Interview: Compassion Head on Western Church and AIDS

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.

|PIC1|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.

As you've been working with churches for so long, just recently have you started seeing changes in the mobilising of churches and is it more effective?

Stafford: It's better resourced now. There are two ends to this bridge. We have been focusing on the Church in the developing world, in the poverty settings. One of the by-products of Compassion is institutional development. We are helping little churches develop their administrative capacity, their managerial skills, how to plan, how to strategise, how to implement, how to raise local resources. We have been deep in that for a long time.

It's the church on the other side of the equation that I'm starting to get excited about - the Western Church, the American Church. Over half of American Christians have not done anything at all about AIDS - 52 percent. It's like it doesn't even exist on the planet. We gather together, we worship, we pray as if this isn't going on. Or if it is going on, it's not our problem. What I'm realising - and Compassion's very good at this end of the bridge, facilitating what the Church does in a poverty setting - we haven't had a whole lot of ability to mobilise the Church on this side.

So my great excitement is that God has raised up people like Rick Warren and Kay that do have the capacity to awaken the Church on this side of the equation. So as they do that, I'm pretty sure that volunteers, and expertise and resources are going to come that will help us do what we do better and better. And I think as the tide rises, all of these boats float.

What percentage of the churches that you're working with are Western churches?

Stafford: Our churches overseas are all national churches. We really don't work with the Western church. We have 800,000 Western Christians who are sponsoring children. But our focus is the institutional capacity and ministering children in the developing world churches. This (the Western Church) is sort of the marketing pool. That's where we find people with a compassionate heart that are willing to reach out to a child. But to mobilise them as an entity is outside of our skill set. But it seems to be the heart of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels that have the voice and the influence.

Did you ever think about mobilising the Western churches?

Stafford: Well we mobilised 800,000 of them to one-by-one reach out to a child. But around the issue of AIDS particularly, it has been very hard to mobilise this Church because the Church has not only the great potential to be a part of the solution but they've also been part of the problem in their stigma of what this disease is. It took the Church in the West a long time to find its compassionate heart. We tended to blame the victims - it was their own promiscuity that led to this. I think when it moved from grown-ups to children, children born with HIV in their blood, suddenly the argument that it's their wickedness that causes this fell apart because there's nothing more innocent than a newborn child with HIV in its veins.

I remember when this disease first started back in the early 80s, there was a time when research was done that said American Christians are more than twice as likely to care for a child in poverty as the general public unless that child has AIDS, in which case they become only half as likely as the general public.

So there was an awful lot of "Who sinned? This man or his parents?" - it was a question asked to Jesus, and the Church has for so long misunderstood this disease and have not stood up to the task. So we're (Compassion) not structured to influence multiple gatherings of churches; we're not a denomination so we can't. That's why I rejoice when I see those that can. I believe all of us are going to be blessed by it in the long run.

Pastor Rick actually defined "compassion." He said it's not sympathy or empathy, but it's doing something about the problem or the pain.

Stafford: That's right. They say pity weeps and walks away, but compassion comes to stay. Compassion actually, we hold our name as a very sacred trust. Our biggest challenge is to deserve our name because if you understand compassion, it's a compound word. In Latin, it's "pati cum." Cum means "with" - communication, community. Pati, of all things, you think well it must mean with a warm heart, a generous spirit. The great shock is pati means "to suffer." So when Jesus called us to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate, what he meant is, I'm not asking you to just go in and take away everybody's hurts. I'm asking you to do something far more courageous - to step in voluntarily, to feel the pain, to suffer with those who suffer. That's a more profound level of love than most of us in the West are comfortable with.

We don't like reaching out and helping, we don't want to feel the pain, we don't want to suffer. We're probably like no society in history. We're the best ones at avoiding suffering, maybe throughout history. We don't tolerate hot, we don't tolerate cold, we don't tolerate darkness, we don't tolerate light, we don't tolerate hunger - not only do we need food, it has to be fast food. We have become masters at avoiding suffering. And yet our Lord calls us to voluntarily step in and suffer with those who suffer. That's some pretty profound concept. And that's why what we do at Compassion is sponsor children across the world; because we actually allow a person here in Los Angeles to step in to the life of a little child maybe with AIDS in Rwanda. Well that's just about profoundly a Christian thing as you can possibly do.

So I'm hopeful that something's going to come of this.