will be used by volunteers for Christian counseling with patients. It’s a small operation, but it’s perfect for Sale, who says, if he could, he’d love to be a full-time medical missionary.

“I’ve always wanted to do medical ministry. What I haven’t been able to do is to go out as a missionary and make that work,” Sale says. “And so, in order to try to put both worlds together, because I have to work to support my family, but at the same time, I want to give back where I can.”

Giving back where it can might as well be the new motto for New Life in Christ, which was renamed after two years of self-inspection, Gray says. As Gray tells it, the church had overextended itself and burnt out some members from its many ministries, so, two years ago, the church intentionally stopped all but its most basic outreach. That allowed the church and its members to really take a concentrated look at what it wanted to do and that concentration led Gray to feel called by Christ to do a complete overhaul in the church’s outward attitude as well.

“We just sort of analyzed, just tried to wrap our hands around the whole big picture thing of what Christ has been doing in the last two years, and it came down to New Life in Christ,” Gray says. “It’s not available anywhere else except in Christ.”