Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper…
(Matthew 26:6 NRSV)

Jesus was in the house. What a critical piece of information! Jesus was willing to risk social stigma and become “unclean” in order to minister to Simon.

American Baptist missionaries have long been reaching out to people like Simon. Dr. Ellen Mitchell went to Burma in 1879 as the first woman physician appointed by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (now International Ministries). At age seventy, instead of retiring she started the Moulmein Leper Asylum. In total, American Baptist missionaries established seven centers for leprosy patients in Congo, India, Burma and China. They were willing to go in the house of Simon the leper.

I believe that Jesus is now calling us to go in the house of Simon the HIV/AIDS sufferer! In our day HIV/AIDS shapes attitudes and claims lives in ways very similar to leprosy, but with one huge difference – the size of the problem! Read the articles in this issue with care. There are forty million people with HIV/AIDS, thirty million of them living in Africa! The World Health Organization estimates that in the eight African nations where HIV infection is most prevelant, “…AIDS will claim the lives of around a third of today’s 15- year-olds.”

And in a cruel twist to the ancient disease of leprosy, many leper colonies in Africa continued, even with descendents who did not have the disease. In isolation, rejection and poverty, some of the most concentrated communities of infection are in these colonies formed out of viciousness of deadly infection -- even now more powerful.

And the scope of the AIDS crisis in Africa also threatens to appear elsewhere. Russia now has the fastest rate of HIV infections in the world. Russia’s deputy prime minister has warned that “the growth of AIDS has gone beyond a medical problem and has become an issue of strategic, social and economic security of the country.”

A number of American Baptist missionaries are already active in HIV/AIDS prevention and care ministries. We have missionaries providing medical care, providing education and prevention training, particularly to youth, and caring for the dying and their children -- orphaned and without a home. Is Jesus calling you to be with him and them in the house of Simon the HIV/AIDS sufferer? If so, the very best preparation is to become involved now with an AIDS ministry in your own local area and learn more about the work of International Ministries detailed in these pages.

May the Great Physician give you strength, guidance and joy as you join him in the house.

Reid Trulson