LAKE FOREST, Calif. – The first international conference on the Church and AIDS concluded Thursday with a powerful appeal to church leaders to make the invisible God visible to the sick and poor around the world.
Saddleback Church, one of the largest churches in the United States with about 20,000 members, ended its formal conference on Nov. 30 with the session titled, “Because of Love,” The session was delivered mainly by Kay Warren who used personal experiences with the poor and needy to explain what it means to make God visible, urging attendees to apply the message to society’s outcasts.
“If you are going to care about AIDS you have to make the invisible God visible,” exhorted Warren. “If you claim the name of Jesus Christ, your number one job is to make a God that is unseen, seen. It is our job to put flesh and bones on Him by the way we live our lives – to make the invisible God visible.”
Warren gripped the attention of the nearly 2,000 pastors and church leaders gathered through the account of her experience at Mother Theresa’s Home – a center that reaches out to the sick and dying in India – where she realized what it meant to make God visible.
“Last year, I went to Mother Theresa’s for half a day and I felt like I was living there half my life. I saw and experienced things that were very, very painful. I hadn’t been there thirty minutes when I looked at my watch hoping that my shift ended,” began Warren.
The wife of Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose Driven Life, told the audience to imagine a building with 100 people homeless, destitute, and in stages close to death, where “to qualify to be there you have to be dying.”
Warren described a particular scene in tears, horror, and disbelief about a man she heard screaming.
“Only two hours had gone by and we had a break. During our break, I was with three other friends from Saddleback and I asked Francisco, ‘What was all that screaming coming from the men’s side?’ Francisco could barely talk. There was a man who had a cut on his ankle but lived in a gutter and had no medication to wash out the wound,” said Warren slowly and painfully as she recalled the experience.
“Francisco said that people were holding down the screaming man and he was holding his head as the doctor scrapped out maggot larvae from his wound. You see his cut had gotten infected and maggots had laid eggs in it because he was living in the gutter,” she told the crowd.
Yet it was a simple bedside chat with a lonely woman pouring out her heart in Bengali that helped Warren realized the importance of making God visible.
“She needed something else from me and it hit me. It was sitting beside and sitting with and carrying the suffering of someone else,” Warren said. “I sat next to her and held her and said ‘I know. I am so sorry. I am so sorry that your family is not here. I am so sorry that your neighbor isn’t here with you.”
“But you know what? You’re not alone. God loves you. He brought me here today to tell you that and these arms around you right now, these are His arms. And these hands that are wiping the tears off your face are His hands. And He loves you so much.”
Warren, sitting on a white bed on stage representing the bed in India, looked out through bleary eyes at the audience and said with conviction at the conference that caring means making the invisible God visible through the actions of Christians.
“This is what God asks us to do in this world. Not to build fantastic programs or to come up with plans. He asks us first, ‘Will you sit with someone in pain?’ ‘Will you be My presence in that moment?’”
Michelle Vu
Christian Today Correspondent