Title: Lutheran Leaders Must Be Involved in Response to HIV and AIDS 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 news@elca.org http://www.elca.org/news ELCA News Blog: http://www.elca.org/news/blog