ELCA NEWS SERVICE
August 25, 2006
Lutheran Leaders Must Be Involved in Response to HIV and AIDS
06-129-FI
TORONTO (ELCA) -- The Global Lutheran World Federation (LWF)
Campaign against HIV/AIDS began its first phase in 2002 "to
promote churches getting more involved with HIV and AIDS
activities, especially in regions of Africa and Asia," said Dr.
Sheila Shyamprasad, the HIV and AIDS consultant to the LWF
Department for Mission and Development. She said one of the key
lessons learned was that Lutheran leadership -- bishops, lay
leaders, leaders of women's, men's and youth groups -- must be
involved for the church's activities to be effective.
The first phase of the campaign ended in July 2006, focusing
on education and prevention, Shyamprasad said. The second phase
will run through 2011 and will be a "scaling up" of current
activities with a greater emphasis on care and support, she said.
Shyamprasad took part in the International AIDS Conference
here Aug. 13-18 and in ecumenical and interfaith pre-conferences
Aug. 10-12. She led a workshop on "Getting Churches and Their
Leaders on Board."
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is one of
the LWF's 140 member churches in 78 countries. Based in Geneva,
the LWF represents 66.2 million Christians around the world.
Shyamprasad visited the ELCA churchwide office Aug. 21-22 in
Chicago.
The world health community first recognized AIDS (Acquired
Immunodeficiency Syndrome) in 1981. AIDS is a result of HIV
(Human Immunodeficiency Virus) infection. HIV is transmitted
through direct contact with a bodily fluid containing HIV, and
transmission usually involves sexual contact, use of contaminated
injecting equipment, blood transfusion or exchange between mother
and infant.
Lutheran churches were hesitant to get involved with all the
issues related to HIV and AIDS, Shyamprasad said. LWF launched
its campaign in 2002 in Nairobi, Kenya, with an action plan,
"Compassion, Conversion, Care: Responding as Churches to the
HIV/AIDS Pandemic," designed to enlist every aspect of being
"church" in response to the complexities of the pandemic, she
said.
The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
agreed to fund the campaign partially, Shyamprasad said. Global
Fund involvement brought more oversight, she said.
"There were a few HIV projects going on in various parts of
the world which were being implemented by various (Lutheran)
churches," Shyamprasad said. The Global Fund required more LWF
coordination to achieve the goals of the action plan, she said.
Shyamprasad, an obstetrician and gynecologist, was
coordinator of the HIV and AIDS program of the United Evangelical
Lutheran Church in India for more than 12 years at the Gurukul
Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute, Chennai.
She said that program started slowly with "awareness and
sensitization" and moved into "counseling, testing and medical
care" and finally caring for the widows and orphans of AIDS.
LWF asked Shyamprasad, "Why don't you try to replicate the
same kind of program in other churches and try to motivate other
churches?" she said.
A key to the LWF campaign was to involve church leaders in
the response to HIV and AIDS, she said. "Coordinators, or the
people in the field, who know the situation, know the church
needs to move but, if they don't the 'green signal' from the
bishop or if the bishop doesn't really understand the urgency of
the situation, then nothing happens."
The LWF campaign conducted training for Lutheran church
leaders -- bishops, lay leaders, women leaders, youth leaders,
social service providers -- all around the world, Shyamprasad
said, but the Global Fund was not happy with just the number of
church leaders trained. It asked, "What are these trained
leaders actually doing?"
So, the LWF administered a survey of church leadership to
"assess the impact of our training," Shyamprasad said. She said
she learned that 95 percent of church leaders were "involved in
HIV activities."
The survey asked a variety of questions, Shyamprasad said,
such as: "How often do you preach or publicly acknowledge HIV and
AIDS? Have you had an HIV test? Do you think people with HIV
should be employed by the church? Do you think it is right to
administer Holy Communion to people with HIV? Do you think it is
right to discuss HIV and AIDS in Sunday school? Do you think the
churches should advise on condom promotion?"
"We kind of graded them," Shyamprasad said. "At the end of
it we got very good results." She said she was especially
impressed by the greater involvement of Lutheran churches in
Africa compared to prior to the training.
Launching the campaign in Kenya after a five-day regional
consultation, LWF sponsored similar consultations in three other
regions. Each region "contextualized" the campaign and outlined
its own plan of action, Shyamprasad said.
Pan-African Lutheran church leaders committed themselves in
May 2002 to "Breaking the Silence" as their statement; the Latin
American consultation in March 2003 in Venezuela adopted
"Justice, Conversion and Integration;" the Asian consultation in
December 2003 in Indonesia endorsed "Covenant of Life;" and the
European consultation in April 2004 in the Ukraine drafted "Bound
Together."
The campaign did not target Lutheran churches in North
America or western Europe, because it appeared that government
and educational systems were providing HIV and AIDS prevention
information there, Shyamprasad said.
Church leaders there were included in the survey, and the
results found Lutheran churches in North America and western
Europe lacking in efforts to deal with issues related to HIV and
AIDS, including stigma and discrimination. "So maybe we need to
rethink about whom we should target in the next phase,"
Shyamprasad said.
Phase two, regional coordination, workbook, ecumenical teamwork
The Global LWF Campaign against HIV/AIDS applied again for
money from the Global Fund for the second phase of the campaign,
but Shyamprasad recommended that LWF continue even if a grant is
not awarded. "Now that the LWF has intensified its campaign, I
don't think we should take a backward step," she said. "We need
to move forward."
Care and support of people infected and affected by HIV will
be emphasized in the second phase, Shyamprasad said. It will
capitalize on the longstanding work of Lutheran churches around
the world in care for widows and orphans and in development, she
said.
Getting the churches involved in sharing prevention
information, talking about condoms and sexuality, took some
"persuasion and motivation," Shyamprasad said. "But if you say,
'We have to take care of widows and orphans,' they say, 'Yes, we
have to take care. We should be doing more,'" she said.
The commitment of Lutheran leaders will continue to be
important, but the campaign's second phase will rely more heavily
on "technical resource people strategically placed here and
there," Shyamprasad said.
The Rev. Lisandro Orlov, a pastor of the United Evangelical
Lutheran Church, Argentina, and director of a shelter for people
living with HIV and AIDS in Buenos Aires, coordinates the LWF
campaign in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr. Mamy J.
Ranaivoson coordinates the campaign in Africa. Based in Nairobi,
Ranaivoson is the health consultant on HIV/AIDS for ELCA Global
Mission and the ELCA's Stand With Africa campaign.
"But one person in Africa is not enough," Shyamprasad said.
"We need at least three people in Africa." She said additional
regional coordinators are needed in Asia and possibly in North
America and Europe.
"We're looking at regional support points where people will
be able to do capacity building and put in structures and systems
within the church structures so that the programs can go on,"
Shyamprasad said.
The Global LWF Campaign against HIV/AIDS is also working
with other Christian campaigns. The African Network of Religious
Leaders living with or personally affected by HIV or AIDS
(ANERELA+) is named as a co-recipient in the LWF application with
the Global Fund.
"When we went to Africa, there were so many villages where
the pastor had an old dusty volume of something, really dog-eared
copies," Shyamprasad said. "People go to him because he is the
only person for treatment or for counsel," she said.
Often these pastors can't update the information they have
about HIV and AIDS by attending conferences, subscribing to
publications or accessing the Internet, Shyamprasad said. So,
the LWF campaign developed a workbook with the help of ANERELA+
that it will distribute to all the Lutheran pastors and
evangelists in the villages of Africa, she said.
The workbook will come out at the end of 2006, providing
information about HIV and AIDS, human rights and advocacy,
Shyamprasad said. It will have five initial chapters, and the
campaign plans to add more chapters later, she said.
One of the major chapters in the workbook deals with the
theology of the churches' response to HIV and AIDS, Shyamprasad
said. That chapter was written with the help of the Rev. Jape
Heath, an Anglican priest and general secretary of ANERELA+ in
Johannesburg, South Africa.
-- -- --
Information about the Global LWF Campaign against HIV/AIDS
is at http://www.lutheranworld.org/What_We_Do/LWF-HIV_AIDS.html
on the Web.
An audio report on this story is at
http://media.ELCA.org/audionews/060825.mp3 on the ELCA Web site.
For information contact:
John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or [log in to unmask]
http://www.elca.org/news
ELCA News Blog: http://www.elca.org/news/blog
