Lausanne World Pulse – LAUSANNE REPORTS – Mission through the Lens of AIDS

By Evvy Campbell

For five days at the end of December 2006, 593 Urbana 06 delegates collectively focused on what it means to live missionally in a world pressed with the numbing reality of forty million people living with HIV/AIDS. Participants in “Mission through the Lens of AIDS,” an Urbana 06 residential track, explored the state of the pandemic, effective programs and opportunities to respond as Christians. Key topics included discerning how the Church can learn from AIDS and learning how the good news of God’s kingdom can bring and manifest hope in places where coping with AIDS is a necessity.

Let Scripture Speak
Attendees who signed up to be part of the track resided together in the Drury Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, USA—the city where Urbana 06 was held. On the first night, they formed family groups of four to six people. This allowed them to practice on a small scale the type of communal processing and living described in the book of Ephesians, the subject of the “Let Scripture Speak” Bible studies. Don Everts, InterVarsity area director from Boulder, Colorado, USA, led these family groups through a study of Ephesians. Everts facilitated the 90-minute sessions, utilizing staff with roving microphones to stimulate group discussion. He included time for individual reflection and prayer as well as large and small group dialog that allowed opportunity for consideration of a biblical response to HIV/AIDS. Similar studies on Ephesians for other delegates were held in sixty-nine additional venues, after which the 22,250 attendees trekked to the Edward Jones Dome, where missionary statesman Ajith Fernando of Sri Lanka led four additional expository sessions on Ephesians.

Engaging the Pandemic through Seminars
The heart of “Mission through the Lens of AIDS” was the thirty-one seminars led by those intimately involved in responding to the pandemic. Speakers were selected by an internationally diverse steering committee co-led by Grace Tazelaar, missions director for Nurses Christian Fellowship, and Jim Thomas, professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Steering committee members Sujai Suneetha, a physician from Hyderabad, India, and his scientist wife, Lavanya, spent over fifteen years in leprosy work and research in different parts of India before God led them to begin a drop-in center in their home that now caters to five hundred HIV-positive persons and their families. The couple spoke eloquently on “Caring for People with HIV/AIDS” and were joined in their presentation by University of Illinois at Chicago infectious disease specialist Dr. Jonathan Uy.

Emmanuel Katongole, a Ugandan Catholic priest and professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke University, also served on the steering committee. Katongole spoke on “Theology through the Lens of AIDS,” drawing on the personal experiences of watching his 21-year-old niece, his eldest brother and ultimately scores of friends in Uganda die of AIDS. Katongole said, “I found myself raising more questions than I or anybody had answers for—as it soon became clear that with HIV/AIDS we had entered a new kairos, a moment of truth, in which AIDS was killing not only our bodies but also our usual and comfortable ways of being church and what it means for us to be God’s people.”

Jane Wathome, founder of Beacon of Hope in Kenya, led seminars on “Income Generation to AIDS-Stricken Communities.” Wathome’s ministry began in 2002 through listening to the needs expressed by women in the impoverished community of Ongata Rongai. Starting with the production of textiles, Beacon of Hope has grown to include childcare and orphaned child sponsorship, a feeding program, medical assistance, training in home based care, spiritual guidance, group support therapy, HIV testing and counseling and a youth program. To accommodate the rapidly expanding programs, Beacon of Hope has purchased an eight-acre parcel of land and is embarking on the development of a self-sustaining community initiative that will continue to serve women, children and youth affected and infected by HIV/AIDS and poverty.

Dr. Evvy Hay Campbell is chair of intercultural studies at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, USA, and was facilitator of the 2004 Forum for World Evangelization Holistic Mission Issue Group. She is Lausanne senior associate for holistic mission.