Archive: Prison Fellowship

A Light in the Darkness

By Dierdra D. Moran

The prison walls that confined Chuck Colson, a former White House aid, for seven months have become a worldwide mission field for him and thousands of others.

The two staff members and three volunteers that were a part of Prison Fellowship’s humble beginnings in 1976 have watched the ministry explode; it now boasts 225 employees and 25,000 volunteers. The program reaches prisoners in 60 countries.

The busy hands of the workers are not confined to prison cells, however. A number of Prison Fellowship’s programs minister to prisoners’ spouses and children as well.

Project Angel Tree provides Christmas gifts to the children of inmates, and Prison Fellowship’s Family Ministry provides marriage seminars and family counseling for spouses and children. In-prison Seminars include three to five days of evangelism and discipleship meetings inside prisons, and small-group weekly Bible studies follow the seminars. A pen-pal program has enabled thousands of volunteers to correspond with thousands of inmates.

Philemon Fellowships, designed for ex-prisoners, provide practical support for those who have been freed; Aftercare helps these former inmates stay out of prison and gets them involved in local churches.

Justice Fellowship, an affiliate ministry founded in 1983, promotes alternatives to incarceration for offenders of nonviolent crimes based on restitution, reconciliation and community involvement.

On the international scene the needs are more unique. In a prison in Peru, for example, about 50 children live with their incarcerated mothers. Prison Fellowship volunteers provide food, clothing, beds and daily nursery care. One volunteer even picks lice from the children’s hair each day.

New branches of the ministry are sprouting up even now, as Prison Fellowship seeks more ways to meet prisoners’ needs.

A mentoring plan is in the works which provides freed prisoners with Christian mentors who help them adjust to a crime-free lifestyle and hold them accountable to it.

Because more than half of the nation’s prisoners are members of a minority group, Prison Fellowship seeks to work hand in hand with inner-city churches in ministry to prisoners and their families.

The Prison Fellowship International’s board of directors, including 18 members from 14 different countries, recently chartered ministries in Costa Rica, Chile, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Prison Fellowship volunteers are a rare sort, willing to take the freedom of the gospel into prison cells all over the world. In Colson’s own words, “We pray we can dare to be different, to creatively meet the physical and spiritual needs of the ‘least of these,’ and in the process demonstrate to a skeptical world that the Gospel is real.”