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That means, for example, Bellavista's police soccer team plays the delinquents' team, and right-wing paramilitaries play FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Colombia's most notorious guerrilla group). Before the 1990 revival, such games would have ended in a bloodbath.

"There can be hope for Colombia," Brabon says. Armies, weapons, and government legislation will never break the power of evil, she says. "You can't look to government and expect it to do what only God can do."

A child of missionary parents from Ohio and Michigan, Brabon was born in Colombia, where Protestants faced generations of severe discrimination until 1991, when government reforms ended the Catholic Church's privileged position. Her parents helped create Medellín's Biblical Seminary of Colombia. Brabon grew up during La ViolenciaS, the modern era of bloodshed triggered in 1948 when guerrillas assassinated presidential candidate Jorge Gaitán. Leaders of the FARC and other armed rebel groups trace their roots to guerrilla armies formed in the 1940s to press for political reforms. More than 200,000 died in the free-for-all before it segued in the late 1950s into the modern era of guerrillas warring to bring communism to Colombia's 44 million people.

By 1991, Brabon, an Old Testament scholar by training, had returned to Colombia from mission work in Spain to teach at the seminary. Chaplain Osorio asked her to preach at a Bellavista worship service. At the end of Brabon's sermon, 23 terrorists and sicarios accepted Christ, an event chronicled in journalist David Miller's book The Lord of Bellavista.

Brabon began discipling these killer-converts and holding Bible studies inside Bellavista. The next year, she took a giant step by launching one of the very few theological institutions inside a prison. Today, that institute is central to the strength of Bellavista's outreach. The training is deeper than what most Colombian pastors receive. Bellavista's brethren test doctrines and they know their Bibles.

Inmate encounters with the gospel start with the Psalm 27:10 mural near the prison entrance. Prisoners awake to the sounds of singing in the cellblocks. Believers hold evangelistic services. Each Christian aims to share his faith twice a day. On weekends the believers stage evangelism campaigns for their unbelieving fellow inmates and thousands of visitors.

"People tend to look down on people in prison," Brabon says. "They don't think they're people of worth. But they are. At the Cross there's level ground." And those prisoners want to reach Colombia for Christ, starting with the nation's 57,000 inmates. Prison has become a strong ministry focus for Colombia's evangelical Protestants, who are growing at about 7 percent a year. (According to a leading evangelical researcher in Colombia, there are 5 million Colombian evangelicals. In 1933, there were 15,000.)

How the Bellavista prison became a hub of Christian ministry draws in the stories of many individuals scarred by violence or abuse. Christianity Today gained rare access to Bellavista to interview several of the most influential individuals in ministry there.

In 1993, the army captured guerrilla Fredy Arias (then 21) and hauled him to a village jail deep in the heart of Colombia's war-torn Antioquia region.

Arias was a poster child for Colombia's social problems. His deep, abiding anger traced to an abusive stepfather, grinding family poverty, and a cousin who raped him repeatedly over two years. He became a street kid in Apartadó, a violent town near Colombia's border with Panama, dominated by narcotraffickers and four illegal armed groups. FARC guerrillas befriended Arias when he was 9 and taught him reading, writing, and Marxism. When he reached 17, they handed him a machine gun. The armed rebellion proved a natural outlet for his unfocused rage.

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February 2004, Vol. 48, No. 2