As co-founder of California’s Saddleback Church, Kay Warren thought she lived a faithful and Purpose Driven Life. But she had to reassess her outlook six years ago when she became `seriously disturbed’ by the HIV and AIDS pandemic. So disturbed that she launched her own international mission to speak out on behalf of 33 million people living worldwide with the disease. So when Tearfund sent her an invitation to speak at a UK conference on HIV, the wife of Rick Warren of Purpose Driven Life fame leapt at the chance.
What brought you here?
KW: Tearfund invited me to be part of this very historic HIV conference, I’ve heard it’s the largest conference for Christians who are talking about HIV in the UK so it was a thrilling opportunity.
How did you get involved in HIV?
KW: Very unexpectedly. I just read a news magazine article one day for some reason. Now looking back I know it was a divine moment but at that time it was completely unexpected.
There was a story about AIDS in Africa that captured my attention. Up to that point I didn’t care, honestly I didn’t care at all. I never thought about it, I didn’t know anyone who was HIV positive, I didn’t know any HIV orphans, so it didn’t touch my life, it was very far removed for me.
But that day when I read that article it captured my attention. I realised that the greatest humanitarian crisis was developing right under my nose.
So I spent some time just passionately wrestling with God telling him that this didn’t have anything to do with me, I didn’t know anything about it, how could I make a difference?
After several weeks I realised this was definitely God’s call, that he did want me to become a voice for those that don’t have a voice.
And so I said "Yes, I will be what you want me to be, I’ll care about people with HIV".
Is there a particular story that comes to mind when you think about HIV?
KW: There are some both around the world and some closer to where I live. I will never forget that the first woman I met with HIV was in Mozambique and she lived homeless under a tree.
When I met her she and her husband had been kicked out of two villages and she had nowhere to go. She only had the clothes on her back, she had diarrhoea and was only about a week away from death, she was completely emaciated, just skin and bones.
It rocked my faith, I just didn’t know how to respond. I realised I didn’t know what to say to her. What do you say to a dying homeless woman under a tree?
My faith had prepared me to figure out who had the best price of chicken this week, I know how to talk to families when they are having struggles within their marriage and I know how to talk to women about their lives and I know how to teach the Bible, but I didn’t know what to say to a dying homeless woman.
She was there because of stigma. She had been kicked out of villages because people were afraid of her. That was such a powerful lesson to me about what stigma can do, how it can harm people.
It would be easy to say that just happens in Africa, in some place else but that’s not true. It happens around the world.
In my community in California I know the story of a man who had to live in his brother’s backyard. His brother would not let his disabled HIV brother live in his house, so he had to live in the backyard.
His meals were brought out to him, he had to take a shower with the garden hose. I say the dog in that family was treated better because at least the dog got to come into the house. So stigma is alive and well in our world.
It’s alive and well in all our communities and Christians have a responsibility to end that stigma.
You talk about stigma, what is the biggest misconception we have in the West about HIV and AIDS?
KW: Well I can’t speak for the UK but I can speak absolutely positively for the US, where there is still the perception that it is a gay man’s disease.
For me for a long time I thought that meant I didn’t have to care. I felt if you were a gay man and were HIV positive you had put yourself at risk and therefore had no right to expect any sympathy from me. My heart was really hard.
I was very wrong. I have since learnt that it is not a gay man’s disease, more women than men are infected around the world.
But what if it were just a gay man’s disease? Does that change the level of compassion? And for a long time I would have said “Yes” but now I understand absolutely it doesn’t.
If we have to ask how someone became infected and how they became infected changes our response to them, then something is wrong with us.
We are not accurately representing God’s heart. So I think the greatest perception in the western church is that it is a gay man’s disease or it’s a disease of drug users. In other words it’s a disease where someone had done something terribly wrong, therefore I don’t have to care.
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.
When we hear about HIV, it’s normally in connection with some appeal and there’s lots of numbers. How do you mentally breakthrough the statistics to be able to tackle the crisis and help people involved with it?
KW: You’ve hit on the key. The key is to make AIDS personable. As long as it is statistics, faceless numbers it’s difficult to get your heart engaged, it’s difficult to care.
But when Aids becomes personal, when it’s somebody you know, when AIDS wears a name and a face your heart is easily engaged.
For me it was meeting people who are HIV positive. I first met them in Africa and then I came back to my own community and said "No I can’t just care about people in Africa, I must care about people in my community who are HIV positive".
One of the reasons I didn’t know anyone who was HIV positive was because I wasn’t a safe person for others to talk about themselves to and my church was not a safe place for people to disclose their status. So I had to come back and make our church a safe place to talk about HIV.
And when I did, I then began to meet HIV men and woman in my own church, then it was very personal.
How can individual Christians and churches get involved and make a difference in this area?
KW: You’ve hit on a key factor. Say you do start to care and do start to feel your heart stirred and feel “I need to respond to this” but usually then our second response is “I have no idea what to do about a pandemic, a disease that spans the globe.”
We believe there are six things every church can do. We believe that every church no matter their size can support and care for the sick, that doesn’t cost any money. All it takes is a commitment to care.
Every church can encourage people to get tested for HIV. Every church can send their 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.
Every church can talk about God’s standards. We know how to prevent HIV, it’s not a mystery so the church can preach those messages of prevention.
Every church can do simple things such as calling someone who is HIV positive and reminding them to take their medication. That sounds such a minor thing to do but it can help save their life.
You don’t have to be a big church, a wealthy church, or even that knowledgeable, all you have to do is have a willingness to do something.
I think those six things are very do-able and practical.
Why did you write your new book Dangerous Surrender?
KW: I wrote the book as a way of multiplying my own efforts as a person – I can’t get to every church or group to speak to them but I could put it in a book form that would challenge living as a seriously disturbed and gloriously ruined man or woman of Christ.
For me being dangerously surrendered to God led me to be an advocate for people with HIV.
The reality is God has an adventure for every one of us and if you say “Yes” to God and he may lead you on a different route to the one he led me.
He may make your heart beat fast about homelessness, he may put a passion in your heart for people who are addicted. Whatever it is, God will put something in your heart when we say yes to Him.
Can you explain what the idea of dangerous surrender and gloriously ruined is all about, it sounds uncomfortable – why would I want to be gloriously ruined?
It is uncomfortable. But I have found that through saying yes to God and in as much as I know how saying "God I am yours you can do with me as you wish’” that in that process of becoming seriously disturbed and dangerously ruined I have a different intimacy level with God than I have had before.
Yes I cried, I cried every day because of the suffering that many in our world are enduring. But at the same time I am more full of joy, there is a vibrancy to my faith as I share in the fellowship of sufferings of Christ.
I wouldn’t trade that to go back to a comfortable existence. I love to feel that my heart is beating with His, I feel like I am actually being his hands and feet in this world, there’s nothing quite like that, so it’s worth it to me to experience the discomfort and the pain because I have an opportunity to show my love for Jesus.
What’s it like being married to Rick Warren, do people come to you with all their problems?
KW: Being married to Rick Warren is a hoot. He is a wild and crazy man and I adore him. I don’t know anyone else like my husband.
We can be on a plane and a flight attendant will say “You’re Rick Warren, I’ve read your book” and then they begin to tell how they received that book at a very low time in their lives.
We never get tired of hearing it. I love the way God has used The Purpose Driven Life to bring encouragement and hope.
He thought he was just writing it to encourage believers and yet people will give it to those who don’t know the Lord and they come to Christ, so that was a completely unexpected benefit of the book.
Do you ever have an off-purpose day yourself?
KW: Oh please, yes of course. Like this morning when my alarm didn’t go off and they called me to say the car is here ready for you to leave for your speaking engagement and I was still in bed. That was an off-purpose moment!
What’s the most important message people can take away about HIV and AIDS?
KW: That it’s the responsibility of every Christian to care. It’s not just for a few people. It’s not something a church should add to its to-do list, it’s not an add on to do when you get everything else figured out.
I really believe that caring for people with HIV and AIDS, caring for the least and the last and the lost should be in the DNA of every church, it should be part of the fabric of what we do.
I am so passionate about it and I believe that to try and do church in our world today without talking about HIV, without having an active response to people with HIV and orphans, then we’ve missed the boat entirely.
Isn’t there a critical danger that the church’s moral authority to advise people on their sexual behaviour is undermined by the stigma issue?
KW: I do believe that - that’s why we are in the process of developing a sexuality curriculum because the church has historically not done a good job in talking about sex and sexuality and you can’t talk about HIV without talking about sex.
That in itself is off-putting. So there’s the fear that I might get HIV if I am around you and the stigma – “Oh you are a bad person I don’t want to be around you”.
Then there's the whole issue if I talk about HIV then I’ve got to talk about sex and typically we aren’t very comfortable about that.
So we are trying to address that by writing a curriculum that starts with babies in a crèche. So you are holding a little boy and you say “You are so special, God made you a boy” or you hold a little girl and say “You are so special, God made you a little girl”.
So you start talking about sexuality and gender from very early ages so by the time children are 11, 12, 13 years old when some might begin to be confused or struggle and not know who they can talk to, then the church is prepared, because the church has developed an adequate conversation about sex and sexuality.
We are a long way from this, the church is not good, but if we wait to get that figured out it’s messy.
Working in HIV is messy. It brings up every conversation maybe you never wanted to have.
But that is fantastic, that pushes us exactly to where we need to go. It makes us have to talk about what do we believe about sex, what do we believe about sexuality, what do we believe the Bible has to say about gender?
Because our world is very confused. The church no longer has a clear message and the danger then on the other side of that is historically if we did talk about it, we did it in a way that was very condemning, very negative, very fearful, there were certain issues you just didn’t talk about and we have to talk about absolutely everything, there cannot be any off-limits topic in our churches.
We have to wrestle through it and look at what does the Bible say and come up with a coherent message because the rest of the world is blurring the lines everywhere possible.
But we have to do it in such a way that we don’t lead with messages about sexuality. We lead with messages of compassion – “God loves you, he wants to be in relationship with you”, then as we begin to talk to people we talk about their lives, we talk about their struggles, we talk about where they are comfortable but maybe we don’t feel it’s a Biblical response to sexuality.
So there is nobody I won’t talk to. I’ve had conversations with the most radical people on both the right and the left on these issues. I can honestly say we have established wonderful relationships and have great conversations ongoing with people.
I don’t back away from what I believe, I’m not afraid to say that sexuality is the way the Bible presents it, designed for men and women and marriage for life.
I don’t back away from that but neither do I lead with that.
I start with “God loves you and wants to have a relationship with you”. I believe when I came to Christ I brought my brokenness, my misunderstandings, my temptations, my failures.
If you read my book, you will see that I was molested as a child and caused a tremendous amount of brokenness in my sexuality.
I became addicted to pornography acted out as a young teenager in some ways that I am glad that nobody but the Lord really knows about.
My point is that I am not coming from a place where I am whole, I have got it all – I have experienced brokenness and I know when I came to Christ and over a period and process of years God has healed me and God continues to work deep in my heart. But that doesn’t mean I still don’t struggle.
I don’t know that any of us can control what we are tempted by, I don’t know that any of us choose what tempts us. How do you analyse what tempts you? It’s all so individual and I don’t feel we need to feel guilty for our temptations.
I think we need to bring them to God and bring them into our brothers and sisters so we have people who help us walk and live holy lives.
Do you think that most of the church has got the message that you approach people with love first?
KW: No I don’t. I think that’s a place where we have not done so well. We have led with the negatives, the don’ts, the thou shall nots and those are true, they are in the Bible but when we lead with that it causes us to minimise people’s struggle and their pain, their journey and brokenness.
I have a friend called Chad Thompson who wrote a book called Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would and if you haven’t read it I would advise every believer to read this book.
Chad has a line “Whoever loves them first, wins’” and I see that to be true in any area of life. Whoever loves another person first, that is the person who will win their heart because we are all looking for love.
As Chad tells his story as a young man who felt a tremendous amount of same sex attraction and was raised in a believing home and didn’t know what to do with his feelings, he didn’t want his same sex attraction.
But who was it that showed him grace, who was it that tried to draw him in, who would let him express his fears, his doubt and confusion? It was the homosexual community. So they loved him and won his heart.
And there’s nothing sinister about that, that’s just the way we are as human beings, we respond to whoever shows us grace.
And so Chad says if we are interested in reaching particularly into the gay community, into whatever community we are trying to reach into, if we understand that love is what wins people’s hearts, then we will lead with love and have some of those other conversations in that context. That repeats in my head over and over – whoever loves them first will win their hearts. I’m interested in winning people’s heart and loving them.’