December 10, 2002
by Melissa Lauber

WASHINGTON – More than 200 people from black United Methodist churches gathered in the nation's capital to discuss how the church's silence around HIV/AIDS is killing people.

"If we stay silent, we're killing people. Silence with HIV/AIDS means death," said Noemi Fuentes, a staff executive with the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries. The board, along with the Baltimore-Washington Conference, sponsored the open discussion on AIDS and the Black Church at the Washington Plaza Hotel Dec. 6-7.

Keynote speaker Dr. Joycelyn Elders, a former U.S. surgeon general, described the crisis that the disease has created during the past three decades.

African Americans make up 12 percent of the population in the United States, but 59 percent of women with AIDS are African American and 65 percent of teens with AIDS are African American. By 2005, Elders said, 60 percent of all AIDS cases will be African American.

"And in the church, we're still deciding whether we want to talk about it or not," said Elders. "The day you see the truth and cease to speak is the day you begin to die."

Fuentes acknowledged that the Baltimore-Washington Conference is one of the more outspoken, active annual conferences in the AIDS arena. However, Bishop Felton Edwin May cautioned against complacency and simple good intentions.

"In the church, we identify, process, debate, codify, print and believe it's done. We have spoken," Bishop May said. "By the time the ink is dry, we are exhausted."

He expressed concern that the church is in denial about AIDS and noted that actions speak louder than words.

"The Word has not value until it is wrapped in flesh and blood," said the bishop. He encouraged the participants to become "living prayers" in the battle against AIDS.

Elders also urged the church to act with "mountain-moving faith." She shared the story of how the United Methodist Church changed her life by giving her a scholarship that took her from the cotton fields of Arkansas to a college campus.

She served as the nation's surgeon general in the Clinton administration but had never seen a doctor before she went to college.

"You can't be what you can't see," Elders said. "You're the visionaries of our society. You've got to be voicing a vision for the poor and powerless."

Elders also took the church to task for allowing the AIDS virus, a medical condition, to become a sin. She questioned people's uneasiness about discussing sex in church settings and their unwillingness to advocate the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS.

"I agree condoms will break, but vows of abstinence break far more easily," she said.

At a Bible study during the conversation on AIDS, Randy Bailey, a professor at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, stressed the importance of allowing honest discussions about sexuality within the church, especially from the pulpit.

In a lively discussion, Bailey, a Hebrew scholar, showed participants his interpretation of how the first part of the biblical book of Esther is a homoerotic story.

"The ways in which we read a text can limit us or free us to become involved in ministry," said Bailey. By denying or distorting human sexuality, the church stigmatizes the very people with whom it seeks to be in ministry, he added.

He shared how he spent time trying to convince his brother, who had AIDS, that God still loved him when the church indicated otherwise. He also pointed out God's absence in the book of Esther. "Where is God in all this?" Bailey asked. "How do we live through situations where it seems God is not speaking?"

Christians practice an incarnational faith, he said. "We have to demonstrate God's presence," and find God in the "unacceptable one."

Following the Bible study, a panel discussion on AIDS and a series of workshops were held, which included opportunities to explore ministering to the deaf community.

"That was intentional," Fuentes said, noting that AIDS infections rates in the deaf community are four times higher than those of the hearing community.

Miscommunication about AIDS is a huge problem, said Harry Woosley, a deaf activist from Christ United Methodist Church of the Deaf in Baltimore. Within the deaf community, misunderstanding the signs for positive and negative has spelled the difference between life and death, Woosley said.

People have died and others have delayed medical treatment because they believed themselves healthy when they saw the sign for positive conveyed to them in American Sign Language as they were being diagnosed for HIV/AIDS.

In 1989, Woosley discovered he was HIV-positive. "There was no counseling, no discussion. The doctor told me I was HIV-positive and left the room, left me alone in the room."

Conditions for deaf people with HIV/AIDS have changed, but not nearly enough, said Woosley, who is a caseworker for deaf people with the Family Services Foundation.

Woosley has an act he takes on the road. It's very graphic and includes teaching deaf participants safe-sex practices.

Everything with deaf people must be visual, he stressed. Deaf people don't hear about AIDS in movies, on television or radio. Most read at only a third-grade level, so they tend not to read newspapers, magazines or closed-captioning on their televisions. "It's person-to-person. That's how the message about AIDS is spread," Woosley said.

"I don't have time to be embarrassed. I'm not polite," he said. "That's a waste of time. There's no time for games."

The Rev. Joseph Daniels of Emory United Methodist Church in Washington, agreed. Local churches can no longer afford to be silent or inactive about AIDS. "We just need to do it," he said. "We need to open our doors and get to it."

United Methodist News Service

Melissa Lauber is associate editor of the UMConnection newspaper in the Baltimore-Washington Conference.