I never met Charles Colson. But the ministry he started played a pivotal role in my life. I don’t know that I would ever have gotten involved in prison ministry some 20 years ago were it not for Prison Fellowship.
At that time I was a grad student. I had gradually formed a desire to be involved in what I term “Matthew 25 ministries”—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned. For whatever reason, it was visiting the imprisoned that drew my attention.
I didn’t know anyone who was involved in prison ministry, and I didn’t really know where to start. I had quite a bit on my plate as a doctoral student. I needed to take my comprehensive exams to be admitted to candidacy, and then I needed to write my dissertation. I told myself that I needed to take care of those hurdles first, then I’d get involved in prison ministry.
But then I thought about how I hoped I’d be hired as an assistant professor at a “publish or perish” research university, and get married, and have children. In my mind I pictured myself at the end of my life, still rationalizing what I had always meant to do, but never did. The very next day I wrote a letter to the national Prison Fellowship headquarters asking for contact information for the regional PF ministry.
I am unsure what I would have done without Prison Fellowship. PF had a national presence. Most prison ministries are local; I wouldn’t have known even how to find a local ministry, and I wouldn’t know whether any would want or even accept my participation. (I have rarely met in-prison volunteers who weren’t Baptists of one sort or another, members of independent fundamentalist churches, or Pentecostals. My Missouri-Synod Lutheranism is usually suspect in these circles.)
The national PF headquarters connected me with the regional ministry, which ran a training program and helped me with the logistics of getting into the state’s system of prison volunteers.
I first went in as a facilitator for one of PF’s weekend in-prison seminars. The prison was fifty or sixty miles from where I lived, so I got up early on Saturday morning to get to the prison in plenty of time before we were to go in. (Prisons aren’t really set up for late-arriving volunteers to dribble in throughout the morning.)
The gothic style of the prison looked all the more foreboding in the overcast early morning gray. Years later I initially wondered whether the prison was where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed. (It wasn’t—but it could have been.)
After going through security, the prison staff herded the small group of volunteers through a narrow hall, and then through a large, metal door into an even smaller hallway, with another metal door closed at the other end of the hall. The first door shut behind me with a “clang” sufficient for Hollywood.
The leader took us through the materials, and we broke into small groups to talk, read, and pray. We repeated on Sunday. Nothing momentous happened that weekend, but it was a good weekend. I got to meet a couple of men whom I didn’t know before. And that really was (and is) my goal.
In Matthew 25 Jesus says “I was in prison and you came to me.” He doesn’t say that he was in prison and you preached to me, or that you came to make me a better person, or that you came and taught me “principles for living.” Now maybe some of that other stuff happens—I hope it does—but that other stuff isn’t the reason for prison ministry.
The way I see it is that there are Christian brothers on the inside of prisons, and I go to visit them as I go to visit my friends on the outside. I don’t visit my friends on the outside to preach to them, or to try to make them better people, or to teach them anything. To be sure, all of that can happen to them through me, and to me through them. But that other stuff is incidental to visiting them as a friend, whether on the outside or on the inside. In Christian fellowship we change each other as we meet Christ in one another—me as much as the men I visit on the inside.
Meeting Jesus inside prison walls is one of the greatest gifts I’ve received in my life. After my start with Prison Fellowship I worked with other prison ministries, and ultimately organized my own (modest) local ministry—a step that would have been utterly inconceivable to me twenty years ago.
Perhaps I would still have stumbled into all of this even without Prison Fellowship. But I don’t know that I would have. Without PF it would have been easy for me to have excused and rationalized not going into prison year after year—and all the while maintaining the best of intentions to go in “some day.” So I’m more than happy to give credit where credit is due. For the privilege I have been given to go to Christ’s brothers inside prison walls, I am eternally thankful to my Lord, and to his servant, Charles Colson.
James R. Rogers is department head and associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. He leads the “New Man” prison ministry at the Hamilton Unit in Bryan, Texas, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Texas District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.
RESOURCES
Stephanos Bibas, Colson’s Enduring Legacy
Thomas G. Guarino, A Catholic Appreciation of Chuck Colson
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Comments:
The first night in their house, I spotted a louse scurrying across my pillow. Ken and Rose had just brought Ed in. "I got bugs real bad," he had told them. Indeed. Ed would talk to himself as he relived events from his past life, and throw tantrums if he didn't get to watch what he wanted on t-v. When they asked him if he really wanted to stop drinking, Ed replied, "No." Ever wonder why it takes a true saint to sacrifice themselves for the downtrodden? This is why. I think K&R made the grade, but I wouldn't claim the same for myself. This is one reason I have always held Chuck Colson in the highest regard for his prison ministry.
There was just one thing I would have recommended that Colson watch out for, though. And that is his tendency, like many who have a strong ideological commitment, to gather and propagate information from suspect sources without bothering to vet it, simply because it serves to support one's point of view. A case in point was one of Colson's radio broadcasts that I heard while driving in my town years ago. Colson was decrying the corruption of the Girl Scouts of America. Unlike the Boy Scouts, he claimed, they had surrendered to the pressures of modern secular society. As an example, he said that girl scouts today are routinely trained, during their meetings, on how to install a condom on a man, using an erect dummy as a training aid. I almost drove into a tree.
The next day I happened to meet my friend Susan, who was an employee of the National Scouting Museum and a fairly high ranking girl scout leader. I relayed Colson's charges against the Girl Scouts to her and asked her opinion. She stared at me open-mouthed for several seconds and then doubled over in hysterical laughter. When she got control of herself, she explained that the only topic touching on sex that was allowed in their meetings was basic training in feminine hygiene. Furthermore, that was only for the older girls and only with written permission from a parent.
So, even saints can be deceived about the facts if they are overzealous in making their case, although I don't believe for an instant that this detracts from the value of Colson's prison ministry. But still, it's better to retain a healthy scepticism and a touch of scientific objectivity about our information sources, no matter how juicy the tidbit that is offered to us.
I grew up in reformatories and went to prison at age 20 (for ten years). Many years later on the outside, after I found my way back to the Church, I volunteered for a prison ministry, and after my training I went to a local county jail, and at that first meeting with prisoners, which was fruitful, I was told by the group leader that I was not supposed to talk with the prisoners, that I had stepped outside the bounds of what I was trained to do, that we are supposed to sing gospel songs and read from the Bible only. I told her that in that case, I will not be returning. What you wrote sums up what is at the heart of prison ministry:
"The way I see it is that there are Christian brothers on the inside of prisons, and I go to visit them as I go to visit my friends on the outside. I don’t visit my friends on the outside to preach to them, or to try to make them better people, or to teach them anything." This reiterates what St. Francis said: “Preach the gospel, and when necessary, use words.”
Chuck Colson is a true son of God, not only for how he inspired persons to visit prisoners, but his holy fight for ecumenism, what is at the heart of a new and great millennium of Christian witness.