For the congregation:

Write letters. Visit prisons. Send books. Contribute to informal economy funds. Invite prisoners’ families into your homes. Sit with them in church. Learn their names. Remember their stories. Do not treat them as projects. Treat them as brothers and sisters whose sins are, ultimately, no worse than yours. Jesus had to suffer and die for both alike.

Confront your own prejudices. If your first question when you hear that a fellow church member has been arrested is “What did he do?”—examine your heart. The Gospel is for sinners. Every one of us is a sinner saved by grace. The man in the prison cell is not categorically different from you. He is different circumstantially, and circumstance is governed by the Providence of God, not by your moral superiority.

Prepare for the returning member. Before he is released, prepare the congregation to receive him. Provide housing, employment, and mentorship. Do not make him prove his worthiness. Receive him as the prodigal was received: with a robe, a ring, and a feast. That does not mean the church should make a former thief the church treasurer or that a former pedophile should teach Sunday School to children. The church can act with prudence and still incorporate former prisoners who have turned to Christ into the body and useful service.

Why God Sends Men to Prison

Before I close, I must address a truth that most Christians have never considered, a truth that I witnessed repeatedly during five years, five months of incarceration, and that changed my understanding of Providence forever. God uses prison as a means of salvation.

This is not a metaphor. It is a literal, observable, repeated phenomenon. The man who would never have entered a church, never have opened a Bible, never have considered the claims of Christ, is now locked in a room with no escape and no distraction. His pride has been broken by the humiliation of arrest. His self-sufficiency has been exposed by the helplessness of confinement. His pleasures have been stripped away. And into that vacuum, God sends His Word—through a cellmate who happens to be a Baptist pastor, through a chaplain who preaches with conviction, through a Bible left on a shelf by a previous inmate, through a letter from a stranger who writes in the name of Christ.

How many men have been saved because God, in His inscrutable wisdom, permitted them to be arrested? How many men who would have spent their entire lives running from God were stopped in their tracks by a pair of handcuffs? Marcelo Bonilla was dying of a rare, cartilage-hardening disease when I taught him the Gospel in his final months. He might never have heard it outside those walls. The young tough guy who sought me out for conversation—a man who had stabbed other inmates in previous módulos—came to 118 wanting to change. He could not have articulated what he was hungry for, but the hunger was God-given, and the prison was the place where God chose to feed him.

Even Ismael, for all his later inconsistency, acknowledged the truth: “All in all, I am glad it happened to me since by being in jail I came to know the Savior Jesus Christ; jail was my route to salvation.” Jail was his route to salvation, and time will tell whether he was truly converted. Yet, his remark should be carved above the entrance to every prison ministry office in the world. The prison is not merely a place of punishment. For some men, it is the place where God, in His sovereign mercy, arrests not just their bodies but their souls.

The application for the church is clear: if God is using prison as a harvest field, then the church must enter that field. The laborers are few. The harvest is plentiful. And the Lord of the harvest is calling you.

The Gospel Shines Brightest in the Darkest Places

I want to close with a truth that I learned in the darkness of a Chilean prison cell, a truth that no seminary could have taught me and no book could have conveyed: The Gospel is more powerful than the prison. The concrete walls cannot contain it. The steel doors cannot keep it out. The corruption of the guards, the violence of the inmates, the indifference of the courts, the cruelty of the system—none of these can defeat the Word of God or thwart the purposes of God. I have seen the Gospel pierce the heart of a hardened criminal. I have seen it sustain the faith of a wrongfully convicted man through years of unjust suffering. I have seen it transform the life of an inmate who had never heard the name of Jesus spoken with reverence.

The prison is one of the darkest places on earth. And that is precisely why the light of the Gospel shines so brightly there. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5). The darkness cannot overcome the light. It never has, and it never will. Do not fear the prison. The God who walked with Daniel through the lions’ den, who stood with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace, who sat with Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail at midnight—that God is present in every cell, every módulo, every penitentiary in the world. He is there. He is working. He is saving whom He will.

And He is waiting for His church to join Him. “I was in prison, and ye came unto me.” Go.

A closing prayer: Almighty God, Sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, who in Thy inscrutable wisdom dost ordain that Thy people should suffer in this present evil age, we come before Thee in humility and in hope.

We pray for those behind the walls—for those who are guilty and need Thy mercy, for those who are innocent and need Thy vindication, for those who are broken and need Thy healing and have since repented and trusted in Your Son. Sustain them by Thy Spirit. Preserve them by Thy Providence. Let Thy Word be a lamp unto their feet and a light unto their path.

We pray for their families—for wives who carry burdens too heavy to bear, for children who grow up without their fathers, for parents who weep for sons and daughters in chains. Comfort them. Provide for them. Send Thy church to them with the love of Christ made tangible in bread and presence and prayer.

We pray for Thy church—that she may open her eyes to the world behind the walls, that she may hear the cry of the prisoner and respond with the full weight of Thy love, that she may not rest until every incarcerated brother and sister knows that they have not been forgotten by the body of Christ. And then, through the church’s evangelistic effort, many of those who see and hear will make Christ their Lord and Savior.

And we pray for ourselves—that Thou wouldest give us the courage to go where Thou sendest us, to love whom Thou commandest us to love, and to serve as Thou hast served, even unto death.

In the name of Christ, who was Himself a prisoner, who bore our chains, and who rose victorious from the grave. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria.