After serving as program director of New York City’s Rauschenbusch Metro Ministries for nine years, Ronnie Adams, one of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's Global Missions field personnel, said the HIV/AIDS community is the most open to the gospel and to his ministry of all the work he does.

“It’s a remarkable experience seeing folks living with a life-threatening disease and how they continue on with their life and grow in their Christian experience and Christian life and live a life worthy and full in the midst of living with AIDS,” he said.

Adams visits three HIV/AIDS service agencies and offers spiritual help, basically serving as a volunteer chaplain in a city filled with more than 100,000 people with HIV/AIDS.

Adams and other members of the Fellowship’s HIV/AIDS Task Group envision having a network of churches that are ministering to people with HIV/AIDS and matching those congregations with CBF Global Missions field personnel.

The network would provide a source of communication, information and support for churches. “It’s such a huge issue, we need more than just personnel working on it,” Adams said. “We want to involve all persons in the CBF family who are already ministering.”

Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day.

For more information about the HIV/AIDS ministry network, contact Adams at (212) 695-8365 or ronniecbf@aol.com.

CBF is a fellowship of Baptist Christians and churches who share a passion for the Great Commission and a commitment to Baptist principles of faith and practice. The Fellowship’s mission is to serve Christians and churches as they discover and fulfill their God-given mission.