Kevin P. Casey
A former corporate CEO, Rich Stearns took a 75 percent pay cut to become head of World Visions American division.
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On a recent Sunday morning, Steve Haas arrives at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to meet a group of Seattle pastors and church members. Haas, a former cleric at one of the country's best-known evangelical megachurches, Willow Creek Church in Chicago, is leading the group on a trip to Africa. Milling about the KLM ticket counter with him are several people from University Presbyterian Church carrying long thin black bags that make a clanking sound; inside are pipes for a well pump they are bringing at the request of a missionary in Kenya.
This trip isn't a typical relief effort, though. Haas is a vice president with World Vision, the giant Christian charity whose American headquarters are in Federal Way, and he plays a central role in one of the organization's most challenging missions: waking Christians to the fight against AIDS.
A lanky, fast-talking 48-year-old who quotes extensively from the Bible, Haas has the zeal of a convert. He recalls being asked about the disease when he was at Willow Creek and responding, "Well, you play—you pay." In the eyes of much of the Christian community, AIDS has meant two things, both considered taboo: homosexuality and promiscuity. In 2001, World Vision commissioned the Christian-oriented Barna Research Group to survey Christians and other Americans about their attitude toward AIDS. Among all Americans, only 8 percent said they were definitely willing to donate for international AIDS prevention and education. Among evangelicals, World Vision's base and source of financial support, the number was an even lower 3 percent.
In the past few years, World Vision has set out to change that. In 2003, World Vision embarked on a "Hope Tour" across the country to raise awareness among Christians about the scope of devastation caused by AIDS internationally, and to ask for funds to combat it.
Haas, who is responsible for World Vision's outreach to churches, now talks about the "ignorance" and "blindness" that kept Christians from tackling AIDS, and which to some extent still does. The most recent Barna survey in 2004 found 14 percent of evangelicals were willing to donate for AIDS work, an increase from the original survey but still a number World Vision finds unacceptable. Last summer, World Vision brought to New York's Grand Central Station a 3,000-square-foot exhibit that took viewers into the lives of children affected by the disease. The organization is now building a similar exhibit that will travel to churches around the country. A smaller multimedia exhibit will be kept in the Seattle-Tacoma area, debuting at Seattle Pacific University on Friday, Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.
Waiting for the flight to Nairobi, University Presbyterian member Nancy Andrews recalls a recent talk that Rich Stearns, the head of World Vision's American division, made at the church, which Stearns attends. "It was really very powerful," says Andrews, a former Microsoft program manager who now works for a nonprofit involved in Africa. The 5,000-member-strong evangelical church already had an HIV/AIDS task force, but after Stearns' address, Andrews convinced the church to seek a bigger project. In Africa, church members will meet first with World Vision staff in Nairobi for an educational briefing and then fan out to Ethiopia. The University Presbyterian team plans to look for something concrete to support, perhaps, Andrews says, a hospice or a school.
Also meeting Haas today are two members of Capitol Hill Presbyterian, a new evangelical church of only 250 that has nevertheless already made a big commitment—$25,000 a year for the next three years for World Vision work in Tanzania, where the Capitol Hill pair will go after Nairobi. That's on top of the 75 African children the church signed up to sponsor after World Vision held a "sponsorship Sunday" at the church in September. Some 20 other church members from around the country will join Haas as well in Nairobi.
Haas has led nine or 10 such trips. Writing a check is one thing. "But in order for us to truly do what I think God has called us to do," he says, "it's got to be more, and it's got to be deeper."
One Sundaylast December, Rich Stearns addressed a conference of church leaders and medical practitioners at Eastern Hills Bible Church in upstate New York. The conference was devoted to the role of the Christian community in medical missions, specifically those dealing with AIDS. The bespectacled, white-haired Stearns began by asking what he acknowledged were uncomfortable questions.
Question No. 1, in essence: Where has the church been? "If we honestly ask who are the ones who have taken the lead in fighting against AIDS and showing compassion to its victims, we find a surprising list." He ticked them off: "the homosexual community, Hollywood, rock stars, political liberals, the U.S. government, the United Nations, secular humanitarian organizations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation."
He then quoted a man he held akin to a prophet, who had written recently about the AIDS plight in Africa. "What is happening to Africa mocks our pieties, doubts our concern, and questions our commitment to the whole concept [of equality]. Because if we're honest, there's no way we could conclude that such mass death day after day would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else."
