AIDS and orphans: Why you should care, what you can do
By Manda Gibson

Rachel Styffe (left), daughter of Elizabeth Styffe and member of Saddleback Church’s high school ministry, embraces a new friend the Memorial Center Gisimba Orphanage in Kigali, Rwanda.

In her travels to the parts of the world most affected by AIDS, Elizabeth Styffe has visited neighborhoods where every home is headed by a child. For her, the 143 million children orphaned by AIDS are not numbers.

“I know their names; I know their faces,” she said. “It just became really personal.”

Styffe is the director of Saddleback Church’s HIV/AIDS Initiative. As Saddleback has become more involved in addressing AIDS, Styffe has realized that you can’t care about AIDS without caring about orphans, and you can’t care about orphans without caring about AIDS. That’s because millions of children have been orphaned as a result of AIDS – and until AIDS is stopped, more and more children will continue to be orphaned.

Saddleback’s ideal plan is to equip local churches to care for the orphans in their own communities.

“Every local church is God’s answer for the child,” Styffe said. “Children in families is God’s plan.”

Saddleback Church, as part of the HIV/AIDS Initiative, has an orphans ministry that is both locally and globally focused.

“The goal is to come alongside churches to learn from them, to equip them in orphan care ministry if they don’t have one, and help children stay in communities and find families when they have none,” Styffe said. “The church is the place where orphans find hope in the world.”

But sometimes countries – including the United States – have more orphans than adults willing and able to care for them.

“When load exceeds capacity, we believe it’s biblical to adopt,” Styffe said. “Adoption is God’s idea.”

Through P.E.A.C.E., Saddleback Church and churches in Rwanda are working together on the Saddleback/Rwanda Orphan Proposal.

“Those of us working on the Orphan Proposal dream of caring for street children through the church, supporting families caring for orphans, and increasing Rwandan churches’ involvement in local orphanages,” Styffe said.

In addition, the Saddleback/Rwanda Orphan Proposal is working to establish an international adoption agency in Rwanda, which is home to 800,000 orphans.

What churches can do

Paul Pennington, director of FamilyLife’s Hope for Orphans, believes that, as Saddleback becomes more involved in orphans ministry, the positive results for children around the world could be significant. He prays that Saddleback will become a mentor church to show other churches how orphans ministry and HIV ministry can go hand in hand.

At the 2007 Global Summit on AIDS and the Church, Pennington and other experts will lead a session detailing how churches can start an orphans ministry. An orphans ministry may include several components, including adoption – even the adoption of children who are living with HIV.

However, though adoption is sometimes the best solution, it is an extreme form of orphan care, Pennington says. With 143 million orphans around the world – many of whom aren’t adoptable for various reasons – churches need to love and care for orphans where they are.

“There are so many things a local church can do,” Styffe said. “Loving their own orphans might include welcoming children into your own home, spending time with them, or helping a family that is adopting.”

Additionally, churches might provide education for orphans or help them learn skills that will enable them to support themselves as adults, Pennington said. In Zambia orphans are discipled while learning to do rotation farming and to sell their crops through a farmers market. Youth who successfully complete the program receive their own land to farm.

“What that all adds up to is sustained ministry,” Pennington said. “We’re not just interested in humanitarian relief.”

On a P.E.A.C.E. missions trip in Rwanda’s Kibuye district, Saddleback members Elizabeth Styffe and her son Peter Styffe learn from and interact with Rwandan church members who are leading the way in orphan care.

Why Christians should care for orphans

Caring for orphans is a particular responsibility of Christians, Pennington says. Throughout Scripture, God makes clear his heart for orphans. In Deuteronomy, he instructs his followers at harvest time to leave behind grain in the fields for orphans and widows to collect. The book of James says that pure and undefiled religion is to visit orphans and widows in their distress.

“It is a point of difference between biblical Christianity and the rest of the world’s philosophies and religions that we value those who can give nothing back to us,” Pennington said. “In the end that is a picture of the gospel.”

Historically, Christians have cared for orphans, even when no one else would. In the first century, when Christians were being martyred, other Christians began taking in children of martyred believers. They also would care for children who had been abandoned by non-Christians. In many families, one family member would fast one day each week so the orphans of the martyrs could be fed.

“It’s only been in the last 100 or so years, when we reclassified our American orphans as foster children and took them out of sight, that the church kind of substituted writing a check as the way we show compassion,” Pennington said.

Today’s average American church spends less than 10 percent of its budget on children’s-related ministry, and the amount being used for the orphans and children who are fatherless is much lower, he says.

Pennington, Styffe, and other like-minded Christians – including Saddleback Church – are calling Christians to once again fulfill their responsibility of caring for orphans, both physically and spiritually.

“When you do a study of Scripture about how God cares for the sick and for the marginalized, you begin being hit in the head with the verses that talk about God’s heart for the orphans,” Styffe said.

“Family is God’s idea. We believe in adoption because, as Christians, we’re all adopted by God through Jesus.”

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