LAKE FOREST, Calif. (PD) –  Last week nearly 1,700 people from 37 states and 17 countries joined forces to repent, pray, teach, and show God their commitment to fight the global HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In what Kay Warren, wife of Saddleback Church Senior Pastor Rick Warren, called “a wake-up call and a kick in the butt” for the Church, the Disturbing Voices HIV/AIDS Conference at Saddleback Church sought to help the Church break the stigma of AIDS and set the pace for the HIV testing and treatment.

With 54 speakers in plenary sessions and workshops on Nov. 29 and 30, the conference is the first local church-based gathering designed to mobilize congregations all over the world to address HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. The conference was co-sponsored by Saddleback and Willow Creek Community Church located in the Chicago suburbs.

Special events to honor World AIDS Day on Dec. 1 followed the two-day conference, including a special prayer service, community service projects led by Saddleback small groups, a free concert headlined by Wynonna Judd and other artists, and free HIV testing.

Warren was even publicly tested to see if he had the virus on World AIDS Day. “I am taking this test publicly so that we can start the process of reducing the stigma related to just being tested,” Warren said.

The results were negative.

Birthed in her heart three years ago, Kay Warren said her own journey into AIDS awareness began with a magazine article that shocked her with statistics and photographs.

More than 25 million people have died from the aggressive disease, which has ravaged Africa, India, and China and is growing in the United States, Kay Warren explained.

Worldwide, a reported 40 million people have HIV/AIDS, but David Miller disputes this number.

“We believe that there are 75-80 million people infected with the disease,” said the AIDS activist from ACT-UP, a controversial group from New York City that has fought a long, hard battle against the epidemic.

Since finding out in 1988 that he was HIV-positive, Miller has been involved in dramatic attempts to get the crisis to the public’s forefront, including the militaristic storming of New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Dec. 10, 1989 and Washington, D.C.-area’s National Institutes of Health on May 21, 1990.

The Warrens befriended Miller in their attempts to understand the enormity of the disease. For Miller, it’s the first time that Christians have listened to his message.

“I have never been to a conference with so many HIV-negative people,” Miller marveled. And when Saddleback members welcomed – and even hugged – more than 20 people with HIV/AIDS on stage during the conference’s closing session, he was surprised that nobody ran away.

“I am not a Christian,” Miller said. “But I am thinking about it.”

In addition to the message of compassion, the conference sought to impart several other points, which have emerged from Rick Warren’s development of a global P.E.A.C.E. Plan.

The plan seeks to position the worldwide Church to attack the five “global giants” of spiritual emptiness, egocentric leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, and illiteracy and poor education, by Planting churches, Equipping servant leaders, Assisting the poor, Caring for the sick, and Educating the next generation.

Using the acrostic, C.H.U.R.C.H., Rick Warren enumerated six ways the Church can best fight HIV/AIDS: Care and comfort the sick; Help test and counsel; Unleash a worldwide volunteer force; Remove the stigma; Champion healthy behavior; and Hand out medicine and nutrition.

“The only thing growing faster than the HIV/AIDS pandemic is the Church,” said Rick Warren, echoing the same conclusion reached by other conference speakers.

Bill and Lynne Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church shared that the Church must be the safe place where people can come to for healing and acceptance. The couple became engaged in the battle when rock star Bono of U2 introduced the dilemma to them.

“It’s not our place to ask how or why people contracted the disease,” Bill Hybels said. “It is our place to love them.”

“The Christian community has been silent far too long,” lamented Claude Allen, chief assistant to President George Bush for domestic policy, who urged the American Church to “put their heart and their backs” into the effort of eliminating the disease.

“One hundred percent of this disease is preventable,” he added.

2005 Disturbing Voices HIV/AIDS Conference

Want to read more about the historic 2005 HIV/AIDS Conference? Click here for a whole assortment of photos and articles about the conference.

Other conference highlights included:

• Robert Redfield, the co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland and a physician with notable accomplishments in the area of HIV immunoregulation, immunotherapy, and vaccine development, also believes that the Church is best positioned to combat the pandemic. 
   
  “This may be the ultimate Christian opportunity,” he asserted. 
   He  believes that the world was required to wait until the Church was willing to get off the 
   sidelines and make an active impact on AIDS.
  
  
• Jim Towey, assistant to President George Bush and director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who formerly worked alongside Mother Teresa in India, shared about his involvement in the nurture and care of HIV patients. 
   
  “Government has the responsibility to provide for people, but there is a need much   
   greater than material poverty,” he said. Calling loneliness the most terrible disease,   
   he emphasized that the government cannot help people who feel unloved and 
   unwanted, but the Church can.
  
  
• Video messages from First Ladies Laura Bush of the United States, Janet Museveni of Uganda and Jeannette Kagame of Rwanda also stressed the importance of engaging in the battle.
  
  
• Harvard University’s Edward Green presented the startling statistics of the disease’s progression and in some cases, its prevention. He shared how Uganda, following the ABC plan of Abstinence, Being faithful, and the Correct and consistent use of condoms, has reduced the prevalence of the disease.
  
  
• Gary Haugen, president of the Washington, D.C.-based International Justice Mission, shared his attempts to be a voice for the voiceless victims of sexual violence. “Sexual violence is one of the engines that is driving the spread of the disease,” Haugen said, sharing that 78 percent of HIV-positive sub-Sahara African women reportedly were forced to have sex. Of the same population, 25 to 40 percent say their first sexual encounter was forced. 
  
  “Gender is at the heart of the pandemic,” he decried, explaining that rape, sex  
  trafficking, and an unjust view of women have caused more women than men   
  to die from HIV/AIDS. He said that violence also affects the vulnerability of the victims through the violent dispossession of  property of orphans and widows. “When the head of the household dies, other family members simply take the property and the home away,  leaving the orphan and widow alone,” Haugen lamented.
  
  
• Bishop Charles Blake, pastor of West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, Calif., has consistently demonstrated a willingness to confront issues of AIDS relief. He started Save Africa’s Children, a non-profit organization that now helps more than 90,000 African children who have been affected by the AIDS pandemic. “I hope that we are inspired today to provide formal, deliberate opportunities and ministries to assure victims themselves will receive all the love, all the care, all the comfort that we can provide,” he said.
  
  
• Rwandan pastor Francis Karemera shared the heartbreaking story of his first wife’s battle with HIV. It was during their honeymoon that she first became sick. 
   
  “I am a pastor, a born-again Christian,” Karemera recalled saying to God. “The Lord does not 
  allow for my bride to have HIV!” Yet in a manner of weeks, he learned his Christian wife was 
  dying, something he thought also meant death of his profession as a pastor. After he lost his wife, he moved from Uganda to Rwanda, where he dared never to share the truth of his experience. 
  
  “In our culture, we carry our children on our backs,” he said, illustrating the opportune time to 
  teach children right or wrong. “It’s the best time to  teach them to be thieves.”
  
  How much better it would be “to teach them values,” he said.
  
  
• Calling the pandemic, “the genocide of HIV,” Martin Ssempa, pastor of Makerere Community Church in Kampala, Uganda, has effectively used educational entertainment as a means to communicate behavioral change to youth at Makerere University. The effort, called Prime Time, has grown from 50 to 5,000 students since 1988 and has become a part of the university’s cultural landscape.
   
  Ssempa said his ultimate goal is to celebrate an Abstinence Pride Month, “30 Days of Abstinence,” where men, women, children, parents, and grandparents march together celebrating the healthy 
  attitudes of abstaining from sex and alcohol.
  
  “Imagine the bumper sticker, ‘My daughter chose to be abstinent. I am so proud of her,’” he said   energetically.
  
  
• Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas, encouraged churches to partner with health care providers in providing testing and counseling of AIDS patients.

             But he offered a cautionary note. “If you launch an effective and efficient AIDS ministry, you 
             need to begin to counsel your membership. Do not assume that your congregation will get it 
             overnight.”

             He added, “Do not be surprised when you come under attack.”

Acknowledging the stigma of AIDS in the local church, Kay Warren reminded those in attendance, “It’s not a sin to be sick.”

Her husband, who advocates repentance instead of avoidance, acceptance instead of intolerance, presence instead of distance, and endurance instead of superstition, concurred.

“If you are going to join this battle against HIV/AIDS, it has to start in the heart – you have to care. One day you are going to be judged by how you treated other people. You may not be able to change the world, but you can change the world for somebody.”

With additional reporting provided by Kelli Cottrell.