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Conference aims to give church wake-up call about AIDS

The Rev. Donald Messer

“The church has been sleeping for the past 25 years while the pandemic is spreading, but the Spirit of God is awakening the church, (and it is raising) people to respond with money and programs for prevention, care and treatment,” said the Rev. Donald Messer, who directs the center at Iliff Theological Seminary in Denver. Messer is a former president of Iliff.

Part of that response will be an upcoming “Lighten the Burden Conference” Sept. 8-9 in Washington. The gathering is designed to equip clergy and lay leaders who want to join in the global response to the AIDS crisis. The registration deadline is Aug 15.

Musa Dube, associate professor at the University of Botswana, will open the conference with a worship service. She is author of Preaching to the Converted: Unsettling the Christian Church and The HIV and AIDS Bible: Selected Essays, and she has served as a consultant on HIV/AIDS curriculum for the World Council of Churches.

Bishop Joao Somane Machado of the Mozambique Area will give participants a close-up view of the pandemic through his ministry in South Africa. Machado is a leading advocate in the United Methodist Church for the eradication of HIV/AIDS and malaria.

A closing service of commitment will be led by the Rev. Mpho Tutu, an Episcopal priest and clergy resident at Christ Church, Alexandria, Va. She is the executive director of the Tutu Institute for Prayer and Pilgrimage, which honors the life and ministry of her father, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. She is chairwoman of the board of the Global AIDS Alliance.

The conference’s goals are twofold, according to Messer.

The first goal, he said, is to make the church understand what it is like to live in a world with the worst health crisis in 700 years and to help participants better understand the pandemic, which has already infected more than 40 million people.

A UMNS photo by Mike DuBose Dozens of fresh graves crowd the Granville Cemetery in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Seventy percent of those living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa. Outside the United States, almost half of the infected are women. Worldwide, 8,000 people die daily of the AIDS virus; about 600,000 children are infected annually, and 14 million children have been orphaned.

Second, the conference will equip participants to raise money for projects and activities to support the Global AIDS Fund and provide leadership in local churches and annual (regional) conferences.

The United Methodist Global AIDS Fund was created at the denomination’s 2004 General Conference with the goals of raising $8 million over the next four years and mobilizing the church to be more involved in fighting the pandemic in the world.

The fund does not overlook the crisis in the United States, where about 1 million people are infected and the numbers are escalating — especially in communities of color.

General Conference requested that each annual conference establish an HIV/AIDS task force, and the plan specifies that 25 percent of what each conference raises should be used in that conference for AIDS work, either locally or in global projects.

An 11-member committee oversees the promotion, use, supervision and distribution of the Global AIDS Fund.

Messer pointed out that United Methodists have always been on the frontier of health care. “To raise $8 million, it would only take $1 per member in the United States or 25 cents per year,” he said.

A pre-conference gathering Sept. 8 will give participants an opportunity to visit organizations and people living and working with the AIDS in Washington, which has the highest AIDS rate of any major U.S. city, conference officials said.

For registration or more information about the AIDS conference, visit online
http://www.umc-gbcs.org/site/pp.asp?c=fsJNK0PKJrH&b=1804397.

Donations to the Global AIDS Fund may be designated for UMCOR Advance #982345, Global AIDS Fund, and placed in church offering plates or sent to P.O. Box 9068, New York, NY 10087-9068.

*Furtado, an intern at United Methodist Communications, is a senior communications major at United Methodist-related Rust College, Holly Springs, Miss.

News media contact: Kathy L. Gilbert, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.