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I have a hard time finding clothes to fit me,” my tall friend said, pointing to her white socks protruding from beneath short slacks. Her height was good for her university basketball team but not for looking stylish.

Clothing is not all that doesn’t fit Ann. She struggles to fit in her country.

Ann is from Beijing. As a Christian she fits in with less than one percent of China’s 1.3 billion population. As a Christian concerned about AIDS, she is a total misfit.

But that must change because the global crisis of AIDS may be the most significant challenge the global church will face anywhere in the next ten years.

Asia and Africa groan in gross neglect from church involvement in AIDS. Until very recent years in Africa, few pastors, lay leaders and global Christians stepped from church doors to look for families affected by AIDS. They failed to discuss realities of sexual behavior with youth while AIDS stalked as a silent killer. Most governments hoped predictions were oversized and timidly relegated action to ministries of health. Ethnic conflict, war, mass migration to cities for work, and changing moral practices resulted in an eruption of volcanic proportions. Today 9,000 people die of AIDS every day. In some places pastors do little more than bury the dead.

Most Christians think the church and AIDS is a misfit. We are about preaching and living faithfully in marriage and abstaining before marriage. We don’t need to worry about AIDS because we don’t associate with homosexuality, we are far from Africa, and it isn’t our problem.

Our hypocrisy is glaring. Glances at global trends show Christianized America and Africa to be woefully behind Muslim communities in the faithful-marriage quotient. How are we practicing true religion? What difference are we making for the millions of orphans living within sound of the drumbeat of our churches?

Last year AIDS took three million lives. The crisis catapults us to examine the meaning of compassion. How do we care for people like us in our own country—similar in language and culture yet worlds away in the secrets of the mind and body and the definitions of love, meaning and commitment in relationships? How do we fit in foreign cultures like Angola or Ukraine—today’s spawning grounds for tens of thousands of new infections?

Josephine Munywoki didn’t know how to get started, but she knew she must. Groping her way, she left her middle-class home and church in Nairobi and set out for the slums. She discovered women whose only risk was faithfulness. They were dying of AIDS along with their infected children as their husbands abandoned them to other wives. She found 12-year-old Agnes sick with AIDS and 40-year-old “Baba Sammy” with his infirmed elderly mother caring for him. The more she looked the more she found. In desperation, Munywoki prayed, “Lord, show me what to do.”

Munywoki called together a group of pastors in the urban poor community to determine what role their churches could play. They admitted they had little, but what they had they would give.

Ministry was born. One church gave a corner of its tin building for a counseling and training room. Another sent its pastor every week to share Jesus’ hope and comfort with the support group for those with HIV. Another started a rug-making business for HIV-positive people. Yet another played soccer with a 14-year-old boy needing a break from being the sole caregiver of his dying dad. Pencil-thin people at death’s door were born again.

The lessons are many for us. AIDS is God’s business, even if we think it isn’t the church’s business. We have to be involved because Jesus is. There is no other option. We need to pray Josephine’s prayer, “Lord, show me what to do.”

Our involvement begins with what we have. The church may not have clinics or drugs but it does have the best and most affordable medicine: hope, comfort, the offer of reconciliation and eternal life, and a Savior who loves us just as we are. Every church and every Christian can give what people with AIDS need most.

AIDS is about behavior—my behavior in the bedroom, my preoccupations on sleazy Internet sites, my mind in the movie theaters. We all wear the scarlet “A,” and were God to treat us as we deserve, no one could stand his judgment. We are guilty, saved only by grace and called to be misfits in our world. It’s not popular in our worlds to rein in sexual freedom. And it’s not popular in churches to love the homosexual. God commands both.

AIDS is not a poor man’s disease, but the impact on the poor is devastation that affects generations. Few North Americans feel the effects of AIDS like Africa. The vicious cycle spins uncontrollably as children care for parents, parents use all their income and property for care, and skilled workers are not replaced in market economies.

AIDS is a call to his kingdom. Chrub was dying but not alone. The small and dynamic church in her Phnom Penh neighborhood discovered her, visited her daily, bathed her, listened to her confessions of the red light district, and brought her to Jesus. The day she died, songs of hope replaced Buddhist chants. As her coffin was lifted to the crematory flames, her grandmother confessed Jesus and yelled after her, “I’ll see you again.”