The Wrong Stuff is the name of a blog featured by the online magazine Slate, subtitled What It Means To Make Mistakes. The latest installment features a particularly revealing interview with Chuck Colson, the former White House “hatchet man” who went to prison on a Watergate-related plea bargain and then founded Prison Fellowship, a ministry to prisoners.
While reading the interview I was reminded that a key event in the growth of Prison Fellowship’s ministry took place at a federal prison just 60 miles north of Madison.
The story is told in Charles Colson: A Life Redeemed by Jonathan Aitken. Prison Fellowship began working with prisoners by arranging furloughs from prison for discipleship seminars in Washington, DC. Some 30 classes were held and seemed to be going well until the warden at the Oxford federal prison refused to let any prisoners go.
“If you guys are so good, why don’t you bring your teaching team into our prison and run your course here?” warden George Ralston challenged. Colson thought Ralston was bluffing, so he accepted the invitation. The seminar went so well that Ralston was one of its biggest supporters by the end of the week. He recommended Prison Fellowship to other wardens and the seminars spread across the Midwest.
Several hundred of the more than one thousand prisoners who went through the program in the following year committed their lives to Jesus Christ, as well as at least one warden, George Ralston.
The Prison Fellowship ministry went from training hundreds of inmates in Washington DC every year to thousands of inmates inside prison walls every year, because of what happened at the Oxford prison.
The account in Aitken’s book also mentions the involvement of thousands of local Christian volunteers who went inside of the prisons to work with these prisoners.
Many of these volunteers have received little recognition for the important work that they have done. They are volunteers like Roger Kubly and Lou King, who we wrote about several years ago. They remember that Jesus praised those who visit the prisoner. In Matthew 25:40 he said, “whatever you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do for me.”
The large number of men and women who are incarcerated right now is an indictment of the failures of our society. Prison Fellowship and its volunteers offer an answer but the number of lives that they touch is still far short of what it should be.