January 13, 1999
Allen: More churches need to help
___ATLANTA (ABP)--Former Southern Baptist Convention President Jimmy Allen has urged people active in the fight against AIDS to embrace people of different theological views.
___"They won't always agree with you, but there's a lot of new recruits out there," Allen said during a recent convocation on AIDS and Religion in America in Atlanta.
___Allen,whose story of losing two grandchildren and a daughter-in-law to AIDS was detailed in the 1995 book "Burden of a Secret," called on the predominantly liberal conference crowd to encourage more conservative faith groups to join the fight against AIDS. "They need some patience, but they need persistence," he said.
___In an emotional address, Allen said his grandson Matt did not find acceptance in churches after contracting HIV but found it at places like McDonald's and the public school system.
___"The church didn't turn us down," he said. "It was the gatekeepers of the church who turned us down." Allen said people hiding behind the institution of a church will do cruel things they never would do as individuals.
___He also urged the crowd not to resent latecomers to the battle against AIDS. "Many will ask where they were," he said. "Where they were was moving toward a time and place where they need to be and that time is now."
___Allen praised the church ministries across the country that are caring for HIV/AIDS victims. "It's not a problem of statistics, it's a problem of pain. It's an attitude problem, and that's where faith comes in."
___Faith-based ministries across the country are providing a spiritual element to treating the disease that even the government has acknowledged.
___The Balm in Gilead, a New York-based group which mobilizes African-American churches to respond to AIDS, won a $600,000 three-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control to establish a black-church HIV/AIDS assistance center.
___Other help groups are found within churches, synagogues or other houses of worship, and some combine their efforts into an interfaith approach and coordinate with AIDS National Interfaith Network, sponsor of the Atlanta convocation.
___Jeff Peterson-Davis, an ordained Presbyterian minister who is executive director of the Atlanta Interfaith AIDS Network, said he has a mixed view on the response to AIDS from the faith community. "On one hand, I'm disappointed, but on the other hand there are some great shining lights of how the churches have responded.
___"This is an opportunity to engage in a ministry where I think Christ would be found in 1998," Peterson-Davis said. "When I look at the life of Jesus and the life he kept, I think one of the places he would hang out is with people who are living and dying with HIV/AIDS.
___"For us, how someone got the disease is not important," he said, advising groups that let theological views stand in the way of a meaningful AIDS ministry to "follow the example of Christ to provide non-judgmental compassion and care."
___In addition to losing his daughter-in-law and two grandchildren to AIDS transmitted though blood transfusions, Allen also has a son who is gay. The former Texas pastor and former president of the SBC Radio & Television Commission said he and his son, Skip, have agreed to disagree on the morality of homosexuality.
___"He's allowed me to be wrong on the issue, and I have allowed him the same privilege," Allen said. "Skip has agreed to respond to my accepting him rather than us approving each other. And the bridge of that is love."
___That same kind of love can bridge the gap between churches and people with AIDS who need compassionate ministry, he said, noting that many people of faith concentrate on the sin of homosexuality while ignoring sins such as greed and racism.
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