Rusty lived this way for seven years. He thought he could get away with anything. But in 1997, he received his first drug charge. Then came a felony assault on a police officer and a first-degree burglary charge. With two back-to-back violent crimes and other drug related convictions, he went to prison repeatedly.

“I could never figure out how to get out of prison and live the right life,” Rusty says. “I went from prison back to the life that I'd chosen. But I couldn't forgive myself for the things I'd done.”

In 2012, Rusty was released from prison. This time, he wasn’t going back.

He went to a ministry home for his first few months on the outside. There, he learned how to find a job, pay his bills, and live wisely. He paid off around $30,000 in fines—taking responsibility for the first time.

At first, because his relationships with his family had been broken, his church, his reentry program, and Celebrate Recovery provided him with his main source of community.

One day, the mother of two of his kids arrived at the ministry home. She was on drugs, and Rusty was finally sober.

“You gotta get away from me,” Rusty said. “I can't have this in my life. I've changed, and I'm done.”

She responded, “How do you get this God, and I don't get nothing?”

Rusty gave her a phone number someone had given him earlier that day—a number for a women’s ministry home. After calling twice a day for over a month, she got in.

Six months later, Rusty saw her again and realized that she had become a Christian too.

“Give me someone to serve with,” Rusty remembers praying when he first became a Christian. He never dreamed it would be the mother of two of his kids. He married Brandy, and they continue to serve God together today.

“God restored everything,” Rusty says. “My kids, my mom and dad, my grandma, all of them, everybody that I've burnt the bridges with.”

Rusty served in response to hurricanes and tornados with the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Team, served as Celebrate Recovery Ministry Leader at First Baptist Church-Claremore for eight years, and earned a bachelor’s degree in community counseling. Years of ministry prepared him to serve men in prison.

In April of 2023, Rusty once again walked through the halls of a prison—but this time as a free man and as a Prison Fellowship Academy^® manager at Dick Conners Correctional Center in Oklahoma. His friend Trevor, who had led Rusty to Christ, had been the one to let him know about this opportunity for prison ministry.

He arrived early for his first day on the job and parked across the street from the prison. Rusty doubted himself that day. He wondered if he could live up to the task ahead of him but felt God reminding him of a verse.

“Here I am, Lord, send me.”

He entered the prison, and an officer handed him a set of keys.

“Here I am, an ex-incarcerated person, has a set of keys to a whole unit. Six or seven gates, every door in there, I can pop.”

That day, he joined a class filled with Prison Fellowship Academy graduates. Hearing the incarcerated men talking, he knew he was in the right place. “It just made me start crying,” Rusty said.

The Academy uses targeted curriculum, compassionate coaching, and restorative community to transform lives. But many of the men who graduate from the Academy, like these men, still have time left on their sentences. They miss the community that the Academy fosters and are eager to find ways to give back. Within the program for graduates, they receive training and are given opportunities to serve their community.

“I’ve done time in medium yards here in Oklahoma. For me, what’s been the most touching is that God has used someone like me to do something good,” Rusty says.

Because he knows the culture and vocabulary of prison, Rusty is better able to serve the incarcerated men he works with.

“They don’t connect with many people, and these guys have connected with me,” he says.

He is currently leading his first cohort at the Academy, and the facility is a lockdown facility.

“[There are] hardly any movements. We’re grinding through this,” he says.

Despite the difficulties, the Academy is successfully building community.

For his first year, Rusty was only able to persuade 39 people to sign up for the Academy. But he already has over 150 applications turned in for next year. In a violent and chaotic prison, the incarcerated men see something different in the Academy unit.

“It's because these guys [at the Academy] have learned integrity,” Rusty says.

Rusty teaches classes, leads service projects and community-building events, and meets one on one with the men.

Some of the Academy participants are serving life sentences and have been in prison for over 20 years. Some decided to get out of a gang for the first time, and escaping from gangs left them with physical and emotional scars.

Despite their past, they now want to make a difference. The Academy graduates recently began going into the segregated housing unit (SHU) to minister to the men there.

The SHU is “prison inside the prison,” Rusty said. No TV, radio, or books are allowed inside, and normally no visitors go in. Rusty received special permission to take the academy graduates, themselves prisoners, into the SHU to minister. He now takes five people into the SHU every other week. He said he has more volunteers than he needs because most of them have been in the SHU before and remember the loneliness inside. Through Prison Fellowship®, they now have an opportunity to not only be ministered to, but also to minister to others.

Recently, Rusty shared his story at his church. One of Rusty’s previous arresting officers was there, who texted the pastor while Rusty was describing one of his arrests. The pastor got up in the middle of the story and read that text aloud to the congregation.

“It was crazy/powerful,” the text said. “I’ll never forget that arrest the rest of my life because it affected me.”

The officer said Rusty had been violent, crazy, and had known nothing of God. He said he would never forget that arrest, because of how much Rusty had fought him and how mean he looked. He was surprised to see the change in Rusty, and praised God for it, along with the county sheriff who was also there that day.

“They came up to me and got to talk to me,” Rusty says. “They arrested me way more than one or two times. And just to see me where I was now, it was just glorifying God. The whole day glorified God.”

Reflecting on his story, Rusty often describes the change in his life to others like this: “Before I surrendered, I was inmate 261023, a liar, a thief, an adulterer, a drug addict, a deadbeat dad, a mean and violent person. After Jesus took over, I'm Rusty, a friend, a brother, a son, a father, a ministry leader, a good employee, a homeowner, and as far as I know, the best papa in the world. So thank you for listening to my story.”