Uganda -- A Nation Redeemed Through a Message of Abstinence
by Allie Martin and Jody Brown
March 23, 2005
(AgapePress) - A campaign that challenges teenagers and college students to remain sexually abstinent until marriage is having a big impact in one African nation.True Love Waits is a grassroots effort led by young people. The movement began in 1993 and was sponsored by LifeWay Christian Resources, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Simply put, True Love Waits is about God's plan for purity.
Part of the campaign involves teens making a pledge to remain sexually pure. According to the TLW website, more than a million young people have signed covenant cards thus far that state: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship."
In 1994, True Love Waits was introduced in the nation of Uganda, a country where HIV infections and AIDS cases were rampant. Jimmy Hester, co-founder of TLW, says God has since used the movement to change the African nation.
"Ten years later, of course, their statistics show that they went from 30 percent of the population being infected with AIDS down to 6 percent," he explains. According to a Baptist Press report last year, the first lady of Uganda credits faith-based abstinence programs like TLW for slowing the spread of the killer disease in her country. At that time, First Lady Janet Museveni, who is a committed Christian, labeled safe sex initiatives -- such as distributing condoms to the public -- as both irresponsible and ineffective.
BP reports that Southern Baptist missionaries Larry and Sharon Pumpelly helped implement True Love Waits in Uganda throughout the 1990s. But they credit Mrs. Museveni's influence for adding credibility to the program in Uganda.
The biblically based message of True Love Waits works, says Hester. "God has just used this [movement] to change cultures and to create different environments in some of these cultures that were just really, really in bad situations," he explains. Uganda, he says, is a prime example.
More than 80 ministries partner with True Love Waits.
