Fac­ulty Pro­file: Vicki De­Bolt

MISHAWAKA--Vicki De­Bolt, D.O., a grad­u­ate of Bethel, has made the most of her skills and abil­i­ties to serve peo­ple around the world by teach­ing them about health. She has been teach­ing at the uni­ver­sity since 2011, and cur­rently, she is the pro­fes­sor of Anatomy and Phys­i­ol­ogy, which is a year-long, ca­daver-based course. Dur­ing her time at Bethel, she taught en­vi­ron­men­tal sci­ence, hu­man and mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy, botany, zo­ol­ogy, ge­ol­ogy, a foun­da­tions course on ge­net­ics and in­ter­na­tional health. 

When De­Bolt was 16, she be­lieved God called her to be a mis­sion­ary doc­tor. With that in mind, she came to Bethel with a full schol­ar­ship to the Memo­r­ial School of Nurs­ing. She faced hard­ship when the school closed, and she had to de­cide what her next move was. She de­cided to ma­jor in Ed­u­ca­tion be­cause the de­part­ment had al­ways been very good, and she grad­u­ated with a de­gree in Ed­u­ca­tion with a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in bilin­gual ed­u­ca­tion. 

Once she ob­tained her de­gree, she taught at a mis­sion school in Ap­pala­cia and on the Texas bor­der. But her faith was pulling her to ac­quire her med­ical de­gree. With both de­grees, she runs the ca­daver pro­gram at Bethel. She never saw her­self re­turn­ing to her alma mater.  

“God’s way is a long cut, not a short cut,” De­Bolt said. 

De­Bolt has trav­eled around the world to pro­vide med­ical care. Her Bethel pro­file states that she has used her med­ical de­gree to pro­vide pri­mary care for In­dian reser­va­tions in South Dakota, mi­grant com­mu­ni­ties in Wis­con­sin and New Mex­ico and mis­sion trips in Mex­ico and In­dia.  

One of her fond­est trips was her scout trip to In­done­sia with a group of Bethel stu­dents where she made close friend­ships with fam­i­lies that lived there. On the trip, they pro­vided care for a home­less com­mu­nity of about 8,000 peo­ple. They were also the first Amer­i­cans to visit an all-Mus­lim is­land named Madura. She is still pro­vid­ing her knowl­edge and med­ical ad­vice to that com­mu­nity through friends in which she keeps con­tact. From this ex­pe­ri­ence, she was asked to write a lo­cal health ini­tia­tive to help In­done­sians care for their own peo­ple.  

Bul­garia is an­other coun­try that showed in­ter­est in this health ini­tia­tive, and she was in­vited to a hos­pi­tal there to pro­vide her care. She first went to visit in the spring of 2019 and plans on vis­it­ing again once travel be­comes more ac­ces­si­ble and safer.  

“The big thing, even with a lan­guage bar­rier, is for them to know the love of Christ, and for them to see that we’re not go­ing to come in as the ex­perts and tell them how to do things. We’re go­ing to come in with re­spect, and with lis­ten­ing, be­cause love lis­tens, and love re­spects,” De­Bolt said. 

When she thinks of all of her trips, the first thing that comes to her mind are the peo­ple she has met and the lives that have made an im­pact on her.   

She also has con­ducted re­search into the rel­e­vancy of Scrip­ture with new­found sci­en­tific knowl­edge. It is ti­tled, “In Agree­ment Fac­ulty Pro­ject.” Through it, she pro­vides in­for­ma­tion on 100 sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies, com­par­ing and con­trast­ing it to Scrip­ture in the hopes to help any­one who may strug­gle with their faith as a Chris­t­ian sci­en­tist.  

“What I wanted to some­how be able to demon­strate is: is Scrip­ture rel­e­vant to twenty-first-cen­tury sci­ence?” she said. 

She said her phi­los­o­phy of “lis­ten first, then re­spond,” brought her to read­ing the sci­en­tific jour­nals that were pub­lished each week and ask­ing her­self if Scrip­ture speaks on any of the is­sues. And she said she was blown away by what she found. 

De­Bolt does­n’t only help stu­dents on our cam­pus. She helps peo­ple with health­care in­ter­na­tion­ally and shares her faith in Christ as well. She plans to re­turn to both Bul­garia and In­done­sia to help strug­gling Chris­t­ian sci­en­tists with their re­search.  

“When we re­mind our­selves that there’s so much more to sci­ence than evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory, then we can see the beauty of life, the beauty of the pre­sent. The sci­en­tific method is pre­sent,” De­Bolt said. “It's what we can do in the pre­sent. And then when we be­gin to see the beauty of what is in the pre­sent, then we can trust God’s word.”