FEATURE: Set Free
ELCA Candidate for Ordination Lives with Faith and HIV
CHICAGO, United States of America/GENEVA, 21 December 2006 (LWI) - Preparing for ordained ministry in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is filled with uncertainties - about seminary classes, God's direction, church structures, congregational acceptance and more. A 40-something, African American, single mother of three can anticipate even more uncertainties in a 4.85 million-member church that is about 97 percent white.
Andrena Ingram faces those uncertainties and others related to her being tested HIV-positive. Yet, she matches those uncertainties with an overwhelming faith in Jesus Christ, who healed a "bent over" woman with whom she relates.
"A lot of people in my community were dying from the virus and * I was nervous about it, but I went ahead and I got tested," Ingram said. "When I received my diagnosis, I was devastated. ... I felt like damaged goods.
"Because I saw so many people in my community getting sick and wasting away, I believed that would happen to me also. I was depressed, and it was only because of my children that I made an appointment at a clinic -[outside] my neighborhood, of course - and began to get treated. My doctor also recommended that I see a therapist for my depression," she said in a recent interview with the ELCA News Service.
When Ingram heard about the church down the block, she put her youngest son in its summer program so she could "be miserable during the day without him watching me in that condition."
At the end of the summer program at Transfiguration Lutheran Church, South Bronx, New York, parents were asked to enroll their children in the after-school program, seek baptism for their children or become a member of the congregation. "I signed up to have my son baptized and forgot about it," Ingram said.
Invitation to Sunday School
A few days later, Rev. Heidi B. Neumark and intern pastor Andrea L. Walker were standing at Ingram's door. "That completely blew my mind," Ingram said. "I just remember that the pastor took time out of her day to visit me."
Ingram talked with them about all that she was going through. "I didn't think that God loved me, because I had been away from God for so long," she said. The women invited her to bring her son to Sunday school.
"I was afraid of going to church, because I feared being judged by God. I feared being looked at by others and being judged by them also." But she took her son to Sunday school and started attending church. She did not encounter any of the reactions that she had anticipated. No one looked at her "funny" or "moved over in the pew," she said. Everyone hugged her, and she heard that "Jesus loved me."
Ingram heard a story from Luke (13:11-13) about Jesus healing a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for 18 years "That was a story about me," she said.
Neumark invited Ingram to read Bible lessons in church and to teach Sunday school. Whenever Ingram said she couldn't do something, Neumark convinced her she could. "Just as Jesus told that woman who was bent over, 'You are set free from your ailment,' he said that to me. I was set free from my ailment, and it wasn't the physical ailment that had me bent over, but the emotional ailment, the spiritual ailment," she said.
Becoming an Ordained Minister
One day Neumark asked her to think about going to seminary. "I said, 'Well, I don't know.' She said, 'Yes, you can do that,'" Ingram said. Ingram applied to become a candidate for ordained ministry through the ELCA Metropolitan New York Synod. Her entrance interview with the candidacy committee included a review of her psychological evaluation. It ended abruptly with a question: "What if we sent you to seminary and you developed AIDS dementia?"
"I was kind of shocked when I heard those words," Ingram said. She didn't have a response other than "Thank you for your time."
Ingram applied again the following year, and when the same question came up, she responded: "What if you got hit by a bus when you left the building?"
Ingram entered the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia as part of the ELCA's Theological Education for Emerging Ministries program, an alternative path to ordination that does not require a master of divinity degree. But during her second year in the program, she decided to earn the master's degree. "I felt that I needed everything the seminary had to offer, in order to deal with the stigma that is attached to my age, my gender, my culture and my illness. The stigma that I sometimes deal with goes much deeper than just the illness," she said.
Ingram completed a year of internship with St John Evangelical Lutheran Church, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania. This December she is due to complete her academics and seek a call from a congregation in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod.
Standing Up Publicly
In August, Ingram attended the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, and its interreligious pre-conferences, where Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop and president of the Lutheran World Federation, urged religious leaders to confront the AIDS stigma and discrimination by taking HIV tests and publicly disclosing the results.
"As a religious leader stepping forward to put a face to HIV, I am aware of some of the risks in doing so. But there is a larger risk here," Ingram said. "It is the risk that people take every day in having unprotected sex. It's the risk of someone feeling the stigma * the discrimination of [having] HIV or AIDS," she said.
People living with HIV and AIDS should be able to find "sanctuary, a shelter from the storms of life" at church, she said. "People will not go and get tested, if they feel that they are going to be rejected."
"We can do something about minimizing the spread of [HIV]. We can erase the stigma and discrimination. We can love one another, and * be the community that we are called to be - the body of Christ."
"I hope to be a bridge between the community [of people living with HIV and AIDS] and the church," Ingram said.
(Edited from the original feature by Frank Imhoff, associate director for the ELCA News Service. )
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