Interview: Kay Warren on Saddleback's New HIV/AIDS Conference

Kay Warren, wife and co-minister with Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, is heading up the church’s new HIV/AIDS Conference from Nov. 29 - Dec. 1 in Lake Forest, California, USA. She is convinced that God and those suffering with HIV/AIDS are calling the church to take action.

|PIC1|The upcoming gathering of pastors, medical experts, and persons living with HIV, will showcase practical tools to help the local church address HIV/AIDS in their community and around the world.

Rick Warren will speak on how the P.E.A.C.E. Plan can help address HIV/AIDS. Other speakers include Bill & Lynne Hybels, and leaders from around the world. The conference will educate people from different parts the earth about the global P.E.A.C.E. plan – a program to get churches to do good works in their communities.

On Nov. 15, in an exclusive interview with Kay Warren, she said local churches must get involved because there are not enough professionals to lift the majority of the world that are desperately poor. She also responded to would-be critics who might ask, why Evangelicals didn't catch wind of the bleak situation for so many of the world's poor much earlier.

What is the AIDS Conference all about?

KW: The AIDS conference is about the church. There will be government leaders and others, but it's a call primarily to the church. We have tried to appeal to pastors, believing that pastors are the gatekeepers to the congregation. You can have a sweet old lady who can have ideas about caring for the people, but it won't have any major effect on the churches as a whole.

I am very excited about the AIDS Conference. I think that God is getting ready to unleash a wave of compassion and caring. This is the greatest opportunity for the church to demonstrate we are “for real.” We say we are believers. I think this is a test.

James O. Davis and Rick Warren have both said that outreach responsibility is shifting from parachurches to local churches. Do you agree?

KW: It is happening. I believe that for many years, there have been folks concerned about the physical needs of the people. They care for the sick, the poor, but unfortunately they weren't in the church. Finally the church as a whole is beginning to understand what it is that God has called us to do and be.

But I am so grateful for the probably hundreds of thousands of Christians who right now are caring for orphans, widows, vulnerable children, and all those in need. They have heard the call of Christ to care, and they have done so.

Do you believe that many Americans were as unseeing or as unknowing as you were when you first understood the enormous toll that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is having on the world?

KW: I'm sad to say, but I don't think I was in the minority. As I talk to Christians, most of them are where I was, but the more you talk to them, the more the light begins to dawn because the heart of most people is to have the heart of Christ.

I think that God asks us to become seriously disturbed about the millions who are infected with HIV. I think God asks us to become seriously disturbed of the millions of little girls who are sold into prostitution every year.

Some people criticise Evangelicals for getting involved in social concerns. This action has traditionally been categorised as under the "liberal" domain. What would you say to them? And others ask why Evangelicals didn’t get involved much earlier?

KW: None of us ever know why, at any moment in history, things come together in such a way that there is a movement. We've done a really good job as Evangelicals in reaching people for Christ, talking about people's needs. We have been fulfilling the Great Commission. However, we have ignored the Great Commandment. So our attempt is to bring the Great Commission and the Great Commandment together. Any church that just emphasises the spiritual and neglected the physical is not honoring the heart of God. Any church that only ministers to the physical and doesn't honor the spiritual is not honoring God.

I think our church is going to be a better church after simply implementing it. We don't have it perfected. We are not setting ourselves up as examples of how to do it, but just to realise that we're trying. We realise that we've been disobedient, apathetic, and we've repented of that. So I think our church will be a much healthier church. I think we'll have much better believers.

How does Saddleback Church plan on urging local churches to get on the forefront of the fight against global ills?

KW: I think it starts with awareness. I think we have to read Scriptures with a new set of eyes. My dad was a pastor. I read those verses in the Old Testament about the poor, the sick, the widows, the immigrant who was treated unfairly, and I would just sympathise and go, 'Wow, it must've been really hard living back then,' not realising that most of the world lives like that today. We don't understand sickness and poverty. We tend to think that it's something that happened a long time ago.

Research has shown that pastors are overwhelmed as it is. Do you think it will affect a pastor's ability to minister to his own congregation?

If it were just the poor pastor who had to do it all, but it's not. Every Christian is a minister. God has called each of us to minister. It's not up to the professionals. There will never be enough professionals to get the job done. There will never be enough doctors, lawyers, or pastors. This is a call to the woman in the pew, the man in the pew, to the student; this is a call to every Christian.

What does the P.E.A.C.E. plan have to do with all this?

The P.E.A.C.E. plan that we just launched in our church this fall is a model that we hope to reproduce in thousands of churches, churches who believe that the purpose is to grow in fellowship and have a mission in the world. We have people coming from Uganda and South Africa. We're not asking them to come and tell us what we need to do where they are. We're asking them to tell us what they're doing in their Jerusalem. We're urging churches to rise up and do what they can do in their Jerusalem, in their own backyard.




[Interview conducted by Christian Today Correspondent Rhoda Tse in California, USA]