Peter’s language about “doing good” is richer than most Christians realize. The phrase appears across twenty-nine New Testament occurrences in various Greek forms—agathopoieō, ergazomai agathon, kalos poieō, and others—and it describes a life characterized not merely by preaching but by right action, honorable conduct, practical beneficence, truthful speech, obedience to God, and kindness toward both saints and sinners. When Peter writes that it is commendable “when ye do well, and suffer for it” (1 Peter 2:20), the “doing well” encompasses the whole range of faithful Christian conduct. It includes proclaiming the Gospel, certainly—but it also includes feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, repairing what is broken, teaching the ignorant, comforting the afflicted, and maintaining a life of visible integrity in a context that assaults integrity at every turn.

Prison ministry that reduces “doing good” to “preaching at inmates” has amputated the biblical concept. It has reduced a whole-body command to a single organ. The result is a ministry that speaks to the soul while ignoring the body, that addresses eternity while neglecting the brutalities of the present hour, and that wonders why its message falls on deaf ears among men whose most immediate experience of the world is hunger, filth, sickness, boredom, and degradation. “If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?” (James 2:15-16). James asked the question two thousand years ago, and the church has still not adequately answered it.

The Whole Man Under Assault

To understand why whole-person ministry is necessary in prison, one must understand what prison does to the whole person. Incarceration does not merely restrict movement. It assaults the entire man—body, nerves, habits, speech, hope, family ties, and personhood.

The body is assaulted by inadequate nutrition, contaminated water, insufficient medical care, and the sheer physical stress of confinement. During my years in the Valparaíso Penitentiary, I watched men develop chronic conditions—dental infections, skin diseases, respiratory ailments, fungal infections of the feet and hands—that would have been trivially treatable in the outside world but that festered for months or years because the prison medical system ranged from incompetent to nonexistent. I once photographed the swollen, infected toes of Richard, a Bolivian Pentecostal who had no family support in Chile and no money for treatment, and sent the images to Valentín so that he could bring antifungal cream on his next visit. The simple act of obtaining basic medicine required coordination across the visitor-encomienda supply chain—a chain many prisoners do not have access to. The kiosk inside the private Rancagua prison charged double or triple the market price for basic goods: food, hygiene products, snacks, and beverages. Prices were only slightly higher in state-run Valparaíso. A man without outside financial support was a man without the basic materials of survival.

The nerves are assaulted by constant noise, lack of privacy, and the unrelenting tension of living among dangerous men. A chess move—a stupid chess move—once sent me into an emotional tailspin that revealed how deeply the prison was eroding my psychological resilience. How could a single bad move on a board game produce such disproportionate anguish? Because prison compresses the emotional world until small events acquire enormous significance. The man who has lost his family, his career, his freedom, and his reputation has nothing left to invest emotionally except the trivial events of his daily confinement. When those events go wrong, the reaction is catastrophic—not because the man is weak, but because the prison has stripped away every buffer between him and his emotions.

Habits are assaulted by enforced idleness. The men who lost their minds behind bars were, almost without exception, the men who had no structure—who slept until noon, watched television until their eyes glazed, and drifted through the weeks without purpose. Speech is assaulted by the coarseness of the environment: profanity, vulgarity, manipulation, and dishonesty become the lingua franca of the módulo. Hope is assaulted by the sheer length of the sentence and the glacial pace of the legal system. Family ties are assaulted by distance, expense, shame, and the slow erosion of relationships that cannot survive years of separation without heroic effort on both sides. And personhood itself—the irreducible dignity of the image of God in every human being—is assaulted by a system that reduces men to numbers, treats them as problems to be managed, and communicates through every institutional mechanism that they are not worth ordinary care.

Whole-person ministry addresses the whole person because the whole person is under assault. A ministry that speaks only to the soul while the body starves, the mind atrophies, the nerves fray, and the family disintegrates is a ministry that has misunderstood both the nature of man and the scope of the Gospel.

Food as Fellowship, Fellowship as Ministry

One of the most effective instruments of ministry during my imprisonment was something so ordinary that most people would not think to call it ministry at all: shared meals. My many supporters financed breakfasts and lunches for other inmates and for me on most days. I prepared the food from what I received pre-cooked by María, my wife, or others. The numbers varied: sometimes three men, sometimes more, up to ten. The food was prepared outside and brought in through the encomienda system, cooked inside the módulo with a small toaster oven I bought at the informal market in Valparaíso, or a larger one with special guard approval in Casablanca. I still have that same oven in our kitchen today. María made Peruvian casseroles, chicken breast rolls stuffed with cheese and broccoli, blue-cheese-stuffed hamburgers, and other meals that were extraordinary by any standard and miraculous by prison standards. The practical generosity cost money—real money, recurring money, money that my supporters could have spent on themselves.

But the meals did something that no sermon could have accomplished on its own. They created a community. A man who shares your food becomes, however briefly, your companion. A companion at your table is a man who will listen to your counsel, tolerate your correction, and consider your testimony with a seriousness that he would never extend to a stranger who showed up to preach. The shared meal is the oldest instrument of fellowship in human history—the Passover meal, the Lord’s Supper, the agape feast of the early church—and its power in prison is no less than its power in any other context. Indeed, it may be greater, because the prison environment is so devoid of genuine community that the simple act of sharing food becomes, by contrast, an event of startling significance.

Shared meals became fellowship. Fellowship became counsel. Counsel became instruction. Instruction became, in God’s Providence, the pathway through which some men heard the Gospel for the first time, and others were strengthened in a faith that the prison was systematically trying to destroy. By March 2021, twelve to fifteen men were gathering on the patio for a brief preaching or devotional moment prior to breakfast, with Cristián, Alan, Alexis, or me rotating the preaching duties. The breakfast was the draw. The Word of God was the substance. Neither would have worked without the other—not in that environment, not with those men.

Chess as Ministry

I played 3,761 chess games during my imprisonment, winning 91.4 percent and drawing 1.9 percent. I record these numbers not for vanity—though I confess some pleasure in the record—but because chess became, unexpectedly and providentially, one of the most effective ministry facilitators available to me. Being considered smart in a Chilean jail has advantages and grants weight to what one says about the Gospel or God’s word compared to the Pentecostals, who are widely considered to be ignorant. Chess mastery generates respect.

A man who will not sit for abstract exhortation will sit for chess. A man who distrusts preachers will trust a chess opponent—because the chessboard is honest. It does not flatter, it does not manipulate, and it does not pretend that a bad position is a good one. The man across the board from you is, for the duration of the game, your equal in dignity and your opponent in skill, and the relationship that develops across a chessboard is qualitatively different from the relationship that develops across a pulpit.

Chess cultivated patience in men who had none. It cultivated foresight—the capacity to think two, three, five moves ahead—in men whose entire existence had been governed by impulse. It cultivated self-command: the discipline to resist the obvious move in favor of the better one, to endure a bad position without panic, to accept defeat without rage. These are not merely intellectual virtues. They are moral virtues, and in an environment where impulsiveness, shortsightedness, and volatility were the norm, any activity that cultivated their opposites was doing moral work whether or not anyone recognized it as such.

Moreover, chess created conversation. The post-game analysis—“Why did you move there? What were you thinking? Did you see that I had a fork on move twelve?”—is a form of rational discourse that many inmates had never experienced. They had been talked at for years—by judges, by social workers, by guards, by losers, even by preachers—but rarely had they been talked with in a context that assumed their intellectual capacity and invited their participation. Chess assumed both, and the conversations that grew out of chess games often extended far beyond the board into matters of theology, morality, family, and life. Many inmates had never been treated as if they could learn anything noble. Chess taught them otherwise, and the teaching was all the more effective because it came not through a lecture but through a game.

Books and Intellectual Engagement

I read my Bible through nearly twice and consumed 204 other books during my imprisonment—theology, history, economics, political philosophy, and Italian language. I taught myself Italian to a B1-B2 level. I wrote the five-book, eleven-volume Bearing the Cross series and the entirety of Suffering Unjustly. This intellectual engagement was not a luxury; it was survival. The mind that is not fed atrophies, and the atrophied mind is fertile ground for despair, vice, and spiritual collapse.

Most prison ministries make no provision for inmates’ intellectual lives. They bring Bibles—which is essential—but they do not bring books. They do not bring reading material that treats the inmate as a thinking person capable of engaging with serious ideas. They do not bring notebooks, pens, or writing paper. They do not bring language materials, history books, or theological works. The implicit assumption is that the inmate has no intellectual needs or that his intellectual needs are irrelevant to his spiritual condition. Both assumptions are false.