AIDS
I want to say something about the AIDS epidemic because it is relevant to us all. Then I will talk about third millennial challenges. You know that one person every 15 seconds becomes infected with the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) and that some 30 million have already been infected. In 1985 we were pumping infected blood into patients because we thought it was safe. In that year, we thought that drug users were safe from the epidemic as well as heterosexual men and women. My first experience of the AIDS epidemic in all of its power and savage brutality was in 1988, when I saw the coffins lining the road from Entebbe Airport to Kampala. Unlike countries such as India today, they had very little warning. The biggest risk factor is other untreated sexually transmitted disease.
Within a short time one in three of the adult sexually active population of parts of Uganda was infected, ill or dying.
I am going to Zimbabwe next week to speak on the significance of the epidemic to the South Africa Economic Summit. Some of the leading world industrialists will be there. They are beginning to realise that it is going to affect their bottom line. A South African mine owner in Davos at the World Economic Forum told me that one in five of his work force was infected. The death toll from AIDS in Rwanda will be far greater than the death toll from ethnic genocide.
It's a silent epidemic. It's a thing we track with statistics but we never actually see until its too late.
It was on the news the other night that 50,000 refugees in Zaire went missing. That's only a tiny fraction of the rest of the population in that area who have HIV.
The good news is that infection rates among young teenagers in Uganda are falling.
But India has a greater population than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. I have just come back from Bombay. They have two and a half percent HIV infected. I don't know of a city in any country of the world outside the West which has managed to prevent a 2.5% becoming a 25% in 5 to 10 years. All you are arguing for is whether it is going to stabilise at 22% or 32%. That depends on education. The number of people with sexually transmitted diseases who also have HIV was 4 in 100 in 1990. In 1994 it was 36 in 100. Bombay has a population just about as large as the whole of Uganda. It's almost impossible now for us to prevent some two to three million people dying from HIV in that city alone.
My own calculation is that 800 people are infected in Bombay every night.
Around Calcutta and Bombay there is a hinterland of two to three hundred miles from which labourers come in for 11 months of the year, become infected and take the infection home to their wives.
We went to the Burmese border and visited a small village of 40,000 people of whom 8000 are injecting drug users and 4000 are infected. I was in a pastors home. Two of his children were dying of AIDS. It's an area with little technology but they have syringes and needles. In that place, if you are a drug user you are imprisoned. The other side of the border young women sent to earn for their families in Thailand and returning home are tested. Those with HIV are shot. I don't know any other illness that does this to people.
In Calcutta there is a ward which is padlocked. It is funded by the World Bank to care for those dying on the streets with AIDS. They cannot find a single doctor or nurse who is willing to look after those people. As a Christian community we need to make a response.
It would only be a token but as Mother Theresa has shown us, a token can 'break the heart of a nation.' Yesterday I learned that a mother and child from a hospital close to the one with the closed ward had been sent out to die on the streets. Mother Theresa took them in. By the millennium, India could have more people infected than the whole of sub Saharan Africa today and by 2005 the total in India could exceed the total for the whole world today. I believe that as a Christian community we have a moral responsibility to do something about this epidemic. It's different in this country. We have not had an epidemic as such - just a relatively small number of cases. But it is a major issue for developing countries. It will affect every one of the people you send abroad . In Africa already, Asia certainly, The most worrying thing in India was the lack of a government campaign. I didn't see one poster - apart from at the Burmese border. The supply of condoms for prostitutes has stopped since 1994 - in some parts of India. Millions of rupees tied up in government accounts have not been spent. My children when they grow up are going to be asking some hard questions. My son will say 'I can understand Africa because we didn't know enough then but how is it that the whole world just sat back and watched 100 million deaths in a nation of almost one billion people?' I read mission literature from 1997. What on earth are we doing? This is an illness that should touch us deeply as Christians because it is like leprosy. When Jesus touched the leper, it was the one thing that perhaps demonstrated the unconditional love of God more profoundly than his hanging on the tree. He went to those who were rejected. He went to the very depths of humanity. And the 'depths of Calcutta' today is a little baby girl who is thrown out on the streets with her mother because her mother has an illness of which her community is afraid and for which it has judged her. This is a disease of our time. AIDS is a thermometer of social decay, relational chaos, and the bankruptcy of normal life. As Christians we have the answer. We know that if everyone were to adopt a Christian lifestyle, AIDS would effectively be wiped off the face of this earth within 30 years. Even if we find a cure for HIV within the next two years, which is a possibility, the picture won't alter. TB has been curable for the cost of a couple of pounds for 30 to 50 years and we now have the world's worst TB epidemic ever. Syphilis has been curable with one jab of penicillin for the past 50 years and we have the world's worst epidemic of syphilis today. So a drug treatment that may have to be continued for life or may cure you after two years costing £20,000 a year, is science fiction for most of the world.
That's the challenge. Now I will lay that aside.
THIRD MILLENNIAL MISSION
The world is changing very fast: architecture, clothes, technology are about to undergo a huge quantum leap affecting our culture, our expectations, our spirituality and mission.
I think of the men and women a century ago who laid down their lives knowing that the life expectancy on the mission field was measured in weeks or months in some areas. They could be martyred, die of malaria or typhoid yet they went gladly.
In the late nineteenth century, faith and expertise all went together in one package which we call 'medical mission'.
Seeds were sown in those days which are coming back in what I call the 'boomerang effect'. Something extraordinary is taking place. Faith is coming home.
Last night I heard of a church in Argentina which about seven years ago numbered about seven people and is now 10,000 people. You say 'they don't understand the scriptures like we do'. Thank God they don't! There is a faith and vitality which makes us seem spiritually bankrupt. That is what is seen by returning missionaries. Second and third generation Christians from countries where those seeds of faith were sown who come now to this country are dismayed and shocked.
I was whisked off the plane after landing in Uganda expecting to rest but instead was taken to a prayer meeting where 4,000 people had travelled up to 200 miles by vehicles, bicycles and foot bringing their children to a meeting lasting from 6pm to 6am every month. Why? They believed God had called them together to pray.
There is a global explosion of faith the like of which our planet has never seen since before creation. The world population is growing at 1.7% per year and the church at 2.4%.
We look at our little islands - all 4,000 of them with little lumps of rock off the coast of Scotland - and we find an emptiness here and yet there is a hunger and signs of awakening.
We go East from here to Europe to places where there has never been much of an evangelical witness and we find an explosion again. Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia. There is this rump of darkness in Western Europe. Going into the EC we will find the whole psyche of our nation dominated by people who do not have at their roots an evangelical Christian faith but a very decayed Catholicism.
I think it is in Chile where there is a network sending out 2000 church planters. The only condition is that they must have planted 10 churches in their own country first.
I planted a church myself in Brentford about 5 years ago with 18 people and it is now some 70 people plus 30-40 children in an area with 30-40% unemployment.
If we don't church plant this nation, the Chinese or Indian or Chilean or Argentinian Christians will.
We are hardly in a fit state to evangelise our own nation. Yet at least we are reaching our own people when we try, unlike overseas missionaries coming to Britain. Cross-cultural evangelism works, but it is hard work.
A group of Asians in this country are working to establish indigenous churches in India. This costs much less than sending a doctor from this country. They are sending an Asian doctor back to the place from which his family came. There are probably more missionaries in India than there ever have been from Britain.
I met an Indian doctor on the Burmese border working with an entirely indigenous mission. They can tap into funding agencies that would not fund ACET in the UK. He had been sent by Tear Fund to Uganda to see the work there. He said "something happened when I saw what the Ugandan Christians were doing that set my heart on fire and I vowed that I would come back and do the same here".
The situation has changed - the old package of mission is breaking down. The resource inequalities continue.
For every £100 given to Tear Fund for India or Uganda, £110 comes back to British banks in interest for debt. The moral issue in the monetary system needs to be addressed. It is the inequalities that allow us to have the resources to give.
And the economies of global mission are changing.
Thailand is no longer an ultra-poor developing country. The amount of foreign investment in India has increased dramatically every year since 1992. The Pacific basin is booming.
These nations are changing and the flow of resources will change within the next ten years.
ACET is now raising finance within Thailand. In India there is huge wealth now if it could be tapped.
There is still a huge need for resources and expertise. But if someone has been in a mission hospital for ten years and there is still no one locally able to replace him or her, something may be wrong.
'Train, release, encourage, get out, go' It's a different model.
There is a need to transfer resources in a way that allows people to retain their honour and respect and allows them to manage their own lives and their own people. That's difficult. It is easier to write a cheque than to do it the other way.
THE HOME MISSION FIELD
Extraordinary things are happening but on a small scale at present. In a street survey in London, six out of ten people answered that if it were possible to know Jesus Christ in a personal way, they would like to do so.
There is a hunger and pre-millennial tension. Life will not be the same again. We are on the edge of something new.
People are tired of the way they are living - a living hell for many.
They do not want every child to be brought up in a broken home and every marriage to end in divorce. They may not believe in the bible but they love the sort of values for which Christians stand.
For example ACET has been able to give out 1.1 million copies of the AIDS booklet in schools containing Christian values celibacy, faithfulness, long term commitment, family life. It is very popular with teachers, governors and parents of teenagers.
While this nation remains at such a low spiritual ebb, we need to serve those in other nations with great humility, recognising that we are often exchanging our material wealth and technology for their more robust spirituality.
Let us learn something from them while sharing our resources and then come back, remotivated to evangelise our own piece of the earth - the boomerang effect.
I want to say something about the AIDS epidemic because it is relevant to us all. Then I will talk about third millennial challenges. You know that one person every 15 seconds becomes infected with the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) and that some 30 million have already been infected. In 1985 we were pumping infected blood into patients because we thought it was safe. In that year, we thought that drug users were safe from the epidemic as well as heterosexual men and women. My first experience of the AIDS epidemic in all of its power and savage brutality was in 1988, when I saw the coffins lining the road from Entebbe Airport to Kampala. Unlike countries such as India today, they had very little warning. The biggest risk factor is other untreated sexually transmitted disease.
Within a short time one in three of the adult sexually active population of parts of Uganda was infected, ill or dying.
I am going to Zimbabwe next week to speak on the significance of the epidemic to the South Africa Economic Summit. Some of the leading world industrialists will be there. They are beginning to realise that it is going to affect their bottom line. A South African mine owner in Davos at the World Economic Forum told me that one in five of his work force was infected. The death toll from AIDS in Rwanda will be far greater than the death toll from ethnic genocide.
It's a silent epidemic. It's a thing we track with statistics but we never actually see until its too late.
It was on the news the other night that 50,000 refugees in Zaire went missing. That's only a tiny fraction of the rest of the population in that area who have HIV.
The good news is that infection rates among young teenagers in Uganda are falling.
But India has a greater population than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. I have just come back from Bombay. They have two and a half percent HIV infected. I don't know of a city in any country of the world outside the West which has managed to prevent a 2.5% becoming a 25% in 5 to 10 years. All you are arguing for is whether it is going to stabilise at 22% or 32%. That depends on education. The number of people with sexually transmitted diseases who also have HIV was 4 in 100 in 1990. In 1994 it was 36 in 100. Bombay has a population just about as large as the whole of Uganda. It's almost impossible now for us to prevent some two to three million people dying from HIV in that city alone.
My own calculation is that 800 people are infected in Bombay every night.
Around Calcutta and Bombay there is a hinterland of two to three hundred miles from which labourers come in for 11 months of the year, become infected and take the infection home to their wives.
We went to the Burmese border and visited a small village of 40,000 people of whom 8000 are injecting drug users and 4000 are infected. I was in a pastors home. Two of his children were dying of AIDS. It's an area with little technology but they have syringes and needles. In that place, if you are a drug user you are imprisoned. The other side of the border young women sent to earn for their families in Thailand and returning home are tested. Those with HIV are shot. I don't know any other illness that does this to people.
In Calcutta there is a ward which is padlocked. It is funded by the World Bank to care for those dying on the streets with AIDS. They cannot find a single doctor or nurse who is willing to look after those people. As a Christian community we need to make a response.
It would only be a token but as Mother Theresa has shown us, a token can 'break the heart of a nation.' Yesterday I learned that a mother and child from a hospital close to the one with the closed ward had been sent out to die on the streets. Mother Theresa took them in. By the millennium, India could have more people infected than the whole of sub Saharan Africa today and by 2005 the total in India could exceed the total for the whole world today. I believe that as a Christian community we have a moral responsibility to do something about this epidemic. It's different in this country. We have not had an epidemic as such - just a relatively small number of cases. But it is a major issue for developing countries. It will affect every one of the people you send abroad . In Africa already, Asia certainly, The most worrying thing in India was the lack of a government campaign. I didn't see one poster - apart from at the Burmese border. The supply of condoms for prostitutes has stopped since 1994 - in some parts of India. Millions of rupees tied up in government accounts have not been spent. My children when they grow up are going to be asking some hard questions. My son will say 'I can understand Africa because we didn't know enough then but how is it that the whole world just sat back and watched 100 million deaths in a nation of almost one billion people?' I read mission literature from 1997. What on earth are we doing? This is an illness that should touch us deeply as Christians because it is like leprosy. When Jesus touched the leper, it was the one thing that perhaps demonstrated the unconditional love of God more profoundly than his hanging on the tree. He went to those who were rejected. He went to the very depths of humanity. And the 'depths of Calcutta' today is a little baby girl who is thrown out on the streets with her mother because her mother has an illness of which her community is afraid and for which it has judged her. This is a disease of our time. AIDS is a thermometer of social decay, relational chaos, and the bankruptcy of normal life. As Christians we have the answer. We know that if everyone were to adopt a Christian lifestyle, AIDS would effectively be wiped off the face of this earth within 30 years. Even if we find a cure for HIV within the next two years, which is a possibility, the picture won't alter. TB has been curable for the cost of a couple of pounds for 30 to 50 years and we now have the world's worst TB epidemic ever. Syphilis has been curable with one jab of penicillin for the past 50 years and we have the world's worst epidemic of syphilis today. So a drug treatment that may have to be continued for life or may cure you after two years costing £20,000 a year, is science fiction for most of the world.
That's the challenge. Now I will lay that aside.
THIRD MILLENNIAL MISSION
The world is changing very fast: architecture, clothes, technology are about to undergo a huge quantum leap affecting our culture, our expectations, our spirituality and mission.
I think of the men and women a century ago who laid down their lives knowing that the life expectancy on the mission field was measured in weeks or months in some areas. They could be martyred, die of malaria or typhoid yet they went gladly.
In the late nineteenth century, faith and expertise all went together in one package which we call 'medical mission'.
Seeds were sown in those days which are coming back in what I call the 'boomerang effect'. Something extraordinary is taking place. Faith is coming home.
Last night I heard of a church in Argentina which about seven years ago numbered about seven people and is now 10,000 people. You say 'they don't understand the scriptures like we do'. Thank God they don't! There is a faith and vitality which makes us seem spiritually bankrupt. That is what is seen by returning missionaries. Second and third generation Christians from countries where those seeds of faith were sown who come now to this country are dismayed and shocked.
I was whisked off the plane after landing in Uganda expecting to rest but instead was taken to a prayer meeting where 4,000 people had travelled up to 200 miles by vehicles, bicycles and foot bringing their children to a meeting lasting from 6pm to 6am every month. Why? They believed God had called them together to pray.
There is a global explosion of faith the like of which our planet has never seen since before creation. The world population is growing at 1.7% per year and the church at 2.4%.
We look at our little islands - all 4,000 of them with little lumps of rock off the coast of Scotland - and we find an emptiness here and yet there is a hunger and signs of awakening.
We go East from here to Europe to places where there has never been much of an evangelical witness and we find an explosion again. Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia. There is this rump of darkness in Western Europe. Going into the EC we will find the whole psyche of our nation dominated by people who do not have at their roots an evangelical Christian faith but a very decayed Catholicism.
I think it is in Chile where there is a network sending out 2000 church planters. The only condition is that they must have planted 10 churches in their own country first.
I planted a church myself in Brentford about 5 years ago with 18 people and it is now some 70 people plus 30-40 children in an area with 30-40% unemployment.
If we don't church plant this nation, the Chinese or Indian or Chilean or Argentinian Christians will.
We are hardly in a fit state to evangelise our own nation. Yet at least we are reaching our own people when we try, unlike overseas missionaries coming to Britain. Cross-cultural evangelism works, but it is hard work.
A group of Asians in this country are working to establish indigenous churches in India. This costs much less than sending a doctor from this country. They are sending an Asian doctor back to the place from which his family came. There are probably more missionaries in India than there ever have been from Britain.
I met an Indian doctor on the Burmese border working with an entirely indigenous mission. They can tap into funding agencies that would not fund ACET in the UK. He had been sent by Tear Fund to Uganda to see the work there. He said "something happened when I saw what the Ugandan Christians were doing that set my heart on fire and I vowed that I would come back and do the same here".
The situation has changed - the old package of mission is breaking down. The resource inequalities continue.
For every £100 given to Tear Fund for India or Uganda, £110 comes back to British banks in interest for debt. The moral issue in the monetary system needs to be addressed. It is the inequalities that allow us to have the resources to give.
And the economies of global mission are changing.
Thailand is no longer an ultra-poor developing country. The amount of foreign investment in India has increased dramatically every year since 1992. The Pacific basin is booming.
These nations are changing and the flow of resources will change within the next ten years.
ACET is now raising finance within Thailand. In India there is huge wealth now if it could be tapped.
There is still a huge need for resources and expertise. But if someone has been in a mission hospital for ten years and there is still no one locally able to replace him or her, something may be wrong.
'Train, release, encourage, get out, go' It's a different model.
There is a need to transfer resources in a way that allows people to retain their honour and respect and allows them to manage their own lives and their own people. That's difficult. It is easier to write a cheque than to do it the other way.
THE HOME MISSION FIELD
Extraordinary things are happening but on a small scale at present. In a street survey in London, six out of ten people answered that if it were possible to know Jesus Christ in a personal way, they would like to do so.
There is a hunger and pre-millennial tension. Life will not be the same again. We are on the edge of something new.
People are tired of the way they are living - a living hell for many.
They do not want every child to be brought up in a broken home and every marriage to end in divorce. They may not believe in the bible but they love the sort of values for which Christians stand.
For example ACET has been able to give out 1.1 million copies of the AIDS booklet in schools containing Christian values celibacy, faithfulness, long term commitment, family life. It is very popular with teachers, governors and parents of teenagers.
While this nation remains at such a low spiritual ebb, we need to serve those in other nations with great humility, recognising that we are often exchanging our material wealth and technology for their more robust spirituality.
Let us learn something from them while sharing our resources and then come back, remotivated to evangelise our own piece of the earth - the boomerang effect.
