Elizabeth Martenia used to cry as she walked out of her Joliet church in the early '90s.

The congregation had become her support system, but she feared losing them all if she revealed the secret that consumed her.

So she buried her reality. She stopped going to the doctors, stopped taking care of her body and her mind. She pretended the HIV wasn’t there.

“I was so beat down in this church, not being able to be honest about it,” said Martenia, who now makes the weekly 40-mile trip from Joliet to a small Englewood church. “You don’t get the help, you don’t get the guidance. These were people who were supposed to know how to deal with this. And I thought I shouldn’t say anything.”

The pastors at Martenia’s new South Side church have a different take. They believe that promoting a culture of silence on HIV/AIDS will just perpetuate the worst health epidemic currently facing black Americans.

“People see we don’t judge them for it,” said KenQwonna Clarke, pastor of Voice of the Word Church in Englewood with her husband Stephen Christopher Clarke. “If you’re going to address the issue, don’t undercut it. Deal with the lifestyle separately.”

Clarke and her husband are among a growing number of Chicago religious figures who see their role as more than merely preaching church doctrine. Pushing her views condemning non-marital sex and homosexuality is now a lower priority. At this point, the stakes are simply too high.

“I might tell them, ‘What you’re doing, I’m not feeling it,' ” said Clarke, who was among dozens of pastors who recently gathered at a church on Chicago's West Side seeking ways to bring the AIDS issue front and center to their congregations. “But your health is more important.”

Nearly 20 years after Martenia’s diagnosis, the black community is being decimated by the AIDS virus. While blacks account for just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up over 50 percent of the country's approximately 40,600 HIV/AIDS cases. The disease is now the number one killer of black women ages 23-34.

“When I was a kid, [folks] used to say they’d find something to kill all the black people,” said Lloyd Kelly, co-founder of “Let’s Talk, Let’s Test,” a Chicago-based foundation dedicated to fighting the spread of AIDS among African Americans.“Well, guess what? This is it.”

The foundation helps small groups write grants and deal with government agencies, vital skills for agencies that work with African Americans affected by AIDS. Still, Kelly says, the vast majority of state funding goes to groups on the North Side.

The foundation also worked for passage of the Illinois African-American HIV/AIDS Response Act in 2005, legislation that led to the testing of 35,000 Illinois prison inmates in its first year and 60,000 in its second. A few years ago, only 300 inmates were being tested.

But many black church leaders are still reluctant to talk about the crisis, even though, according to Kelly, no one is in a better position to do so. Seventy percent of African Americans regularly attend church, giving clergymen an unparalleled audience and, some say, a responsibility to their congregations.

“Why the faith community?” asked Sherman R. Tribble, a pastor who made the trek from Nashville to the Church of the Harvest in Garfield Park for last week's meeting. “Because we’ve got stuff nobody else has….As faith leaders we have access, access to their minds, access to their purses… We cannot be churches unless we do this.”

Kelly’s plan of attack is simple: to focus on prevention through church-sponsored testing. The first step is ensuring that everyone with HIV knows they have it.

On March 30, pastors involved with the program will give a sermon about HIV/AIDS and take a collection earmarked for AIDS. The money will be used to buy 500,000 testing kits and certifying two members of each congregation throughout Illinois to test for HIV.

No one is sure how many churches will participate, but Kelly said religious figures have become far more receptive to confronting HIV/AIDS head-on than they were even a few years ago.

“We appealed to their humanity,” Kelly said. “We started really going after churches in 2000 to 2002, by saying this is not a morality issue, it’s a public health issue.”

“Look at the people who were sitting there five years ago and look at who’s not there now. Many of them died of AIDS.”

Once testing becomes more widespread, some hope the stigma and misconceptions about AIDS that still linger in the African-American community may begin to lift.

“We still have a psychology of denial,” said Lynne Owens Mock, a clinical and community psychologist with the Community Council for Mental Health and a pastor in her South Side church. “People want to believe they can’t get it, and it’s really hard to break through that denial.”

“Some people are really good at merging a public health message with a moral message,” she continued. “But to say, ‘Don’t have sex’ is a waste of my breath.”

Still, breaking through a collective denial isn’t easy. Honesty about partners and sexual history is even harder to reveal in a community atmosphere that continues to hold deep prejudices against homosexuality and contradictions on concepts of manliness.

And many women, she added, "crave intimacy and monogamy. To use a condom implies mistrust."

There’s still a bit of a subconscious “Magic factor” among blacks, Mock added. People see a healthy Magic Johnson and think HIV isn’t a big deal, that “all I need is to take a pill and I’ll be ok.”

Some religious leaders will continue to resist the idea, said Pastor Zach Gibson of Chicago, but some of the divisions within the church over AIDS may fall along generational lines.

“Many come from a generation where sexual talk was taboo,” said Gibson, an assistant pastor at House of Correction Church of God and Christ in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. “We need to talk about this. It may not be comfortable, but you’ll see how good it can be for the community. If you expect this subject to be taboo, what do you expect?”

Source link