Holistic Mission and AIDS
The challenge of our time to world evangelization.

HIV/AIDS is the greatest humanitarian emergency in the history of the human family. Almost 40 million people are infected with the virus. Almost eight thousand people died of AIDS every day in 2003. At 2003 infection rates, 92,000 people are being infected every week. It is forecast that about 70 million people will die by 2020. (Statistics taken from the UNAIDS 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic and the June 2004 UNICEF/UNICEF Children on the Brink Fact Sheet.)

Fifteen million children have lost one or both of their parents worldwide. Teenagers are heading households, raising their siblings. Grandmothers are raising their grandchildren, having buried their own children behind their simple houses because of AIDS. AIDS is creating widows and orphans at an incredible rate.

Today, the center of gravity of the pandemic is Africa. The pandemic has been raging for over twenty years, while most of the world has slept. African pastors are burying people every day of every week; they are in the burial business. Many of those impacted by HIV/AIDS are our sisters and brothers in the Lord.

We are at the beginning of the pandemic, not the middle nor the end. Africa is only the first wave of an emerging global pandemic. China, India, and Russia - home to almost one-third of the world's population - have growing HIV prevalence rates and poor prevention efforts that could lead them to the situation in which Africa now finds herself.

Many African churches have taken the lead in responding in prevention and care. A few Asian churches are doing the same. Churches in other parts of the world have been slower to respond. What is missing is global commitment on the part of all evangelicals to provide what God has given them to the fight against this scourge.

HIV/AIDS is a complex and multifaceted pandemic with a wide variety of interacting causes, sustaining factors and impacts. Therefore this pandemic demands a holistic mission response from the churches. We must make our contribution to fighting this disaster by drawing on a Christian worldview that seamlessly unites the material, psychosocial, social, cultural, political and spiritual aspects of life, a worldview that unites evangelism, discipleship, social action and the pursuit of justice


Read more on AIDS issues