PRISON FELLOWSHIP: Chuck Colson

As an actress in the “golden age” of Hollywood, few had a more impressive résumé than Coleen Gray.  She rose to national prominence in the late 1940s, starring in classic films like Kiss of Death, Kansas City Confidential, Red River, and The Killing. 

It was uncanny. The prisoner standing in front of me shared my first name. Like me, he was raised on a farm in Michigan. In fact, our homes were so close together that we frequented the same ice cream parlor and hamburger joint growing up.

When I was still a pastor in Michigan, Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson came up for a visit. He attended a lunch celebrating those involved in a church-based reentry program for the formerly incarcerated. Men and women came up to thank Chuck for his work with prisoners, and as they did so, tears sprang to his eyes.

When Charles W. “Chuck” Colson entered the Maxwell Correctional Facility in July 1974, he did so as a humbled man.  The former special prosecutor for President Richard Nixon had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice during the ongoing Watergate scandal investigation, and was preparing to serve a one-to-three-year sentence in the Montgomery, Alabama, facility. 

The following post originally appeared aired as a BreakPoint commentary on March 17.

During a recent visit to Swarthmore College, political scientist Robert Putnam of Harvard asked everyone in the room whose parents had graduated from college to raise their hands.

The criminal justice system was a vital concern to the late Chuck Colson and the organization he founded, Prison Fellowship. The need for Reform is ongoing. And to that end, John Stonestreet welcomes former Congressman J.

A version of the following commentary originally appeared on  the BreakPoint website.

No human life is irredeemable—no one is beyond the reach of God. And if anyone in recent history embodied that truth, it was Chuck Colson.

In 1969, as a young, hard-driving, fast-rising political star, Chuck found himself in the oval office, accepting Richard Nixon’s offer to become special counsel to the President.

In January of 2014, the U.S. Congress established the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections.  Prison Fellowship President and CEO Jim Liske was asked to serve on that task force, representing the interests of Prison Fellowship, and providing a voice to millions of prisoners and their families.

Devoting the rest of his life to prison ministry wasn’t what Chuck expected to do when he got out of prison, but God had other plans.

It was just a few months before Chuck went home to Jesus. We were sitting in his home in Naples, Florida, and he was “schooling” me, as he did several times in the nine months he and I were together at Prison Fellowship.

“This is what the LORD says—he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters … See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

Last Easter, Prison Fellowship Ministries® President and CEO, Jim Liske, visited the Central Florida Reception, a large prison camp with different wings for prisoners who need hospice care or are too young to be housed with the general population.

In the chapel, Jim preached about Timothy, who grew up without a father, and told the young men, “No one is disqualified from God’s grace.”