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What is your advice to American Christians concerned about the HIV pandemic? Is public advocacy at the grassroots level important?

I'd love to see church groups in America mobilize resources and work with sister churches in Africa in ministering to the sick and the dying and AIDS orphans. What I'd like to see is churches everywhere, particularly in the countries that are hard-hit by AIDS, becoming mobilized and getting involved in prevention.

The AIDS experts? The message from them all these years has been: "You people in churches don't have a role to play because only condoms and needle exchange are effective. What you're preaching sounds nice but it doesn't work."

A lot of churches have not been involved in AIDS prevention because they believed what they were told by the experts. The role for churches in America? Mobilize resources, work with your denomination and the other churches in Africa and Asia and the Caribbean and Latin America, and work with them and help them promote abstinence and faithfulness.

Because all the organizations with all the money are promoting condoms. Somebody else needs to promote the A and B. There's a widespread belief that because of the Bush administration policy that's where the emphasis is today. But it ain't so.

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March (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49