'Prescription for Hope'
A Christian conference aims to draw attention to the under-funded efforts to combat AIDS

By Jeffery L. Sheler

Deborah Dortzbach was a young nurse working at a church-run clinic in the slums of Nairobi when the first AIDS patients began showing up there in the mid-1980s. "There wasn't much we could do in those days," she recalls, "except comfort the dying and their families" and watch helplessly as the mysterious fatal disease cut a widening swath through sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. As frustrating as it was, says Dortzbach, ministering to the hopelessly sick in those early days of the AIDS pandemic was a no-brainer. "As Christians," she says, "this is what we are called to do."

Today, Dortzbach is still battling AIDS as head of international HIV/AIDS programs at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. Yet while so much more is known now about treating and preventing the disease, Dortzbach says she still feels frustrated by what she and other front-line AIDS combatants view as inadequate support from government agencies and from American churches that have been slow to respond. "Too many Christians think of AIDS as a sinner's disease," says Dortzbach, "but it affects us all."

Hoping to overcome widespread public apathy and misapprehension regarding AIDS, Dortzbach and some 700 other Christian relief workers and ministry representatives plan to meet in Washington February 17-21 to draw attention to the global epidemic and the under-funded efforts to combat it. "The Christian church has not responded to this crisis the way it should, and we've got to change that," says Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham and chief organizer of the five-day conference entitled "Prescription for Hope."

Among other things, Graham says he hopes the conference will "begin to put a human face on the AIDS crisis" for many Christians by focusing attention on the stories of children and families devastated by the disease and on church-sponsored agencies providing family-based humanitarian care and AIDS prevention programs that emphasize personal sexual morality–abstinence for young people, marital fidelity for adults. He also hopes to flesh out the sometimes numbing statistics that by now have become all too familiar: since the late 1970s, nearly 25 million deaths worldwide, more than 40 million people living with the disease, and 5 million new infections reported last year–most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS orphans now number more than 13.5 million.

As striking as those numbers are, getting conservative Christians to give money for AIDS relief "has been almost impossible," says Graham, president of Samaritan's Purse, an international relief organization. One recent national survey found that just 3 percent of evangelical Christians are willing to donate to international AIDS education and prevention efforts, compared with 8 percent of non-Christians. The same survey found that while evangelicals were twice as likely as other adults to support disadvantaged children overseas, they were less likely to support children orphaned by AIDS. The problem, say Graham and others, is that many conservative Christians, with their strong views on sexual morality, tend to view AIDS as an affliction of homosexuals, prostitutes, and drug addicts. In his 1994 book, The Truth about AIDS, Dr. Patrick Dixon, a British church leader and physician, said Christians often ask him whether AIDS represents the wrath of God. "The reason AIDS is such a sensitive issue," says Dixon, "is because it touches on so many different aspects of conscience and morality." The big issue now, he says, "is how a traditional Christian view on morality can be equated with God's call to love."

Graham says while he's not interested in pointing fingers at his less motivated coreligionists ("I point a finger at myself–I was late in coming to this"), he says compassion more than self-interest should motivate Christians to get involved. "Regardless of what they may have done," says Graham, "each of the 40 million men, women, and children worldwide who are infected with the HIV virus are precious to God. And if they're precious to God, then by God, they should be precious to us."