Inter-Anglican Commission Discovers Life in the Midst of HIV/AIDS
Episcopal News Service. June 20, 2001 [2001-161]
Ian T. Douglas, Member of IASCOME and associate professor of world mission and global Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(ENS) "I came to tears when I witnessed the suffering, yet saw the love and compassion of Jesus in persons living with and dying from HIV/AIDS and in the women who attended them," said Sister Chandrani Peiris of the Society of St. Margaret in Sri Lanka, as she visited Katorus, a township 80 kilometers outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Sister Chandrani was in South Africa attending the first meeting of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Mission and Evangelism May 7-18.
Twenty members of the commission from every corner of the Anglican Communion gathered at the Kempton Park Conference Center in the Church of the Province of Southern Africa for 10 days of prayer and deliberation on the communion's engagement with mission and evangelism. The commission's work was grounded in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, where 4.5 million, or one out of every 10 people, are HIV positive.
In a presentation to the commission, Lynn Coull, of the Diocese of the Highveld's AIDS Coordinating Committee, pointed out that last year 250,000 South Africans died from AIDS. That number will double in six years. Children and young adults are especially hard hit by the pandemic, and it is estimated that 50%of those currently 15 years old in South Africa will succumb to the disease. Those statistics were given a human face when the commissioners accompanied local home-based caregivers as they ministered to persons living with AIDS in the sprawling townships that ring Johannesburg.
The mandate of the commission, given by the Anglican Consultative Council, is to oversee and support mission and evangelism across the Anglican Communion. As this was the first meeting of the commission, significant time was set aside for sharing of stories about the regions each commissioner represented. Additional in-depth discussions centered on theological education, justice and peace imperatives, religious pluralism, affirming life, new church/transformed Anglicanism, and money, power, and corruption.
Committed to the grass-roots of the church, the commission issued a call to parishes around the communion to initiate self-studies on local initiatives in mission and evangelism. In discussion, sharing, and worship, the commission began to envision how, over the next five years, it will challenge the Anglican Communion to respond to and participate in God's mission.
Mauricio Andrade from Brazil commented: "When we leave we will continue to remember that even though each other's story, context, and realities are different, we are the same family and body in Jesus Christ."
Sister Chandrani concluded: "Having considered mission and evangelism in the midst of HIV/AIDS, I am prepared to go home and challenge my community as to how we will reach out to those with HIV/AIDS, strengthened by the love and life we have found here in South Africa."
The next meeting of the commission will be in Scotland in June 2002.