J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: prison ministry
Christianity Today tackles that question in its latest edition.
The second-fastest growing church in the USA is fast advancing the Kingdom of God behind bars.
Incarceration remains at record levels in the US, yet most pastors say they have no contact with present or former inmates in their congregations. What’s wrong with this picture?
Fostering this kind of inmate-to-inmate ministry is exactly what Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path is all about.
Danny Duchene got out of California’s prison system after 32 years, thanks to Rick Warren. Now, he’s hired Duchene as Saddleback Church’s director of Prison Ministries. It’s quite a story.
Watch this former head-busting drug slinger tell how receiving unexpected fierce love from a few Christians brought him to repentance…and a new sense of purpose. Then he entered California’s state prison system. Although he never read Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path, his amazing ministry to fellow inmates modeled what readers of my book can also do.
It was two-and-a-half years between the one time I was interviewed by the FBI in late 2002 about my Internet activities at work and when I received notification from my lawyer that I would face a single charge for possession of child pornography. It was another year after that before I actually stood before a federal judge in Washington, DC and pled guilty to that charge.
Unbeknownst to anyone but a few prayer partners, clergy and family, I had spent those three-and-a-half years going through a rigorous process of church discipline, clinical examination and personal restoration. By the time I stood before the judge, I was a different man from the one who had been engaging in such disordered behavior in 2002. Nevertheless, he convicted me of my crime.
In the fall of 2006, just as I began a nine-month stay in a federal low security correctional institution in North Carolina, I divulged my situation in the parish magazine of my large suburban Episcopal church.* I was overwhelmed by the loving response it elicited. Six months later, I followed up that article with an epistle from prison.
Read both articles now to gain a better understanding of my full story…and the discoveries that inspired me to write Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path:
* In 2009, having left The Episcopal Church, it became a founding parish of the Anglican Church in North America.
Not only priests minister behind bars. Catholic laity and religious can also have a huge influence on the spiritual lives of locked up men.
Kudos to Kairos Prison Ministry International for going after the hard cases, the worst offenders, the guys no one expects to see restored by God.
Royalties from all retail sales enable me to give away copies of the Recommended Reading titles to prison chaplains, upon request. They also enable me to provide free paperback copies of Daily Light on the Prisoner’s Path to prison ministries for distribution to inmates.
Click HERE and HERE to see who is distributing free copies of DLPP.
For more information, write to:
Prisoner’s Path Books
Post Office Box 32014
Washington, DC 20007
I can be contacted at PrisonersPathBooks@gmail.com.