J. R. Woodgates
Tag Archives: spiritual formation
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.
The Obama Administration will soon announce the return of Pell Grants for federal prisoners. Those with fewer than five years left on their time will be able to pay for classes taught by accredited colleges.
Here’s what a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Maryland’s Goucher College has discovered teaching prisoner’s about the Bible:
Almost murdered by his mom, left permanently disfigured, with his dad in prison, Demetrius Guyton ended up in prison, himself. That’s where a Christian inmate shared God’s Word with Demetrius, leading to a life-changing encounter with God.
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.
Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:2, The Message)
Energy and ambition go a long way in making money, acquiring academic degrees, climbing Mt. Everest, and hitting home runs. This is indisputable. But such goals, all of them much lauded by our culture, have very little to do in themselves with growing up in the land of resurrection—with living a mature life.
Competitive ambition can be pursued without conscience, without love, without compassion, without humility, without generosity, without righteousness, without holiness. Which is to say, quite apart from maturity.
Immature millionaires routinely walk out on their families. Immature scholars and scientists who collect Nobel Prizes make do with estranged and godless lives. Immature star athletes regularly embarrass their fans by infantile and adolescent, sometimes criminal, behavior.
These are the men and women who set the standards for getting to the top, making a name for themselves, beating out the competition. These are the men and women who provide the examples of what it means to be standout human beings.
—Eugene Peterson in Practice Resurrection
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.