ABSTRACT
Channels of Hope grew out of my personal pain: on a rainy cold Tuesday, 15 September 1987, I received a diagnosis that I am living with HIV. At the time I was a student in my second to last year at Stellenbosch Theological Seminary. Five years later, on Sunday, 15 May 1991, I disclosed to the Dutch Reformed congregation in Windhoek, Namibia, that I was living with HIV and wanted to pursue a ministry in the field of HIV. In the months before that, I had a meeting with the diaconal services of the Dutch Reformed Church to ask them if they would be interested to start an HIV and AIDS ministry. ‘No, why would we do that? We do not have anyone with AIDS in the Church!’ was the response. That marked one of the typical stances of the Church at the time. Thus, I experienced real personal pain at the hand of the Church, which did not respond to people living with HIV with compassion, grace and mercy, but rather with the ‘pointing finger and malicious talk’ of Isaiah 58:9. However, it also ignited the vision of developing a compassionate response. CoH was not born in World Vision. In 1992, I was asked by Old Mutual, a large insurance company in South Africa, to develop and lead a country-wide HIV awareness campaign. The insurance industry was severely affected by HIV claims, therefore this company saw HIV education as a worthwhile corporatesocial investment for future generations. The community programme I developed with them, ‘I have HOPE’, included a youth peer education programme on HIV and sexuality, and utilized a number of highly interactive methodologies to change attitudes and mobilize young people to provide accurate information to their peers. In 1999 the ‘I have HOPE’ programme won the South African Professional Management Review Empowerment Award for the best corporatesocial investment programme in the health and welfare category. My personal faith led me to believe that the Church should be leading the response to HIV, therefore I increasingly utilized these same methodologies and content in workshops with Church leaders. These workshops proved highly successful in helping Church leaders move away from judgement, blame and stigma towards understanding the complexity of HIV. It helped build a biblically inspired vision for a congregational and community response and commitment to support people living with HIV. In 2000 I was asked by the National Religious Association for Social Development (NRASD) in South Africa to develop this content further, and train facilitators from a wide variety of faiths ranging from African traditional churches, Buddhists, Baha’i and Muslims to Catholics, Jews and Pentecostals. This was very challenging but because of its facilitative nature the programme achieved the desired results. The materials and programme have only been fully adapted to Muslim contexts, however, as explored in detail in this chapter. By 2001 the Dutch Reformed Church was ready to engage more seriously with the AIDS issue, and seed-funded the Christian AIDS Bureau for Southern
Africa (CABSA). I joined World Vision (WV) in 2001 as HIV Coordinator for South Africa and Lesotho, and continued to use this methodology with churches. Since CABSA owned the rights to the ‘I have HOPE’ facilitator’s manual, I led WV to sign a licensing agreement to utilize and implement Channels of Hope within the communities with WV programmes. World Vision firmly believed the Church should be an indispensable partner in its work and HIV response. Channels of Hope (CoH) provides education and training for faith leaders on the most difficult development issues that are traditionally associated with stigma and marginalization in developing contexts. It started with HIV and AIDS education, but expanded to other critical development issues such as gender and gender-based violence; maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH); and child protection. All CoH programmes share a common aim of empowering faith leaders and their respective faith communities to tackle behaviour and attitudes that harm people and deny them their rights. WV is a child-focused organization running child-focused programming. CoH specifically targets adults, knowing that their attitudes and behaviours have a direct impact on the well-being of children. The different CoH curricula share a common framework which is adapted to address each specific thematic issue. For example, Channels of Hope for Gender challenges traditional attitudes and practices that harm girls and women – such as keeping girls out of school, female genital mutilation/cutting and gender-based violence – while Channels of Hope for HIV and AIDS addresses issues including stigma and resistance to support for comprehensive prevention practices, such as condom use for HIV prevention. The latest adaptation was for the Ebola crisis in West Africa, as cited in the introduction above. CoH is both a process and a methodology. The methodology is packaged into a three-day workshop that is planned to be facilitative and interactive. The methodology aims to create a safe space for faith leaders and faith communities to learn, share and debate issues that are sometimes difficult due to their faith traditions. It seeks to reach down to the root causes and deepest convictions that maintain harmful attitudes, norms, values and practices towards children. The process is grounded in guiding principles presented using the participants’ holy scriptures or sacred teachings. A number of external evaluations claim this faith-specific focus to be one of the key success factors of CoH (Bartelink et al. 2015; Kachale et al. (2015).
