“When President Richard Nixon’s knee-capper went to prison after pleading guilty to a Watergate-related crime,” writes World magazine editor Mindy Belz, “he touched off one of the most compelling stories of conversion and a redeemed life in the modern American church.”
Belz reflects on the life of Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson, a man President Nixon “once told to ‘break all the [expletive] china’ to get a job done,” and his transformation to evangelist and reformer:
At a federal prison in Alabama, Colson the inmate found a small but steadily growing Christian group within the walls, as he recounts in Born Again. Upon his release seven months later, he decided to start a prison ministry. The logo since Prison Fellowship’s earliest days has featured a bent reed, referencing Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” It reflected Colson’s belief that no one—not the most hardened criminal nor the most egotistical Washingtonian—was beyond hope.
Prison, on the other hand, was not rehabilitating, Colson said he learned, but rather a “steady, gradual corrosion of a man’s soul.”