Grace Dental and Medical Missions (GDMMissions), Inc. was founded in 1996 as Grace Dental Mission, Inc. - a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation whose purpose is to help local churches in their efforts toward worldwide evangelism.
Earlier, in 1992, an opportunity had presented itself to help a missionary family on furlough from Africa with their personal dental needs. An outgrowth of this experience was an awareness of the difficulties many missionary families face obtaining affordable dental care.  The mission was established a few years later with a burden to help missionaries by providing free dental care to qualified families both in the United States and on foreign fields.

The first two ministry trips to foreign fields (Senegal, West Africa and Papua New Guinea), were primarily focused on treating missionary families serving in those locations. While on these trips it became obvious that the dental ministry could be used as a tool to bring unsaved people in contact with the message of the Gospel. Beginning with the next ministry trip to Mexico in 1998, the focus began to change toward assisting missionaries and local churches in their evangelistic outreach. While still interested in meeting the needs of the missionaries, the overriding purpose of the ministry trips became evangelistic, bringing the missionary in contact with those seeking dental care.  It was not unusual that during a two week ministry several hundred people would be brought into contact with the local church planting missionary and local believers.  Also in 1998, we started to include non-dental participants in these ministries to aid in the evangelistic outreach, with a particular emphasis on ministering to children. This proved to be beneficial not only to the missionary on the field, but also to those participating and their respective local churches. These “team field trips” became a regular part of the mission.

In addition to the change in emphasis to evangelism first, we began to see other health care professionals, such as physicians, nurses, and dental hygienists desiring to serve God with their skills and love for the lost. With this expansion into the medical field we saw that we could impact even greater numbers of people. As a result, the Board of Directors voted in February, 2009 to officially change the name of the mission from Grace Dental Mission to Grace Dental and Medical Missions (GDMMissions).    

Since its founding in 1996 through 2008, GDMMissions has treated approximately 2,000 missionary family members and participated in over fifty mission trips to more than twenty different countries.