"AIDS is Everyone's Problem:" Adventist Church Establishes New HIV/AIDS Committee

There is a widespread reluctance in the Christian community to face up to the issue of HIV/AIDS, say Adventist health professionals

Silver Spring, Maryland, USA | Bettina Krause

An AIDS study committee, recently established by the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s General Conference, has been charged with tracking the impact of HIV/AIDS on society and the church, and recommending new, more effective ways for the Adventist Church to respond to the worldwide epidemic.

The AIDS study committee could play a vital part in breaking through the complacency that has grown up around the HIV/AIDS issue, says Dr. Gary Hopkins, secretary of the committee.  Hopkins, who heads up the Center for Adolescent Behavior Research and the Institute for the Prevention of Addictions at Andrews University, Michigan, says that HIV/AIDS is a problem that “isn’t going away.”

An estimated 50 million people around the world have been infected with HIV; of these, one third have already died. According to current international projections, 50 million people will die of AIDS in the coming decade.

Leo Ranzolin, a vice president of the Adventist Church worldwide and chair of the AIDS study committee, says the committee will work to sharpen the focus of the church’s response to HIV/AIDS.  “AIDS is decimating lives all over the world,” says Ranzolin. “We cannot simply watch precious human beings, created by God, perishing of this dread disease.”

Dr. Harvey Elder, a member of the new committee, says that some geographical regions—especially in Africa and Asia—are “facing a crisis of stupendous proportions.”

“In Botswana, for instance, 15 to 45-year-olds have a 65 percent chance of dying of AIDS,” says Elder. “AIDS is literally dissolving the infrastructure of many countries, as it claims victims among college graduates, the police force, the civil service, and industrial workers.”

Both Elder and Hopkins say there has been a reluctance in the Protestant Christian community—including the Adventist Church—to face up to the issue of HIV/AIDS, with all its physical horror and assumed moral ambiguity.  According to Elder, AIDS is generally perceived as a “dirty, messy” business, which involves individuals who are “not our kind of people.”

An important first step for the church in dealing with the AIDS crisis is to tear down the artificial barrier that divides the “tainted” from the “untainted,” says Elder.  “They [AIDS patients] aren’t ‘them,’ they’re ‘us’—our own church members, our own pastors, our own youth and children.”

Although there are no firm statistics for the number of HIV-positive Adventists, both Elder and Hopkins say that AIDS exists on both sides of the church doors.  Elder cites a case in Africa where an individual who had previously led a high-risk lifestyle embraced Christianity and joined the Adventist Church. Unknowingly carrying the AIDS virus, he married, started a family, and became a church pastor.  “But when AIDS finally manifested itself, this pastor was abandoned by his church family,” says Elder, who adds that the tragedy is magnified by the fact that, when he chose to became an Adventist, the young man had also become estranged from his family and former social support group.

Hopkins and Elder point out that AIDS—with its inevitable association with drug-use and sexual promiscuity, whether homosexual or heterosexual—is surrounded by moral smokescreens that make a straightforward response difficult for most Christians.  “It scares us to death; we don’t know what to do,” says Hopkins.  On an unconscious, or in some cases a conscious, level, some Christians may even have the feeling that these people are “getting what they deserve,” Hopkins adds.

Drawing parallels with Biblical times, Hopkins says that “AIDS is the leprosy of today. And where we have tended to step back, Jesus would be stepping forward.”

Contrary to widespread assumptions, says Hopkins, some 85 percent of new HIV/AIDS cases are the result of heterosexual, rather than homosexual, contact.  Approximately 50 percent of new cases globally are in the 14 to 25-year-old age group. In fact, Hopkins says, the most vulnerable group, in physiological terms, are young women, whose thin cervical tissue offers reduced protection against infection.

When asked why the Adventist Church has a responsibility to AIDS sufferers, Elder says it is a matter of Christian integrity. “No church that claims Christ can fail to respond to the AIDS crisis,” he says.  “We are called, as a church, to be a city of refuge, yet on the whole we are not. We need to develop a willingness to hold and to love, to be open to people, and to let the Gospel and the Holy Spirit work on their hearts.”

Now a clinician at the County AIDS Clinic in San Bernardino, California, Elder says that many of his AIDS patients are responsive to the message of hope in Christ. He says that, in his experience, around a third of the patients become Christian believers, because “for many of these people, sex or drugs had been their god, and their god attacked them. They are searching for a God who will love them.”

Elder says that the international composition of the newly established AIDS committee is a step forward in developing a worldwide, integrated response to the HIV/AIDS crisis.  The 31-member committee includes Adventist health professionals and church leaders from Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

The committee will make recommendations on strategies for “prevention and control of the HIV/AIDS epidemic among Seventh-day Adventists,” for “ministry and service” to church members with HIV/AIDS, and for “advocacy for individuals with HIV/AIDS which address such areas as acceptance within the community of believers, housing, insurance, medical care, and employment.” The committee will also make recommendations on the “appropriate involvement of Church resources and personnel to address the HIV/AIDS crisis.”  The first meeting of the committee is scheduled for mid-January 2001.

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