PRISON FELLOWSHIP: Angel Tree

My wife Cathy’s family calls this time of year ThanksMas. As Cathy’s brothers married, and we all moved away and starting having kids, her family made up this holiday to create a time to gather. The meal consists of both Thanksgiving and Christmas fare, and we give gifts.

Every year, Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program provides the children of prisoners with gifts on behalf of their incarcerated parents.  With the help of churches, church coordinators, and volunteers, these kids are reminded that they are loved by their mothers and fathers behind bars, and that they have a Heavenly Father who provided them with the ultimate Christmas gift—a Child, born in a manger, who would take away the sin of the world.

For over 30 years, Prison Fellowship’s Angel Tree program has been providing children Christmas gifts on behalf of their mothers and fathers in prison, as well as a simple message about God’s love and forgiveness.  Through Angel Tree, families have been restored, kids have been encouraged, and the Gospel has been proclaimed.

With Christmas just a few weeks away, thousands of Angel Tree children are still unassigned. This means that boys and girls in your own community may not get to unwrap a gift from their mom or dad in prison and hear the Good News of our Savior. Will you help share the joy of God's greatest gift to us this season?

God can use any church of any size to serve children with incarcerated parents.

If you haven’t looked at a calendar recently (or, in the case of much of the country, looked out the window or walked to your car in sub-freezing temperatures), winter is fast approaching, and Christmas is just around the corner.  And here at Prison Fellowship, that means the Angel Tree Christmas program is well underway, helping to provide gifts—and hope—to children on behalf of their incarcerated parents.

In the conversation about building safer communities, it’s easy to get caught up in the big topics: record-breaking incarceration rates, headline-grabbing crime trends, and large pieces of criminal justice legislation.

But it’s often the littlest ones among us who are hurt the most by crime.

Don’t look now, but the holiday season is right around the corner. Thanksgiving is only two weeks away, immediately followed by the retail-driven Black Friday and Cyber Monday, encouraging people to go out and start making their Christmas purchases.

And then there is Giving Tuesday.

Thanks to our generous partners, My’lon and Montrese know that they’re loved, and that they have a friend in Jesus, who will never leave them.

A version of the following article appeared in the July issue of Pentecostal Evangel, an Assemblies of God publication.

A version of the following post originally aired as a BreakPoint commentary.

It was back in 1997, when I was practically a kid writer here at BreakPoint, that I first heard about Prison Fellowship’s amazing Angel Tree program.

I was moved by how much Chuck Colson and the Prison Fellowship staff poured themselves into making sure that thousands and thousands of prisoners’ children received gifts at Christmas time.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs around. It takes all your strength, all your patience, and all your creativity.

But imagine how much harder it gets when the children’s father goes to prison. How does a mom explain his absence to her kids?

This past winter, Russell connected with another group of people who needed his help: the 2.7 million children in America with an incarcerated parent.

Rocio remembers it like it was yesterday. “One day there was a knock on our door,” she says. When she answered, a volunteer from a local church told her that he had been sent on behalf of her husband and Angel Tree. “He told me he had gifts for our kids from their daddy,” Rocio recalls.

These prisoners are wonderful examples of redeemed individuals working to restore themselves to their communities through morally rehabilitative in-prison programming.