PRISON FELLOWSHIP: Prison Fellowship

Hope for Kids, Inc. launched this past December with the vision of reaching underprivileged kids in the Greater Springfield Massachusetts area with acts of kindness, spiritual renewal, authentic relationships, and physical nourishment.

When fear and insecurity fill our hearts, we respond with selfish indifference to the needs of our neighbors. But when faith rules our lives, when we have wrestled with God and found Him true, we become secure in His ability to care for us, and we cease to doubt and fear.

A couple weeks ago I got to teach at Christ United Methodist Church in Texas. It was a thrill! The church meets in a beautiful building with dazzling stained glass and a gleaming organ. The angel-voiced choir was dressed all in white – but then, these particular singers, who are members of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative values-based reentry program at the Carol Vance Unit, are always dressed in white; that’s the color of their prison uniforms.

The world moves fast, doesn’t it? We’re always making another to-do list, reading another best-selling leadership book, and doing more. We buy things that promise to make us faster and more efficient – things that will let us be in a business meeting and at the dinner table at the same time.

Just 445 words long, Paul’s shortest New Testament letter is to a man named Philemon, a well-to-do merchant in the garrison town of Colosse, who was also a leader in the Christian church there. He was a businessman, a family man, and someone respected among the community of believers.

So many of the letters we get from prisoners start out the same: “I hope someone reads this …,” “I don’t have anyone left out there …,” or “I haven’t received a visit or a letter in years. I’m hoping you will help me know God …”

But the letter from Joe, a long-time prisoner in Virginia, was different.

David had finally hit rock bottom, going from underage drinking to serving prison time. But God hadn’t given up on him.

It was a rainy day in Phoenix when Prison Fellowship President and CEO Jim Liske became part of a human hallway. Join Jim as he recounts his experience at a volunteer event in an Arizona prison housing inmates from Hawaii. Though separated from their loved ones by many miles, these inmates learned that God’s love was always present and available to them – even in a rainy prison yard in Arizona.

I couldn’t believe my ears.

I was at a prison where the warden was giving several other wardens and me a tour of the grounds. We met his staff and then sat down with about two dozen prisoners enrolled in Prisoners to Pastors, a seminary-level training program that prepares Jesus-following inmates to be leaders behind bars and when they return to the community.

By bringing the words of incarcerated writers directly to the general public through her article, Jones hopes to provide people with a better understanding of what goes on behind bars from raw, firsthand accounts. The excerpted letters cover a range of issues and perspectives, and give readers an inside look at what everyday life is like for prisoners.

Raul would find himself in a situation he couldn’t run from, and he would learn that God was his only source of true freedom from his crime, his guilt, and his anger.

Recently my email program kept telling me that it could not connect to the server. After some tinkering, one of our hard-working IT specialists found the problem: My laptop was trying to find two networks and was connecting to neither. It was confused and stuck in a futile cycle of searching.

“It seems like all the happy people are the ones inside the prison,” observed a member of our board on a recent trip to Michigan correctional facilities, where we attended seminary-level classes with inmate students and later shared a meal in their cafeteria.

While we slept last night, Congress found itself in a stalemate on the terms of the Affordable Healthcare Act, propelling the U.S. federal government into its first shutdown in 17 years.

A reentry organization founded in Cleveland, Ohio, is working to eliminate misconceptions that employers have about the risks involved in hiring ex-prisoners.