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We assess participants' experience of Black Pastors Raising Awareness and Insight of Stigma through Engagement (Black PRAISE), an intervention for Black churches to promote critical awareness of HIV affecting Black Canadian communities. We used a community-based participatory approach to implement Black PRAISE among six churches in the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa, in October-November 2016. For the intervention, congregants received a booklet with validated HIV-related information, attended a sermon on compassion and justice, viewed a short film on HIV-related stigma, and completed baseline and follow-up surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. We then conducted in-depth interviews with 18 pastors and congregants from the six churches to explore how they experienced the intervention. Three major themes emerged from an iterative exploration of the thematic content of the interviews: the beneficial impact of the intervention; reconciling the moral and theological issues of their faith with the social reality of HIV and stigma; and perspectives on future stigma reduction efforts. Participants spoke approvingly about Black PRAISE and supported stigma reduction but acknowledged uncertainties about their capacity to actualise their commitment. The main overarching lessons from Black PRAISE are as follows: first, our results support a community-based participatory approach to productively engaging Black congregations in stigma reduction and health promotion; second, promising or successful interventions incorporate multiple components to promote critical awareness about the specific health issue for Black life and wellbeing; and third, interventions are more likely to succeed if they support critical reflection on the underlying conceptual issues, implicit assumptions and belief systems among the professional and lay stakeholders.

This exploratory research addressed the question, among rural Mississippi African American Baptist pastors, what is the impact of attitudes toward HIV/AIDS on the development of HIV/AIDS programs in the church? It was hypothesized that empathetic attitudes toward HIV make programming more likely. The study used Froman and Owen's AIDS Attitude Scale (AAS) and a demographic questionnaire, which included a measure that assessed potential program development. A sample of more than 300 African American pastors participated. The findings suggested that there is a significant relationship between rural Mississippi African American Baptist pastors' empathetic attitudes toward AIDS and their willingness to develop an HIV/AIDS program.

Aim: Sophisticated adjustments for socioeconomic status (SES) in health disparities research may help illuminate the independent role of race in health differences between Blacks and Whites. In this study of people who share the same occupation (United Methodist Church clergy) and state of residence (North Carolina), we employed naturalistic and statistical matching to estimate the association between race-above and beyond present SES and other potential confounds-and health disparities., Methods: We compared the health of 1414 White and 93 Black clergy. Then, we used propensity scores to match Black and White participants on key socioeconomic, demographic, occupational, and physical activity characteristics and re-examined differences in health., Results: Prior to propensity score matching, Black clergy reported worse physical health than their White counterparts. They had greater body mass index, higher prevalence of diabetes and hypertension, and lower physical health functioning. White clergy reported less favorable mental health. They had higher severity of depression and anxiety symptoms as well as lower quality of life and mental health functioning. Propensity score analysis revealed that matching on SES and other key variables accounted for most, but not all, of the observed racial differences. Racial disparities in hypertension, depression severity, and mental health functioning persisted despite adjustments., Conclusions: Race contributed to health disparities in some outcomes in our study population, above and beyond our measures of participants' present SES and key demographic, occupational, and physical activity variables. This study provides evidence supporting the position that race contributes to health disparities through pathways other than SES.