National Week of Prayer for the Healing of HIV/AIDS - 2023

Since the identification of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in 1981 and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, nearly 40 million people worldwide have died from HIV-related illness – with 38 million people currently living with HIV. HIV has had the greatest impact in Africa, accounting for 70% of the world’s epidemic, with only 3% of the world’s healthcare providers - many of which are affiliated with faith-based institutions.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 40%-60% of healthcare delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa is delivered by Christian clinics, hospitals, and community health centers. Likewise, Christian missionaries were among the first to invest in modern medicine in Africa, and American Christians in particular have continued to financially support efforts to combat the Sub-Saharan HIV epidemic through local churches with global ministries. 

Yet in the late 1980s, an African American woman named Dr. Pernessa Seele recognized that faith communities weren’t engaged in the same way in the HIV epidemic happening right here at home. An immunologist by primary training, Seele worked at Harlem Hospital as an administrator in the AIDS Initiative Program, where she grew weary of caring for people dying with HIV alone in shame and without the spiritual support of their churches. 

So in 1988, Seele met with leaders of 50 churches, mosques, and synagogues, to solicit their prayers for the healing of AIDS, organizing the first annual Harlem Week of Prayer. Religious congregations were encouraged to include education programs on AIDS and its prevention, as well as to create outreach for patients and their families impacted by the disease. Her leadership was supported by major religious leaders in Harlem including Dr. Preston Washington, Dr. Frederick B. Williams, Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, Dr. Calvin O. Butts, Bishop Norman N. Quick, Dr. James A. Forbes, and numerous others who credited Seele for changing the way they saw the disease. 

Thanks to Seele’s organizing efforts, by 1991 100 congregations participated in the annual Harlem Week of Prayer, and Dr. Seele began to receive invitations to churches and public health groups from around the country — prompting the need for a broader movement with more structure. With assistance and support from the federal government, Dr. Pernessa Seele incorporated the ‘Balm in Gilead’ and the Harlem Week of Prayer was elevated to the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, reaching 10,000 churches, and 70 community organizations in the United States, some African nations, and the Caribbean by 2003.

Now nearly 42 years into the HIV epidemic, and 35 years observing the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, this 1st full week in March brings national attention to the HIV epidemic and the “extraordinary role faith communities can and are playing” in HIV prevention, education, service, and advocacy each year. It’s because of the praying hands and feet of people of faith like Pernessa that HIV is no longer a death sentence bathed in shame and spiritual loneliness. HIV no longer has the last word. 

People living with and vulnerable to HIV are experiencing new life with innovative treatment and prevention modalities. The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has birthed the Undetectable Equals Untransmittable (U=U) movement, where a person being properly treated for HIV can achieve a viral load so low that HIV is undetectable in their bodies, thereby ensuring they cannot transmit HIV to someone else. Similarly, the development of Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) has ushered in an era of HIV prevention for people at high risk for HIV transmission, with just a once-daily single-pill regimen or a once-every 2-month injection of HAART.

This renaissance has gifted us the first generation of people living with HIV over the age of 50, and we’ve never been closer than we are right now to achieve the first generation without HIV/AIDS. Greater mobilization of faith communities is urgently required in order to get there, and the faith community is needed more than ever to lead the charge in humanizing the response to ensure that we treat people and not just disease.

This National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, houses of worship are called into praying without ceasing for the coming of new life to be enjoyed by the fellowship of all people of faith and goodwill. This includes people who have not only survived HIV, but people who are thriving with HIV. Faith communities are encouraged to redefine theological healing as more than the complete absence of disease but the presence of life through accessible treatment and prevention. And finally, churches are morally mandated to love our neighbors as God first loved us -- eradicating stigma, embodying love, and ending the epidemic – prayer by prayer.

This Monday, be sure to tune into “The Doctor and the Preacher” on Monday, March 6, 2023 where MBS Health And Wellness Circle partner Dr. Ulysses Burley will give a brief update on the state of the HIV epidemic. Join the live event here: https://bit.ly/doctorandpreacher.

For more information about the National Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS please visit https://www.balmingilead.org/nwpha-2023/.