Here's a report from Ethics Daily:
California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, speaking Wednesday at a White
House discussion on HIV/AIDS, said the church has been a latecomer to addressing
the pandemic but is now "here to stay."
"The church was late to the table on this issue and we have repented of
that, but we are here to stay," he said. "This is not flavor of the week for me.
This is a long-term battle, the eradication of HIV/AIDS."
Warren and his wife, Kay, recently co-hosted an AIDS summit at their Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. They traveled to Washington to join more than 130
ambassadors, federal officials and ministry leaders for a roundtable discussion
hosted by the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.
Speakers cited examples of international and national partnerships
between faith-based groups, businesses and governments to work on prevention and treatment of AIDS and urged continued efforts to reduce the stigma some attach
to the disease.
"This is a problem that demands our attention, and the local church is among the actors making a big difference," said Jay Hein, director of the White House faith-based office.
Marty McGeein, the executive director of the Presidential Advisory Council on AIDS, said groups like the Salvation Army and Esperanza, a Hispanic faith-based organization, are working with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on HIV prevention.
"We need faith leaders to address the stigma that continues to allow HIV to spread," said McGeein, a deputy assistant secretary at HHS.
Dr. Adnan Hammad, director of the ACCESS Community Health & Research Center in Dearborn, Mich., said leaders have to go through a "journey" with religious officials to help them come to a point where they can address the AIDS crisis. Once, he said, mosques burned fliers about AIDS that were left in their buildings.
"Now we screen for HIV in our local mosques," he said.
Your post makes my stomach churn, but probably not for the reasons you might think.
ReplyDeleteI am a person living with HIV/AIDS, and this is my 25th year of this struggle.
Why is it that the "Christian Church has sat by blindly condemning any and all of us who have acquired this virus in our blood stream? Are we not as valuable as the whore that Jesus had lunch with during his ministry. Was he not "condemned" by the officials of the temple for doing so?
Truly, I find this current action by the "Christian" churches of today very suspect, and I question the motivation of their involvement in government. Would they currently be so interested and involved if we didn't have a President that was giving social programs over to the church and doing so with great influxes of dollars to fund such actions?
If you follow the true and honest ministry of Jesus that we have been given, it would follow that Jesus would have embraced us and our challenges 30 years ago, when we were dying in the streets of this great country. NO, it took 50,000 deaths before Ronnie Raygun would even mention the acronym HIV from the whitehouse.
Now for the subject of stigma that the HHS is so very worried about.
We have been telling you strange people for over 25 years now that this virus doesn't have any ability to determine the gender, sexual preference, or anything else about the host. Only that the host is human and has an immune system that contains a receptive CD4 cell. How stupid and what a waste of time it has been, now that the main struggle is one of obliterating stigma that has been created by not only the government, but the holy churches and pastors that have condemned us for years.
How very sad that the Jesus that I worship is now dealing with a church that would have killed us off, or at the very least sent us all to Guantanamo Bay for isolation, like the Raygun Administration would have liked.
Please!
Moffie,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate what you have gone through, and nothing except the love of Jesus can ever make it right. I do take execption to you post in two ways.
1) It seems like you are holding people like Rick Warren and myself responsible for pain inflicted upon you that we had nothing to do with. God wants us all to forgive, even when his people sin against us, and he certainly doesn't want us to misdirect anger toward others' sins against those who are trying to make positive change.
2) I don't think referring to "the church" is any more applicable than refering to "the gays." There are churches who have loved, helped, and supported those afflicted with AIDS just like there are gay people who have not engaged in promiscuious behavior and put themselves at risk and many who contracted the virus through no fault of their own.
I pray that you find peace with you situation and feel God's love as you move through it.
DVD to Help Battle AIDS in Africa .
ReplyDeleteIn 1993, I produced a documentary a film entitled, TRACY'S CHOICES. This is the story of the first person, in the state of Illinois, to be sent to prison, for the knowing attempt to transmit HIV. It's more a film about the choices young people make, and AIDS was the backdrop.
Soon after the release of TRACY'S CHOICES, I learned two realities. The secular world wasn't very interested in the Christian message, and churches refused to admit that activities, leading to HIV infection, could possibly be present in the church. So the program languished. Then a third reality set in. I thought to myself, and began saying to others, "TRACY'S CHOICES is a film that was simply produced too soon. In time, conditions will change, and a market will develop." Well, that's what seems to be happening.
A couple of weeks ago, I shipped 500 DVD copies of TRACY’S CHOICES, to an international ministry, for their use in AIDS education in Africa. While I’m very pleased by this development, TRACY’S CHOICES was produced, primarily, for showing to American young people, because as we say in the film, “It’s time we told our kids that some of the choices they make can kill them.”
Since the sale to Operation Mobilization, and my promotion of that event, I have been asked for preview copies by Urban Ministries, and The National Baptist Convention. Then yesterday, a large ministry in South Africa asked to become a distributor. To say the least, things are picking up speed.
So, I simply wanted to let you know about this film, in the event there are others you can inform.
Learn more about TRACY’S CHOICES here:
http://www.assistnews.net/strategic/s0107059.htm
http://www.maxbooks.9k.com/photo2.html
http://www.videcomp.com/fsnet/tracy_review.html
Sincerely,
Max Elliot Anderson
Producer
Mander8813@aol.com