The story starts with a South African pastor named Christo Greyling. In 1992, Christo stood up in front of his Dutch Reformed congregation and told them he was HIV positive. He’d known for years. He was a hemophiliac, infected through a blood treatment. The church he served wasn’t a place where you announced something like that and expected grace in return.
An elder stopped him outside after the service. “Reverend, we have so much sympathy for you. You got it innocently. But those people…”
Christo knew what he meant.
Moral categories sorting the “innocent” sick from the “deserving” were playing out across churches all over Southern Africa. Faith leaders were often the trusted voices in their communities and the people that families turned to when someone got sick. But instead of offering spiritual care alongside practical help, many were doubling down on shame. They were the ones telling congregations that AIDS was divine punishment. They were the ones turning people away.
Christo started asking why faith leaders across Southern Africa were responding to a public health crisis with judgment when their own scriptures told them to do the opposite. With a group called CABSA (the Christian AIDS Bureau for Southern Africa), he built a training curriculum for pastors called Channels of Hope. It was part Bible study, part public health course, and part support group, teaching church leaders to read Scripture with fresh eyes and then actually sit with the people they were avoiding. In one of the workshops, a pastor admitted he used to tell his own congregation that people with HIV needed to repent and that he’d be “ready to conduct your funerals.” After the training, he said, “I was the one who had to repent.”
By 2002, Channels of Hope had become part of World Vision’s programming in Southern Africa, and Christo was in charge of scaling it. Stigma dropped in the communities that went through it, even as stigma was rising everywhere else. But Southern Africa isn’t just home to Christians. A curriculum built out of Bible verses and Christian testimony wasn’t going to help an imam teach his mosque that caring for the sick and ending stigma are rooted in Islamic values, or ground those teachings in the Qur’an and hadith his community trusted. Furthermore, at the time, World Vision operated in twenty Muslim-majority countries, and wherever there were health crises like HIV, maternal mortality, and disease outbreaks, World Vision couldn’t reach them with a Christian curriculum. Muslim communities needed faith leaders delivering messages grounded in Islamic tradition, not Christian theology borrowed and repackaged.
So in 2007, World Vision went to Islamic Relief South Africa and to a scholar named Sheikh Ali Banda and asked him to build Channels of Hope for a Muslim audience — not translate the Christian version, but write a genuinely Islamic one, grounded in the Qur’an and hadith, that Muslim leaders could actually stand behind.
Making It Make Sense
If you run in evangelical or pluralism circles, you’re probably wondering how Christo made sense of this. How does an organization that identifies openly as Christian, with a donor base that skews conservative and evangelical, fund an Islamic curriculum? Was this mission drift?
World Vision does not use development work as a bait-and-switch to proselytize. The organization explains that it “affirms and defends the right of all Christian and faith-based organizations…to witness through their lives, words and deeds,” but that “nobody should be coerced or manipulated into converting to Christianity,” including through the use of humanitarian aid.
World Vision explains further, “World Vision does not proselytize. While we are always ready to say that Jesus is the reason we do the work we do, we never withhold aid or services for a profession of faith. In fact, we serve everyone we can, of any faith — or no faith — and work carefully within cultural contexts to build respectful interfaith relationships.”
Handing a curriculum to a Muslim scholar wasn’t a compromise of identity. It was the same policy playing out in a new direction.
Islamic Relief operated according to a similar conviction. The organization states that in Islam, “the recipients of humanitarian action are by no means limited to the Muslim community,” the Qur’an and Sunnah “do not exclude non-Muslims from receiving humanitarian aid from Muslims,” and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad reflects that humanitarian action should go to anyone in need, not just fellow believers.
Islamic Relief has also been explicit that engaging with faith communities on shared issues doesn’t mean recruitment: in describing faith-sensitive development work broadly, the organization notes that it “does not mean distributing Qur’ans, building mosques and conversion.” Instead, it means using “faith teachings and traditions” to address the issues communities are already facing — child protection, conflict, maternal health — in language people already trust.
Where It Went From There
The first Muslim-only pilot workshops ran in Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, and the early feedback made clear that trust wasn’t automatic just because the curriculum was theologically sound. Participants in that first Zambia workshop challenged the Mufti leading it, wanting to know why a Christian organization was suddenly interested in Muslim communities it had never engaged before — a story Christo tells in detail in a book chapter on the partnership.
In response, World Vision required an accredited Muslim scholar on any team working with Muslim participants, and paired that scholar with a Christian co-facilitator wherever the context allowed.
When Ebola hit Sierra Leone in 2014, this model paid dividends. World Vision staffers could walk into communities that had already been through the joint Christian-Muslim version of Channels of Hope, where pastors and imams who’d sat in the same training room years earlier could now be paired up to run emergency workshops together. Together, they corrected the rumor going around that Ebola was a punishment from God that prayer alone could stop. They saved lives by convincing people to change how they buried their dead, one of the main ways the virus was spreading.
A U.S. State Department official later pointed to World Vision and Islamic Relief’s work together in the Central African Republic as an example of what religious actors bring to peacebuilding: “an earned respect and shared history,” and “deep bonds of trust” that make them “vital partners in bringing peace.”
Between 2005 and 2019, Channels of Hope grew from a small project in South Africa to a program which reached more than 450,000 faith leaders through 20,000 CoH workshops in 51 countries. In the earliest tracked communities, 86% of faith leaders believed HIV was a punishment from God before going through the training. Four years later, that number had dropped to 58%. Similarly, 26% of faith leaders would not allow a fellow faith leader living with HIV to preach, but after the implementation of Channels of Hope, that percentage reduced to just 9%. More than half of the Channels of Hope groups organized in Uganda continued to be active on a regular basis more than five years after the life of the initial project. Multiply these shifts by hundreds of thousands of people, in dozens of countries, across two faith traditions, and the scale of impact starts to come into focus.
Where It Stands Now
World Vision still runs Channels of Hope as one of its core programs. Islamic Relief has taken the Muslim adaptation and made it fully its own, building new versions of it in country after country, still crediting World Vision for the original methodology.
Christo, looking back on all of it years later, talked about smallness. Asked how the whole thing had grown, he said simply: “Looking back on where this all began, I feel very, very small.” He’d spent years watching pastors and imams who used to preach blame now speaking, in his words, “with conviction with a language of acceptance and support.” Christo also celebrates that Channels of Hope extended beyond World Vision’s name. “It is very important to me that this tool will be a tool of transformation that can be utilized by others to benefit so many of the most vulnerable people in the world.”
Could there be more partnerships like the one between World Vision and Islamic Relief? Recent findings from ISPU suggest there’s real appetite for it. In an April 2025 survey, 20% of white Evangelicals and 17% of Muslims said they were currently involved in some kind of interfaith work — more than any other group surveyed, including Jews (5%), Catholics (3%), and the religiously unaffiliated (1%). And the appetite runs deeper than just activity: 78% of Evangelicals and 75% of Muslims say they support religious pluralism, even though most Americans assume only about half of each group does.
But the same research shows why partnerships like this one remain rare instead of common. ISPU’s Islamophobia Index found that between 2022 and 2025, anti-Muslim attitudes rose faster among white Evangelicals than any other faith group tracked — up 15 points. The two communities most willing to work together are, at the same time, drifting further apart in how they see each other.
This is why efforts like Neighborly Faith, Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, One America, Essential Partners, Interactivity Foundation, Constructive Dialogue Institute, innoFaith, Shoulder to Shoulder, and The Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative are so important. Christians and Muslims clearly have the capacity to build real trust with each other, end suffering, and save lives. The data also says they have the capacity to drift toward division. Which one actually happens isn’t inevitable. It depends on whether organizations like these, which promote dialogue and cooperation, get there first.
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