If you are reading this chapter, you are considering entering prison ministry. Good. The church needs you. The men and women behind bars need you. The families shattered by incarceration need you. But before you walk through those gates for the first time, you need to understand what you are getting into—and what it will cost you.

This is not a ministry for the faint-hearted, the sentimentally motivated, or the spiritually unprepared. It will test your faith. It will challenge your theology. It will expose your weaknesses. It will bring you face to face with evil, suffering, and human brokenness in concentrations that no church setting has prepared you to encounter. And if God is gracious, it will also bring you closer to Christ than any other ministry you have ever undertaken—because there is no place on earth where the light of the Gospel shines more visibly than in the darkness of a prison.

Spiritual Preparation

The first and most important preparation for prison ministry is not administrative, logistical, or educational. It is spiritual.

You must know what you believe and why you believe it. The doctrinal chaos inside a prison—the prosperity theology, the syncretism, the folk religion, the emotional manipulation masquerading as worship—will assail you from the moment you enter. If your own theological foundations are not solid, you will be swept along by the current rather than standing against it. Study the Scriptures systematically. Know the doctrines of grace. Understand the sovereignty of God over suffering. Be able to articulate the Gospel clearly and defend it against common distortions.

You must be prepared to confront evil without being contaminated by it. Prison is a world saturated with sin—drugs, sexual exploitation, extortion, violence, deception. You will see things that disturb you. You will hear things that shock you. You will encounter men who have committed acts that most Christians cannot imagine. Your reaction to these realities will determine your effectiveness. If you recoil in horror, you will be useless. If you become desensitized, you will be dangerous. The biblical posture is clear-eyed engagement without participation: “Be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

You must cultivate a prayer life that can sustain you through emotional and spiritual assault. Prison ministry is spiritually taxing in ways that no other ministry replicates. The accumulated weight of suffering, injustice, and human wickedness that you absorb during your visits does not evaporate when you leave the facility. It follows you home. It settles into your thoughts. It invades your sleep. Without a robust prayer life—and the support of brothers and sisters who pray for you specifically and regularly—you will burn out.

Practical Preparation

Background checks and institutional requirements. Every prison system has its own protocols for admitting volunteers. In most jurisdictions, you will need to pass a criminal background check, complete a training program, and obtain institutional clearance before you can enter the facility. Begin this process early—it often takes weeks or months. Chile grants Evangelicals monopoly power to a national chaplain, who in turn assigns people to serve in the prisons. It is an onerous hierarchy dominated by Pentecostals with some liberal Baptists (including the National Chaplain) that oftentimes creates a bottleneck. Check whether such a system exists in your country.

Learn the rules. Every facility has specific rules about what you can bring in, how you must dress, where you can go, what you can and cannot discuss, and how you must conduct yourself. Violating these rules—even inadvertently—can result in your being banned from the facility. Take the time to learn them thoroughly. Ask experienced volunteers and chaplains for guidance on the unwritten rules as well.

Understand the security environment. You are entering a controlled environment where security protocols are in place for good reason. Do not bring contraband in your bag—even inadvertently—unless it is really small (like a SIM card) and can be easily hidden in a shoe, the lining of clothes, or the bag itself. Buy the contraband informally from the guards or give the Christian inmate money so he can handle the transaction, even though it is more expensive. A level of protection from attentive guards emerges when buying directly. Remember that the main issue with bringing contraband into yourself, besides losing visiting and ministerial privileges, is that the guards will be angry because they are not getting their cut. Let them have it by buying on the informal market through the mozo—especially cell phones and accessories. Remember, too, that cell phones in prison last about six months on average before they are stolen by another inmate or confiscated during a raid, at which point they must be replaced. Remember that you are a citizen of heaven, who “seeks another country” (Hebrews 11), and your standard of what is right and wrong comes from the Bible rather than public policy. Only God’s word can define what is sinful. Sin is the transgression of the law (1 John 2). Just because the state declares something to be wrong does not mean that it is in God’s perspective. Indeed, just the opposite may be true. Sometimes “doing good” (Galatians 6:9-10; Titus 2:7, 14; 1 Peter 2:15, 19-20, 29-30; 3:6, 17; Luke 6:9; 33; 3 John 1:11; 2 Thessalonians 3:13; James 4:17; Mark 14:7; Hebrews 13:16) requires us to obey God rather than men, since disobeying God is not justified by our desire to please civil authorities or avoid their wrath or inconvenient consequences. Being cowardly before a wayward state and its rulers or judges is not a good option for us (Revelation 21:8).

Always accept requests from inmates to carry messages, deliver items, or pass information to the outside, so long as they can be hidden inside the false bottom of the bags you bring or tucked inside your shirt. Visitors and ministers are rarely, if ever, frisked or searched when leaving the prison, and the letters and information you carry out are a lifeline for the Christians or new disciples who send them. Facilitating these innocent requests will not compromise your ministry, your legal standing, or the safety of others. Of course, always be prudent and never carry instructions to the outside that would implicate you in fostering some immoral or biblically defined criminal activity, which might be different than what public policy defines as criminal. Yet, messages you receive from Christians and new disciples in the prison will, presumably, not contain such things. In my case, I was prohibited from writing to friends and family in English, and nefarious Warden Parra ordered me to write to them in Spanish instead so he could read what I said (even though they could not understand Spanish). He also prohibited me from sending out English manuscripts of my books in the Bearing the Cross series. I sent both out—in good conscience—through my visitors and occasionally from a visiting minister like Ignacio. Not everything that is prohibited or declared illegal is immoral or contrary to biblical principles.

Learn the culture. If you are ministering in a facility with a predominantly different cultural or linguistic background from your own, invest time in understanding that culture before you begin. Language proficiency, cultural sensitivity, and awareness of social dynamics within the inmate population will dramatically increase your effectiveness. In my Chilean prison, the cultural dynamics of Latin American machismo, the religious landscape dominated by Pentecostalism and folk Catholicism, and the social hierarchies based on crime type, sentence length, and institutional connections shaped every interaction. An outside minister who ignored these realities would be ineffective at best and offensive at worst.

Setting Expectations

Let me save you some heartbreak by telling you what to expect.

The environment will shock you. Let me be specific. You will enter a world where, in some cases, men share one toilet among twenty-seven (or more) occupants for at least sixteen hours a day—and the occupants, as I wryly noted, are counted according to butt cheeks before their heads or hearts. You will see used toilet paper piled over a foot high next to each toilet. You will see pigeon droppings caked on the walkways, as thick as paint. You will encounter men whose feet are rotting from untreated fungal infections, men with slash marks covering their arms, and men who stab themselves in the abdomen with leather-sewing needles. You will smell food that is described in prison slang as “el chuto”—a Peruvian term for penis—because the despicable wieners served as daily protein merit no more dignified name. You will witness bed bug infestations where the insects are visible, crawling across mattresses in broad daylight, and you will see blood stains when they are crushed. If these realities disgust you to the point of incapacitation, prison ministry is not your calling. If they grieve you to the point of compassion, proceed.

Most inmates will not convert. The soil is rocky in prison. Many men will attend your Bible study, listen to your sermons, nod in apparent agreement, and walk away unchanged. Of those who profess faith, many will fall away within weeks or months. This is not failure. It is the pattern described by our Lord in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:3-23). Your job is to sow. God determines the harvest.

Many who do profess faith will not persevere. Jailhouse religion is real, pervasive, and heartbreaking. Men under the pressure of incarceration will grasp at anything that offers comfort, status, or advantage. Some will use Christianity to gain privileges within the institutional system. Others will make emotional decisions during vulnerable moments that lack a genuine root in regeneration. “When tribulation or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended” (Matthew 13:21).

You will be manipulated. Inmates, as a general population, are skilled manipulators. They have had to be—manipulation is a survival skill in prison. You will encounter men who tell you exactly what you want to hear, who feign spiritual interest to gain your trust, and who exploit your generosity for material gain. This does not mean you should be cynical. It means you should be discerning. Trust slowly. Verify where possible. And remember that even the manipulative inmate is a soul for whom Christ died. Moreover, the biblical command to do good extends even to the raunchiest and evilest of men.

You will experience secondary trauma. The stories you hear, the suffering you witness, and the injustice you observe will take a toll on your emotional and spiritual health. Make sure you have a support system outside the prison—a pastor, a mentor, a small group—who can help you process what you experience and maintain your own equilibrium.

What the Inmates Will Teach You

Let me close the expectations section with something most prison ministry guides omit: the inmates will teach you things that your seminary professors never could. In my five years and five months behind bars, I learned more about the human condition from convicted criminals than from any academic text. I learned about the expulsive power of addiction from the man who would give up his food for a joint. I learned about the resilience of the human spirit from Miami—the most selfless companion I had in prison, the one person I could count on to think of someone other than himself—who carved artwork on wood engraved with the message that men should “treasure their beautiful moments, thank God, and enjoy their existence in this world, doing good to their neighbors.” I learned about the depths of depravity from the sexual extortion schemes run by professing evangelicals in módulo 103, and about the heights of grace from a sickly and dying convert named Marcelo who dedicated his life to studying the Gospel and biblical theology for the final months of his life and believed.

Alfonso Ergas (Alfi), an educated secular Jewish-Chilean man, once told me: “You shouldn’t be here, a man of your intellectual stature, John, playing chess with drug dealers.” He was wrong. There is no better classroom on earth than a prison for a man who wants to understand the full spectrum of human fallenness—and the full reach of divine grace. If you enter prison ministry expecting to be the teacher and never the student, you will miss half of what God has for you.

A man named Arturo—a thief since age twelve, then age thirty-nine—once asked me about salvation, noting that his aunt was an Evangelical. I gave him directions to the church and shared the Gospel. I doubted his sincerity, yet still hoped for the best. That phrase—“doubted his sincerity, yet still hoped for the best”—became the working motto of my entire prison ministry. It is the posture of a man who has been burned a hundred times and yet refuses to stop lighting candles.