The prison yard is not the mission field most pastors envision when they read the Great Commission. There are no comfortable pews, no carefully prepared worship environments, no congregants who arrived voluntarily. There is concrete, steel, barbed wire, and men whose lives have been defined by violence, addiction, betrayal, and desperation. And yet, in my experience, there is no soil more receptive to the seed of the Gospel than the soil of a broken man who has lost everything.

This does not mean that evangelism in prison is easy. It means that it is different—different from anything you have done in a church building, on a street corner, or in a foreign mission field. The dynamics of sharing the Gospel behind bars are shaped by the unique pressures of incarceration, and if you do not understand those pressures, your efforts will be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.

What Works

The most effective evangelism I conducted in prison was not planned. It was lived. The inmates of módulo 118 watched me for months before most of them were willing to engage in serious spiritual conversation. They watched how I treated people. They watched whether I kept my word. They watched whether I maintained my composure when provoked, whether I shared my food, and whether I participated in the petty gossip and slander that consumed most of their days. They watched whether my faith was real or merely a performance.

This is the first principle of prison evangelism: your life is your sermon. In a world where mendacity is a survival skill, and trust is as rare as hot water, the credibility of your message is inseparable from the credibility of your character. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your sake” (1 Thessalonians 1:5). The Thessalonians knew “what manner of men” the apostles were because they had observed them. The inmates will observe you, too—and they will see through any pretense with a speed that would humble the most perceptive psychologist.

I had opportunities to witness to many men during my imprisonment. Some conversations were extended and deliberate—sitting with Ismael in the barber room, working through the doctrines of grace over weeks and months. Others were brief and circumstantial—a comment during a chess game, a word of counsel after a man received bad news from his lawyer, a quiet exchange in the dining hall. With Karim, the young politician and atheist of Palestinian Orthodox background, I spoke about the existence of God and the coherence of the Christian Worldview. With the quasi-Mormon Mauricio, I explained the differences between the true Gospel and the teachings of Joseph Smith. With Raúl the elder, the seventy-year-old atheist murderer, I confronted the reality of judgment to come. With Che, the agnostic with his curious self-made religion of energy fields, I presented the exclusive claims of Christ.

I also discovered an unlikely evangelistic tool: cooking. In the later years of my imprisonment, my bacon rolls, meatballs, and burrito cookouts became events that drew inmates who would never have attended a formal Bible study. They came for the food. They stayed for the conversation. And the conversations, inevitably, turned to the things that mattered most. A Colombian drug trafficker named Michael stopped playing cards to listen to me teaching about the Gospel during one of these cookouts. The surprise continued when he said he would like to attend the Historic Baptists meeting. I told my supporters, “We don’t spend money on cigarettes or other vices, and thus others can see the benefits of buying something wholesome instead.” The principle is biblical: Jesus fed the five thousand before He taught them. Meeting a physical need opens the door for meeting the spiritual need. This is not manipulation. It is incarnational ministry—the Word becoming flesh, dwelling among men, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

Each man required a different approach, because each man carried different baggage. This is the second principle: know your audience. A man who has been raised Catholic and abandoned the faith needs a different conversation than a man who has never heard the name of Christ spoken with reverence. A man crushed by guilt over his crime needs to hear about the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. A man enraged by injustice needs to hear about God’s sovereignty. A man terrified of death needs to hear about the resurrection. You cannot preach the same thirty-minute sermon to every man and expect the Spirit to work identically in every heart. “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

The Unique Openness of Broken Men

There is a reason that Jesus said, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick” (Matthew 9:12). The healthy, prosperous, comfortable man sees no need for a Savior. The man in a prison cell—who has lost his freedom, his family, his reputation, his future—is acutely aware of his need. He may not articulate it in theological terms. He may not even identify it as a spiritual need. But the void is there, and it is enormous.

I saw men who had been hardened by years of criminal life open up in unexpected moments. A tough young man, sentenced to six years for armed home invasion, who had stabbed other inmates in previous módulos and been expelled from multiple cellblocks for bad behavior, came to 118 not realizing what changes were in store for him. After hearing me preach a bit, he eventually sought me out for information, for conversation, for something he could not quite name. The hunger was real, even if his understanding of what would satisfy it was dim.

The minister in prison must learn to recognize this hunger and to respond to it with the Gospel—not with moralizing, not with institutional religion, not with self-help platitudes, but with the unvarnished announcement that God became man, lived a perfect life, died a substitutionary death, rose from the grave, and now offers forgiveness and eternal life to every sinner who repents and believes. That is the message. Everything else—the counseling, the practical advice, the material support—is scaffolding. The Gospel is the building.

The Astonishing Truth: Prison as God’s Harvest Field

Here, I must pause to drive home a theological point that shapes everything I have said about evangelism and will say in the remainder of this book. God providentially uses prison as a means of salvation. This is not a pious abstraction. It is a pattern I observed repeatedly during five years, five months behind bars, and it transformed my understanding of why God permits—indeed, ordains—the suffering of imprisonment.

Consider the trajectory. A man spends his entire life running from God. He grew up in poverty, surrounded by crime, saturated in folk religion that has no saving power. He enters a life of drugs, violence, and exploitation. He would never set foot in a church voluntarily. He would never pick up a Bible. He would never sit still long enough to hear the claims of Christ. His life is an unbroken flight from the God who made him—and then the state arrests him. The flight is over. The distractions are gone. The pride that insulated him from spiritual need has been shattered by the humiliation of arrest and confinement. He is now, for perhaps the first time in his life, available—available to hear the Gospel, available to consider eternity, ripe for the Holy Spirit’s work.

The tough young man sentenced to six years for armed home invasion, who had stabbed other inmates in previous módulos and been expelled from multiple cellblocks for bad behavior, came to módulo 118 wanting to change. He sought me out for information, for conversation, for something he could not quite name. The hunger was God-given, and the prison was the crucible in which God chose to reveal it. An eighteen-year-old gunslinger named Estefan, whom I shared a paddy wagon with during a nighttime transfer—a boy who had begun his criminal career at thirteen, who was unrepentant for his robberies and boastful about his bullet wounds, who planned to go to the United States for “international experience in his criminal field”—slept while I sang eight hymns beside him. Did those hymns penetrate his sleeping consciousness? I do not know. But I know that God placed a Gospel-preaching pastor in that paddy wagon for a reason, and the reason was not coincidence.

The church must grasp this truth: every man in prison is there by divine appointment. Some are there as punishment for genuine sin. Some are there as victims of injustice. But all of them are there under the sovereign decree of a God who wastes nothing—not even imprisonment. And if God has placed these men in a confined space where they cannot flee His messengers, then the church is criminally negligent if it does not send those messengers. Will God allow His elect to simply get away with disobedience?

Cultural and Language Barriers

My experience in a Chilean prison adds a dimension that is relevant for anyone involved in international ministry or in ministering to foreign-born inmates in domestic prisons: language and culture matter enormously. I spoke Spanish, but I was a gringo. My accent was imperfect. My grammar was sometimes questionable and low-class (flaite) and prison slang, not to mention subtle phraseology loaded with dual meanings, usually stumped me. But my overall Spanish level was C2 by international standards, perhaps an 8½ on a scale from 1 to 10. I could communicate theology, but I could not always communicate the subtle cultural nuances that shaped how my audience received my words. Several inmates spoke a quality of Spanish so poor that even native speakers found them difficult to understand—men like the semi-illiterate mozo who could not calculate that seven plus five equals twelve, or the scrawny drunk whose “hideous witch-like laugh” and mangled syntax made communication nearly impossible.

For the prison minister working cross-culturally, whether in a foreign country or in a domestic prison with a diverse inmate population, the counsel is simple: learn the language as well as you can, learn the culture even better, and rely on the Spirit to bridge the gaps that your linguistic skills cannot. My most effective ministry was with men whose Spanish was clear enough for me to engage substantively—Ismael, Miami, Karim, Miami, Alejandro, Carlos, Alexis, Juan, Marcelo, Leonardo, and others who could track an extended theological argument. With men whose language skills were limited, I relied more on personal example, simple truths repeated consistently, and the witness of a life that demonstrated something different from what they were accustomed to seeing.