More than 300 delegates gathered for the UK’s biggest church conference on HIV.
This was a unique assembly of Christians wanting to get informed – to engage with the issues that surround HIV and AIDS. An opportunity to discover not only what is already being achieved by local churches around the world, but also the effect that they as individuals might have with the knowledge and resources to help their own churches to respond in the UK.
Kay Warren, speaking to conference
The Positive Church Conference, produced by Tearfund and hosted by Bracknell Family Church on 15 March, opened with an emotive and captivating address by Kay Warren, Executive Director of the HIV initiative at Saddleback Church, California. She passionately spoke of her brokenness and her initial steps into communities torn by HIV and AIDS. Visiting a slum in Calcutta and how a magazine caught her eye with an article on AIDS in Africa. She struggled to look at pictures of emaciated bodies and babies so weak unable to brush flies from their faces. She would hold her hand in front of her face – ‘Making the monster of what I was seeing as small as I could …how can there be so many children orphaned in one place and I can’t name a single one of them. What’s wrong with me that my faith has not caused me to engage with a problem of this magnitude?’
She told the conference - those that were there just finding out, lifting the lid on the issues, ‘This day could be a decision to move and serve in ways unlike you ever have.
‘The truth is it’s not a sin to be sick and how someone became infected should not change the way we respond. We are called to respond to the sick with hope, compassion and healing.’
‘Every church can encourage people to get tested for HIV,’ she continued. ‘Every church can send volunteers into the community to be a part of caring for people doing practical things.
Every church can remove the stigma …every church can preach messages that break down those barriers that keep people away.’
Patricia Sawo is Tearfund’s HIV Ambassador and lives in Kenya. She is a wife and mother to five of her own children and five orphans. She described herself as a parent to a further 197 orphaned children she pastors in a church run centre, calling them her ‘big, big family’ and the ‘joy of her heart’. She spoke of how as a pastor she would preach messages of stigma and then felt the stigma herself when she became aware of her own HIV status. “God spoke to my heart and convinced me that HIV and AIDS was not something to be a punishment from God, that it was not a moral issue but it was an issue to deal with life,’ she said. ‘It was the enemy against our lives and our families, and so that changed my heart.’
‘The church has been known to do very good work when it comes to HIV and AIDS, but somehow we find out that our dealings with people living with HIV and AIDS and the continuing prevalence of HIV is alarming. And poverty also has a very big impact on HIV and having grown up in poverty and yearning to come out of it and having been faced with the diseases and stigma, I come out of it as somebody who speaks the language of the church leaders.’ Referring to Tearfund’s ‘passion’ of mobilising 100,000 churches within the next ten years to impact 50 million lives, Patricia added: ‘That is something I am able to do as a church leader through the local congregation and therefore in a position to influence and change the attitudes of other church leaders so that together we can get involved with the work of HIV and AIDS and make a difference.”
The conference had reflection on where the Church has fallen short – the failings of miss-action and inaction. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Secretary for International Development, David Peck said, ‘It takes responsibility for doing the right things and it takes responsibility for doing the wrong things and our contribution has wonderfully been right and sadly been wrong. So what we need to focus on is the repentance for what we get wrong and the energising and focussing in building what we get right.
‘You cannot read the bible and think that 33 million people around the world who are HIV+ and how many 10s of millions more are impacted by the weight of that illness and the vulnerability that HIV creates and think it doesn’t involve Jesus and it doesn’t involve me.’
Conference seminars followed including a focus on supporting vulnerable groups such as asylum seekers within the community – feeling the isolation of HIV; leadership within the church and biblical responses around the pandemic.
The senior pastor of Bracknell Family Church was a leader excited by the day – the event on his patch, and his church community at the gateway to positive challenge and change. Simon Benham described the event as part of laying down a foundation as a church that so many people had come. “It just launches us into a whole new phase of involvement,’ said Simon. ‘People have come from all over the place. You know in some sense we can become a flagship in the UK for how churches can engage. Not in a way that we would boast about, but just in away that would equip and enable other churches to be involved because of our involvement. That would be so cool for us.’