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Proclaiming the love of Jesus Christ to those with HIV/AIDS

Rick Warren explains why he and his wife Kay have attended the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City and how he first got involved with this global pandemic

Sunday, 10 August 2008, 15:20 (EST)
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Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and author of the best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, and his wife Kay, were among the many Christians who attended the 17th International World AIDS Conference in Mexico City which ended today (Friday, August 08, 2008).

Warren agreed to talk with ANS during the conference and first answered the question why he was there in the midst of so much protest by various groups and such diverse views on how to tackle the world’s greatest health program.

“We think this is where the church needs to be any time a major issue of global proportion like the AIDS pandemic is around,” said Rick Warren. “The church needs to be there to show up to say, ‘We love, we care and we need to be at the table.’ This is just what Jesus did when he was walking this earth. He went to the market place and we should do the same.

“Although there are some groups here that we’d prefer that were not here, we’re going to be here and we’re going to show love and kindness and proclaim the love of Jesus Christ.”

Rick Warren then revealed how his wife Kay first got him involved in the HIV/AIDS battle.

“Well, to my shame, for years I knew about AIDS and I can honestly say that I didn’t care. I didn’t understand why it really mattered and actually I don’t think I understood the scope of it how large the problem was. I didn’t realize that AIDS was such a pandemic. I had always thought, ‘Well maybe it’s just a gay disease.’ It shouldn’t have mattered even if it was a gay disease.

“But the truth is that when Kay read that famous article about five years ago about how many kids had been orphaned by AIDS she shared that with me. She thought I didn’t understand that there were twelve to fourteen-million children orphaned by AIDS and she kept telling about this terrible situation.

“As God began to speak to her, and she began to believe that God was calling her to be a spokesperson for this particular disease, my first reaction was, ‘I’m proud of you babe. I’m glad you’ve got a cause. You have supported me over the years and now I’m going to support you in this, but my cause is training leaders.’ I’ve been doing that for twenty-eight years and I’ve trained over half a million leaders in a hundred-sixty-two countries.

“But the more she talked about it, the more it began to grab my heart and I thought, ‘I’ve got to care about this too.’ I also began to realize that there were millions of people dealing with a disease that there is no cure as of yet. Even if you have the best medicines in the world, it’s still chronic. And so God grabbed my heart, too, and we said that we were going into a learning mode and we’ve never stopped learning and we never stopped talking about it.”

Source: ASSIST News Service (ANS)


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