The modern church has a prison ministry problem, and it is not the one most people think. The problem is not that churches do too little for prisoners—though most churches do, in fact, do almost nothing. The problem is that even churches that attempt prison ministry routinely confuse two distinct biblical mandates, collapsing them into a single undifferentiated impulse that serves neither mandate well. The result is that the Great Commission is sentimentalized, the duty of solidarity with afflicted brethren is forgotten, and Christian prisoners are abandoned in the very name of outreach.

I intend to separate what Scripture separates. The Bible commands two things regarding persons in prison, and these two commands run in parallel. They are complementary but not identical, and the failure to distinguish between them has produced generations of well-meaning but theologically careless ministry.

Track One: Remember the Brethren

The first track is the duty of solidarity with Christian prisoners—particularly those who suffer unjustly. This duty is grounded not in the Great Commission but in the law of love that binds the body of Christ together. Its foundational texts are Hebrews 13:3, Colossians 4:18, and the “one another” passages that pervade the New Testament epistles.

“Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body” (Hebrews 13:3). The author of Hebrews does not instruct his readers to evangelize prisoners. He instructs them to remember prisoners—specifically, to remember them as bound with them, that is, to identify so completely with the imprisoned brother that his chains become, in a real moral sense, their own. The Greek verb (mimnēskesthe) is a present imperative: keep on remembering. This is not a one-time visit followed by a decade of silence. It is an ongoing, sustained identification with the suffering of a fellow member of the body of Christ.

Peter’s epistles reinforce this duty with precision. “For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God” (1 Peter 2:19-20). Peter is describing the Christian slave, although the principle applies to all, who suffers for doing good—not the criminal who suffers the just consequences of his crime, but the saint who endures affliction precisely because he has acted rightly. That same Peter later writes: “But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled” (1 Peter 3:14). And again: “If any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf” (1 Peter 4:16).

These texts describe a category of suffering that is peculiar to the people of God—suffering that arises not from wrongdoing but from faithful obedience. The church’s duty toward such persons is not evangelism (they are already believers) but solidarity: visiting, supplying, encouraging, remembering, bearing burdens, and refusing to abandon the brother whose chains are, in God’s mysterious providence, a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame.

Paul understood this. When he wrote to the Colossians, his final sentence was a plea: “Remember my bonds” (Colossians 4:18). This was not a fundraising pitch. It was not a clever rhetorical device designed to elicit contributions for the Pauline mission agency. It was a cry for survival—the cry of a man who knew that if the churches forgot him, the isolation of imprisonment would become unbearable. Paul needed food, clothing, parchment, companionship, and the assurance that the body of Christ had not severed him from its fellowship merely because the state had placed him in chains. His plea echoes across two millennia and speaks to every incarcerated Christian who waits in vain for sustenance, a letter, a visit, a word of encouragement from the church that professes to love him. I know that plea from the inside. I lived it.

The Pandemic as Parable

During the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2022), the Chilean prison system suspended most or all visitation for seventeen months. Seventeen months. As my wife and I were unvaccinated, we did not see each other from April 2020 to September 2022, except for very briefly on a few masked occasions during the last several months. That is two years, four months! Almost no face-to-face contact with my wife, no visits from Valentín, no shared meals with supporters, no touch from any human being who knew me as anything other than a prisoner number, except for a few money-grubbing lawyers. Our Pentecostal maid, María, and my wife’s childhood friend, Jana, were vaccinated and thus allowed to visit me for some of those months and bring supplies. I am ever grateful for their help, but their visits were not the same as with my wife or co-Pastor. The isolation was not merely inconvenient—it was existential. It eroded identity, undermined hope, and assaulted the very structures of human connection upon which sanity depends.

I wrote to the Historic Baptists outside the walls, asking them to remember me. I was echoing Paul, not being poetic. The imprisoned Christian who is forgotten by the church is a Christian in spiritual danger—not because his salvation is uncertain (God keeps His own) but because the means of grace through which God ordinarily sustains His people have been severed. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17)—but who will preach if no one comes? The man who is visited weekly can endure hardships that would destroy the man who is never visited. The body of Christ was designed to function as a body, and when one member is cut off from the others, the whole organism suffers (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Curiously, modern evangelical churches tend to presume that proper Christians will not go to jail because they are walking right with God and thus will not commit crimes worthy of prison. Just the opposite is true, and the biblical stories of believers incarcerated for living and preaching the truth confirm it. The more committed a Christian is to his faith and practice, the more likely he will be to be sent to prison by Satan’s henchman, the state (Revelation 2:10). Some of the best believers in the last two millennia have been imprisoned. The more wayward public policy becomes, the more Christians we should expect to be imprisoned. Can we honestly say that public policy in the West has become godlier and more pious than before? Why then should churches presume that prisons are only a mission field instead of a place where their best brethren are suffering? Why aren’t they suffering with them?

The pandemic merely made visible what had always been true: incarcerated Christians are dependent upon the faithfulness of outside believers in ways that the free Christian rarely appreciates. When visitation resumed, Valentín Navarrete—my co-pastor, my brother in Christ, the man who visited me more than 230 times and brought supplies on more than 250 occasions in Casablanca—returned to his post as if he had never been absent. He supplied not only me but (later) also Alfonso (Alfi), Luis Letelier, Elvis, Quintín, Freddy, and a few other Bolivian disciples who had no family support in Chile. He ran errands, handled correspondence, transported materials, and kept the Historic Baptists’ ministry functioning when every institutional structure conspired to shut it down. Valentín embodied Hebrews 13:3 with a consistency that shames the vast majority of Western churches. He did a yeoman’s work, unmatched by any other supporter in terms of time commitment and care, except for my wife.

That is what Track One looks like in practice. It is not glamorous. It does not produce newsletter-worthy conversion stories. It produces something far more important: the sustained, faithful, costly presence of the body of Christ in the life of a suffering brother. It is the ministry of being there—week after week, month after month, year after year—when every natural impulse says that the imprisoned man has been sufficiently remembered and it is time to move on.

Track Two: Evangelize the Lost

The second track is the Great Commission, which commands the church to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18-20), to preach the Gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15), to be witnesses “unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8)—and this emphatically includes the unregenerate men and women who populate every prison on the planet.

Paul describes the condition of the unconverted with terrifying clarity: they are in “the snare of the devil,” taken captive by him “at his will” (2 Timothy 2:26). The unsaved prisoner is doubly captive—captive to the state physically and captive to Satan spiritually. The Great Commission sends the church into every corner of that captivity to proclaim the Gospel of deliverance. The sinner in a prison cell needs to hear that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15), that “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7), and that the God who holds “the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18) can open the prison of the soul even when the prison of the body remains locked.

This is evangelism. It is directed not toward believers but toward the lost. It is not about solidarity with suffering brethren but about the rescue of perishing sinners. Its motivation is the glory of God in the salvation of the elect, and its instrument is the proclamation of the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the church’s offensive mission—entering enemy territory to reclaim those whom God has chosen before the foundation of the world.

Track Two is the track that most churches recognize, albeit imperfectly. When a pastor thinks of “prison ministry,” he almost invariably thinks of evangelism: going into the prison to preach, to hand out tracts, to hold a service, to call men to repentance publicly. And this is indeed part of the church’s mandate. The prison is a ripe harvest field—I saw it firsthand. God uses incarceration to humble proud hearts, to strip away false securities, and to create a receptivity to the Gospel that years of comfortable freedom never produced. Some of the most genuine conversions I witnessed during six years behind bars or on parole occurred among men who would never have darkened the door of a church in the free world but who, in the desperation of imprisonment, heard the Word of God and were regenerated by the Holy Spirit.