I did not go to prison intending to start a ministry. I went to prison because the Chilean state put me there. But God had other plans, as He always does, and within months of my incarceration, I found myself functioning as a de facto pastor, Bible teacher, counselor, and evangelist to a population of men who were, for the most part, spiritually starving.

This should not have surprised me. I had pastored a Baptist church before my imprisonment. I hold a degree in religious studies from Reformed Bible College and have taken six graduate courses in church history, Bible, and ethics at Regent College. I had spent decades studying theology, even though my graduate degrees were in public policy, economics, and business economics. But nothing in my prior ministry experience prepared me for pastoring in a place where there were no pews, no pulpits, no hymnals, no quiet sanctuaries, and no congregants who had chosen to be there. Prison ministry is ministry stripped to its barest essentials—a man, his Bible (if he has one), and the Holy Spirit working in the hearts of broken men.

How It Began

It began simply enough. The men in módulo 118 learned quickly that I was educated, that I read voraciously, and that I was willing to engage in serious conversation. In a place where most men’s intellectual horizons extended no further than the latest gossip, a game of cards, or the score of a football match, someone who could discuss theology, history, economics, and philosophy was a novelty. Men started asking questions—first about mundane things, then about deeper matters. “What do you believe about God?” “Why are you reading the Bible and other books all the time?” “Can I have sex with a girlfriend?” “What is marriage for and what are the roles?” Will I go to hell?”

I was the most famous convict in the Valparaíso Penitentiary—not because of my case, though that attracted attention, but because I was the gringo professor who played chess compulsively, wrote books on his cell phone, and talked about things that most inmates had never heard anyone discuss. Even newcomers were eager to get to know me, to hear me teach the Bible or explain economic theory, or simply to take a crack at beating me in chess. But I cared little about being the center of attention for my intellectual capacities. My attitude was increasingly shaped by what Christ said in Luke 21:19: “By your patience possess your souls.”

The teaching opportunities emerged organically. I began holding informal Bible studies with a small group of interested inmates—Ismael, Aaron, and sometimes Rubén and others. Miami would always listen from a distance. We worshipped twice a week. After a while, some Pentecostal Christians joined me, and we made short preaching a daily routine. The format was simple out of necessity: someone preached, someone prayed, someone coordinated. We had no instruments, no printed materials, no amplification, and no designated space. All preaching was open-air. For discipleship and Bible studies, we used whatever room was available—the dining area, the barber room, a corner of the patio—and we worked around the institutional schedule. On Thursday evenings, I participated in an online worship meeting with the Historic Baptists via Zoom on my smuggled cell phone, offering brief sermons and commentary to the group while my cellmates slept. More than once, I was told to keep my voice down, and more than once, I was reminded that my faith was unwelcome in the close quarters of a shared cell. Yet I persisted, because the worship of God is not optional, even when it is inconvenient for those around you.

Starting Bible Studies with Nothing

The practical challenges of teaching the Bible in prison are formidable. Consider the obstacles: most inmates had no Bible. The few Bibles that circulated were in poor condition, passed from hand to hand, and often disappeared. My own Spanish and English study Bibles and concordance were among the very few books I kept permanently throughout my imprisonment—everything else I rotated in and out through visitors and the infirmary paramedic who served as a courier.

Materials of any kind were scarce. There were no printed study guides, no commentaries, no systematic theology texts. I taught from memory, from my own knowledge of Scripture accumulated over decades of study, and from a few reference works I could access on my phone. The teaching method was necessarily oral—more like the early church than the modern seminary classroom, which, upon reflection, may have been closer to God’s design than we, comfortable Western Christians, typically practice.

The men I taught were, for the most part, biblically illiterate. Many had attended Catholic or Pentecostal services at some point in their lives, but their understanding of Scripture was fragmentary, syncretic, and heavily influenced by Latin American folk religion. They knew snatches of verses, usually out of context. They had vague notions about Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints that were more cultural artifacts than theological convictions. Teaching theology to these men required starting from the very beginning—the existence and character of God, the nature of man, the reality of sin, the person and work of Christ, and the meaning of the Gospel.

I did not dumb down the material. Men in prison are not completely stupid, even if they lack formal education; many of them are uneducated, but they are not incapable of grasping complex ideas. What they lack is exposure. No one has ever taught them to think systematically about God and His Word. When I explained the doctrines of grace—election, total depravity, particular redemption, irresistible grace, the perseverance of the saints—some of their eyes widened not with confusion but with the recognition that someone was finally explaining to them why the world was the way it was and why their own hearts were the way they were. Reformed theology resonates powerfully in prison because it takes sin and sovereignty seriously and does not pretend that human beings are better than they are. The inmates knew they were depraved. They lived with depravity every day. What they needed was not a theology that flattered them but one that told them the truth—and then pointed them to the only Savior who could actually save them.

Navigating Doctrinal Chaos

The religious landscape within a Latin American prison is a carnival of competing, contradictory theological claims. The dominant tradition is Arminian Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on speaking in tongues, prophetic utterances, emotional worship, and an experiential approach to faith that often substitutes feeling for doctrine. Easy-believism (so-called carnal Christianity) and prosperity theology—the heresy that God rewards faithfulness with material abundance—are rampant. Catholic syncretism blends the worship of saints with folk religious practices imported from indigenous and African traditions. Self-appointed prophets claim direct revelations from God while running criminal enterprises during the week.

Nearly all of the evangelicals I encountered in prison were Arminian Pentecostals. The módulo designated for believers—módulo 103, the “brethren’s” módulo—housed approximately seventy professing evangelicals. The internal culture was marked by ambition, envy, and a scramble for spiritual authority. Men competed to become preachers, worship leaders, coordinators, or prayer leaders. The positions carried status and, in some cases, practical benefits. The churches they represented were, by and large, soft on sin—permitting members and leaders to have sexual intimacy with women they were not married to, for example, and tolerating behavior that any serious reading of Scripture would condemn.

A Christian man warned me early on that all was not what it appeared among the prison evangelicals. He was right. The extortion, drug dealing, and sexual immorality that characterized módulo 103 made a mockery of its evangelical label. Although I was never in 103, the spillover from those who later came to 118 from 103 affected my religious environment and expectations. I was forced to navigate this milieu with care—affirming genuine faith where I found it, confronting false teaching where I encountered it, and maintaining my Reformed and historic Baptist convictions without apology.

The opposition was not always abstract. A Pentecostal pastor named Juan Vásquez controlled the prison “church” in Casablanca and actively worked to exclude me from evangelical worship. He threatened an outside Baptist lay minister, Ignacio, that his privilege to conduct services would be revoked if he allowed me to attend Bible study. Eventually, he made good on that threat. The man Elias defended me, noting that I attended quietly and that no other pastors had a problem with the Baptist pastor. I gave Elias a copy of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith—a small act that, in the free world, would have been unremarkable but in the context of prison’s religious power struggles, was a declaration of theological independence. Vásquez eventually forced me out of the Pentecostal services entirely, which turned out to be providential. Expelled from the official church, I established an independent ministry on the patio and in my collective dormitory (colectivo) that attracted genuinely interested inmates rather than men merely going through the motions for institutional benefit. God uses even the hostility of false religion to advance His purposes.

This does not mean I was combative. It means I was clear. When men asked me what I believed, I told them. When they pressed me on tongues, I explained cessationism from 1 Corinthians 13:8-10 and from the stopping of special revelation (without explicit notice) from the Urim and the Thummim. When they promoted carnal Christianity and prosperity theology, I took them to Job, the Psalms, Jeremiah, Romans, and Paul’s thorn in the flesh. When they confused emotional experience with the work of the Holy Spirit, I taught them from Romans 8 and Philippians 1 about the Spirit’s role in sanctification, assurance, and perseverance. I did not expect to convert every Pentecostal to Reformed theology. But I owed them the truth, and truth is the only currency that holds its value in a prison. Perhaps not surprisingly, the truth eventually won out.