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About

“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 reversible 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, limited financial resources, political instability, and cultural barriers 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 public charity in order to provide high-quality eye surgery at no cost to the patient and share the Gospel to the developing world. Throughout these years of service, ChOSEN has strived not only to perform a greater number of eye surgeries during each successive year but also to expand to nations where eye care is scarce.  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. 

Our Journey

In 2009, Drs. J. Avery Rush and Ryan Rush, both board-certified ophthalmologists from Texas, began providing eye surgeries in Mexico. Over time, they established partnerships with local ophthalmologists, invested in surgical facilities, and brought in high-quality equipment and supplies. This groundwork laid the foundation for Chosen’s growth outside of Mexico.
In 2019, the Chosen Board of Directors made the decision to expand its missionary activities into other underdeveloped countries where little to no eye surgery was being performed on the indigent population. Work began in Nicaragua in 2021, in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2022, and most recently in the Amazonian region of Peru in 2024.

“Help us continue the transformative work of restoring sight to the blind and proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor to our patients in great physical and spiritual need. Whether by monetary or in-kind gifts or acts of service, 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, the Lord Jesus Christ whose death on the cross covers over all of our sins and offers the definitive healing to our bodies and minds!”

Ryan Rush, M.D. – Co-Founder, ChOSEN