While churchgoers have sat comfortably in the pews, Compassion International has extended relief and care to hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken and HIV-infected children around the world. For 55 years, the Christian child advocacy ministry has worked through the local church to keep children on their feet.
When dealing with children infected with AIDS, the Western Church has largely remained absent, Compassion International President Wess Stafford noted. Although identified as the "masters" at avoiding suffering, western churches are just now waking up to the widespread humanitarian crisis, giving Stafford a hope for the Church that he had never felt before in his decades of ministry. Christian Today sat down with Stafford at a recent Global AIDS Summit at Saddleback Church to discuss Compassion's work and the rise of the Western Church against AIDS.NGOs have been dealing with AIDS for a long time, much longer than the Church, and speakers at the Global AIDS Summit have repeatedly said that the Church is vital to the equation, which includes the government and NGOs. When did NGOs like yours realise the need for the Church?
Stafford: It's tricky to paint all NGOs with the same brush because the truth is, Compassion is 55 years old and we have always worked only through the Church. Compassion has 800,000 sponsored children across the world but we are committed to never touch the life of a child except the local church, the local body of believers. So we're very unusual.
I'm thrilled to be a part of this [AIDS Summit] ... and I find the rest of the world awakening to this very powerful entity; the Church is a viable, credible, grassroots institution that exists in virtually every village, every town, every slum where AIDS is rampant. But we've approached this problem from the top. It's been medicine, it's been government, it's been major donors.
And now that the ARV pill, which is now a relatively reasonable price, has found its way to the clinics of the communities, for the most part the high powers of the world said, "Well, that's access; mission accomplished." And what we're saying is, "No, that's not access, that's inventory. What you now have is a life-sustaining pill in the clinic. What this is, is the last mile.... If that pill doesn't get out of that clinic and into the tiny little homes where people suffer - well, how does that happen? That's not government. That's not even health workers; there's just not enough of them. What that is, is God's people.
And what we're doing at Compassion with 3,600 churches around the world is mobilising them to be the route into the homes where children are suffering, to be there, to take them to get tested, to take them to get medication, to pick up the tab for the cost if they're so poverty-stricken they can't. Sometimes just the taxi ride is more than they can afford to do. To be there to counsel, to comfort, to make sure their nutrition is strong.
So for all this time, and the reason I said I feel for the first time hope is that we have been doing it all this time in our own quiet way and it's just now becoming a movement across many of the others. Because what's needed now that the pill has made it to the clinic is a viable, credible delivery mechanism right to the home.
