A church cares for people living with HIV by getting to know the person, following up after a disclosure, and making it safe to tell the truth without being dropped. Deon White, a banker, worship leader and HIV activist who went public with his own diagnosis, argues that the greater danger now comes from the congregation itself. He says churches still turn people with HIV away, and that they often value a singer’s gift more than his soul.
His claim places the main injury inside the fellowship, in habits of silence and use. Those are the parts of the problem a congregation has the power to change.
Two claims, not one
White’s case has two parts that are easy to blur. The first concerns what the diagnosis means today. He went public because people living with HIV are still being shunned, and he wanted them to hear that “it’s not your kryptonite like it used to be. It’s not the death sentence.” That is his testimony as someone living with the virus. It is not a medical statistic, and questions about treatment belong with a clinician. It does name a gap: the fear attached to the word has outlived the circumstances that first produced it.
The second part concerns the church. White describes pastors, leaders, small groups and choir lofts, the people inside the doors. He also explains why he went public at all. He looked for someone who loved God, served in the church, and was honest about both HIV and his own struggle with same-sex attraction, and he could not find that person. “What I didn’t see, I told myself I would just become.” Stigma wounds individuals, and it also erases examples. The next person to receive the diagnosis assumes nobody like him has ever lived with it and kept his faith.
Where does the fear come from?
Start with the person who has the diagnosis. White is candid that the first rejection came from himself. After a doctor told him in October 2012 that he was HIV positive, he said that before anybody else knew his status, “I already gave up on myself.” He stepped back from church and went quiet, and he went through roughly three months of depression before he found his way out.
That detail cuts against a common assumption. Churches tend to picture stigma as something that happens after a person discloses. White’s experience suggests it works earlier, by anticipation. A person absorbs what the community has taught him a diagnosis means, and he withdraws before anyone speaks. So a church cannot measure its welcome only by how it treats those who have told. It also has to ask what its silence has taught those who have not.
The speakers also locate the silence in a particular corner of church culture. Fields names homosexuality as one of the taboo topics in music ministry, “especially in gospel music.” She describes caricatures about men in choirs and ministers of music: people assume things about their sexuality, often because a man seems more feminine, and then “they don’t say anything.” Or the subject gets preached across the pulpit while nobody talks to the person directly. She says the taboo weighs especially on Black men, some of whom avoid being seen with men who seem feminine for fear of what others will conclude about them. White’s own history fits the pattern of an inherited quiet. As a teenager he was afraid to tell his parents, who believed what he was doing was wrong, and he doubted anyone at church would have heard him. Fields also says the virus is spreading rapidly in the African American community. That is her assertion, offered as a reason for urgency, and it should be checked against current public health data.
The limits matter as much as the pattern. Fields frames these as observations about some churches, not all, and neither speaker offers a survey. What they describe is a habit passed down through choir lofts and pulpits: speak about a subject in general, and avoid the person in particular. Her verdict is that “we are past due for a conversation.” Stigma, in this account, works partly as social distance, keeping clear of anyone whose presence might raise a question about you.
Gift over soul
This is the center of White’s critique, and it comes from a specific experience. Years after his diagnosis, he told his pastor. Fields recalls asking him later whether the pastor had followed up. The answer was no. Her reading of that silence is that churches sometimes forget that a person, “while they are gifted, they’re still a human being and a soul.”
White put it bluntly: “The church is more concerned about the gift than they are the soul.” He named the reason too: “the gift draws crowds.” Then he described what the congregation never sees. The person who led the room on Sunday may be at home afterward, and in his words, “They’re home depressed, maybe want to kill themselves, don’t know what to do.” The service runs on the gift, and the person carrying it goes unattended. Churches, he says, use the gift and “not take care of the person who’s behind the gift.” The consequence: “You leave us to die spiritually.”
White is not saying worship leaders are uniquely fragile or pastors uniquely callous. He is describing an incentive. When a ministry depends on someone’s talent every week, the talent becomes the part the institution watches, and attention follows usefulness. Music ministries, he says, “are running on fumes.” He also concedes that real pastoral care of musicians takes someone equipped to give it, and not every leader is.
Scripture speaks to this inversion. Paul writes to a church dazzled by spiritual gifts: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). In context, he is correcting the Corinthians for ranking gifts by how impressive they look. In the chapter before, he describes the body of Christ arranged so “that the members should have the same care one for another” (1 Corinthians 12:25). Paul measures a congregation by mutual care among its members. A church that uses a worship leader’s voice and never asks about his life has reversed that order.
Why the silence protects itself
In this conversation HIV and sexuality are tangled together, and pulling them apart helps. HIV is a medical condition, and many people who live with it never fit the assumptions churches attach to it. But Fields names why sexuality stays buried in some music ministries. Leaders may know things about musicians, and musicians may know things about leaders. The arrangement becomes, as she put it, “if you don’t tell on me, I don’t tell on you.” Her conclusion: “sin grows in the dark.”
That is a claim about institutions, not about any one person’s guilt. It describes a culture where secrecy protects everyone’s position, so nobody gets free. White agreed, and described how it feels from inside. When a leader has no relationship with you, you show up, sing, get paid, and go home. The transaction replaces the fellowship.
Small groups do not automatically fix this. White found his comforting at first, but he stayed guarded because he could not predict the outcome, and the talk among the men tended toward boasting about women. What he missed was “continual conversation or wholesome conversation about how I can better myself.” Many men in his position, he said, stay guarded or stop attending, because “one look from somebody can turn them completely away from the church, not from God, but from the church.” His friends had not necessarily rejected God. They had concluded the church had no room for them, and the stigma misrepresented the faith the church claims to hold.
White’s story also includes being drawn into sexual contact in church settings as a young teenager, by an older boy and then by an adult elder, which was abuse that a church’s duty is to stop and report. Fields warned parents against assuming a child is safe simply because the child is at church, citing “countless stories of children being taken advantage of in church by church leaders” while stressing that this is not every church.
Doesn’t closeness blur the church’s convictions?
This is the most serious objection, and sincere believers raise it. If a church draws close to people living with HIV, and especially to people wrestling with their sexuality, won’t it look as though it has stopped caring about holiness?
The first answer is factual. A diagnosis is not a confession. White contracted the virus after a period of celibacy, from a man he trusted to be honest with him. Treating HIV as a moral verdict gets both the condition and the people wrong.
The second answer is theological. Jude 3 affirms the historic Christian sexual ethic, that sexual intimacy is reserved for the marriage of one man and one woman, and it holds that ethic together with genuine welcome, honesty about the church’s failures, and the love of God first. The conviction does not require distance. Fields made the same point about method: “We can’t have dialogue that starts with condemnation. We have to have dialogue that starts with compassion.” She pointed to Jesus, who did not fear being judged by the company he kept. The Gospels record exactly that complaint against him: “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them” (Luke 15:2). Luke uses the complaint to introduce three parables about God seeking what was lost. Jesus does not treat it as a charge to avoid.
A quieter objection is that the pastor who never followed up was respecting White’s privacy. Privacy is a real value. A disclosure should never be spread, announced or turned into a sermon illustration. Privacy governs who else hears. It does not excuse the shepherd from checking on the person who trusted him, and that second conversation is what White asked for.
Fairness also requires the counterexamples in White’s own story. When he gave his life to Christ at 17, he found people in the church who “knew all about me, and there was no judgment.” Later he described church members whose love was so genuine that “you’re loving me to life.” His complaint is that the church already does this in pockets and could do it on purpose.
What care looks like
White’s guidance is concrete, and most of it costs time more than money.
Show up as a friend. He described the kind of person a church should equip, someone willing to say, “I don’t mind hanging out with you on a Friday night just to get some lunch or dinner so we can talk out a few things.”
Do your homework and check your motives. He urged helpers to read up first, so the person living with HIV does not have to educate them. He also warned against helpers who mainly want to be seen helping: “go pray first before you come to me.”
Build the ministry that is missing. Churches organize care around grief and cancer, he noted, and argued they “should have a ministry for every issue in life.” His reason is sobering. Depression after a diagnosis is real, and “I’ve had friends die from killing themselves.” People, he observed, “want to give up soon as they hear the diagnosis.” Jude 3 holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, so a church’s care should include pointing people toward trained counselors and doctors alongside prayer. Anyone thinking about ending their life can call or text 988 in the US to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Make testing ordinary. Fields and White both urged people inside and outside the church to get tested, and Fields acknowledged that not everyone lives by what the church teaches about sex. White added a humane detail: “if you’re scared, I trust that you should go with somebody so you won’t feel alone.”
Care for the leaders who carry the room. Pastors should know how their musicians and worship leaders are actually doing, and should follow up after a disclosure.
Under all of this sits White’s reason for openness: “closed mouth don’t get healed.” The healing he means is not a promise that the virus disappears. It is the relief of no longer living a double life, of being known and kept. He tied it to the church’s identity: “If the church is supposed to be a safe haven, let’s let it be.”
Fields also asked people who have been hurt by a church to extend grace even to hypocrites and to those who said the wrong thing, since everyone fails at this. She and White have been friends since second grade, and she admitted saying judgmental things he forgave. Their friendship is honest, does not always agree, and stays.
White’s last instruction was for anyone who knows someone living with HIV: “take the time to get to know them, not their issue, not their struggle, but get to know them.” For a church, that starts with one phone call after a disclosure, made the following week and made again the week after.
