Evangelicals to ponder AIDS pandemic

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- Billy Graham's son, Franklin, will convene a five-day international Christian AIDS conference in Washington to make U.S. evangelicals more aware of this devastating pandemic, his spokesman told United Press International Friday.

"It is Franklin Graham's opinion that the evangelical church in America is not as involved in this problem as we would hope," said Mark DeMoss, speaking for Graham's Samaritan Purse organization.

Some 700 Christians from 68 countries on six continents will participate in Feb. 17-21. It will draw together church and government leaders, public and private donors, and frontline Christian AIDS organizations, according to DeMoss.

About 300 of the delegates will come from poorer nations, especially African ones.

The apparent indifference of many conservative Protestants to the catastrophe has been censured in May during the General Assembly of the World Evangelical Alliance in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

George Verwer, founder of the London-based group Operation Mobilization, challenged his coreligionist to participate more forcefully in the fight against this global epidemic that has claimed about 22 million lives so far.

Of these deaths, 70 percent occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, where every 25 seconds someone is infected with the HIV virus, according to a Time magazine cover story "Death Stalks a Continent" earlier this year.

In Africa, AIDS has claimed the lives of 3.7 million children and orphaned another 12 million, DeMoss reported.

In South Africa alone, more than 10 percent of the population of 41 million have been infected with the HIV virus, Gerhard Grohs, a former member of the World Council of Churches' central committee, recently wrote in Idea, a German Protestant wire service.

He stressed the majority of the AIDS patients in South Africa are between 15 years and 30 years old.

Last year, Heidemarie Wiczorek-Zeul, Germany's minister for development, announced that in some African countries almost every third teacher had tested HIV positive or suffered from full-blown AIDS.

"In those countries, teacher die faster than can be trained," she added.

DeMoss said, "Many evangelicals see AIDS largely as a homosexual issue, as a moral rather than societal problem." In Africa and other parts of the Third world, most AIDS sufferers are heterosexuals, however.

"But even if people have acquired this disease because of immoral behavior, it is the job of the Church of Christ to reach out to them. We have a mandate to love, not to hate," DeMoss continued.

To impress this notion on evangelicals aware of this was one of the goals of the conference to which Franklin Graham has invited President George W. Bush and the Most Rev. George Carey, archbishop of Canterbury.

While the conference's intended audience is chiefly evangelical, other Christian traditions will be represented.

Among the speakers will be Father Angelo d'Agostino -- nicknamed Father d'Ag -- who runs a home for abandoned children in Kenya. Roman Catholics will also lead some of the conference's workshops.

DeMoss said one of the trickiest tasks of the meeting will be cultural. International AIDS specialists have been reporting for years about the difficulty of promoting abstinence and fidelity.

The Time cover story on AIDS in Africa also emphasized the refusal of male Africans to use condoms. Much of the continent's epidemic is due to truck drivers and migrant workers who "sleep around" during their absences from home, as Time put it.

At a U.N. AIDS conference in New York in June, experts of the World Council of Churches promoted the idea of a close cooperation between governments and faith-based organizations.

They suggested appealing to moral and religious convictions of African males to change sexual behavior and pointed to Uganda where such a program has resulted in a marked reduction of the number of new infections.

"Humanly speaking, the situation is pretty hopeless," DeMoss said. "If we don't act after 20-plus million deaths worldwide, this pandemic will continue to escalate."