If I told you there was a place where the church was growing dramatically—conversions followed by baptisms and discipleship, red-hot leadership development, and measurable improvements in the well-being of the surrounding community—and it was in North America, not Africa or Asia, you might not believe me.
If I told you it was happening in the nation’s largest maximum security prison, Louisiana State Penitentiary, you wouldn’t believe me. Given the prison’s sordid history, which has inspired books and movies, including Dead Man Walking (1995) and The Green Mile (1999), it is indeed an unlikely story.
“It’s truly a God thing,” said Norris Grubbs, senior associate dean of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS), which has administered a seminary training program inside Louisiana’s penitentiary, known as Angola, since 1995. With an inmate population of some 5,200, 85 percent of whom are violent offenders, Angola is the nation’s largest, and historically most notorious, prison.
But now Angola has a very different reputation, largely a result of the NOBTS program, called the Angola Extension, which has graduated 192 inmate ministers, as they are called, since it began 15 years ago.
Modeled after the seminary’s Bachelor of Ministry degree, the Angola Extension is a 126-hour program operated year-round in the prison, fall and spring semesters, with lighter, modular courses offered during the summer.
The curriculum in this fully accredited Bible college is taught by a rotation of NOBTS and visiting faculty—Greek and Hebrew, pastoral care, preaching, biblical studies, church history, systematic theology, and evangelism.
“We didn’t have any idea what it would develop into—God has kept opening doors,” Grubbs said. The goal of the program, to graduate a corps of educated inmate ministers, has been realized—all of them now busy ministering among Angola’s huge prison population, and beyond.
America’s bloodiest prison
Sixty miles north of Baton Rouge, Angola sits on a tract of land bigger than Manhattan, surrounded by the Mississippi River. First settled as a slave plantation in the 1800s, today the prison is home to men serving time for capital crimes. More inmates are serving life sentences here than at any prison in the country.
Everyone in a prison understands two things: authority and community for the Angola Christians, authority begins in the message, both written and embodied. Pastors are respected for their example, not their office, and there is no hiding if they lapse, which happens.
By 1994, when Burl Cain was appointed its new warden, Angola had a reputation as the bloodiest prison in America. Cain was determined to change that.
“Nothing happens in a prison unless the warden wants it to happen,” Grubbs said, and what Warden Cain wanted, as he’s said elsewhere, was moral rehabilitation. Cain also was obeying his mother, who had warned him before his first day at Angola: “You just remember one thing,” he said she told him, “I raised you right—to know God—and God will hold you accountable one day. If you don’t see that those prisoners have a chance to know Him, He will hold you accountable for their souls” (from Cain’s Redemption: A Story of Hope and Transformation in America’s Bloodiest Prison).
In September 1995 NOBTS accepted the warden’s invitation to teach Bible classes inside the prison, even though the funding was uncertain, skepticism was high, and violence inside was still rampant.
John Robson, who has been the director of the Angola Extension Program from the start, also remembers inmate resistance to the program at first. “We had to earn our way,” he says. To this day the program depends on donations and costs the state nothing.
In a prison, everything must be earned, so the program fit into prison culture right away. There are rules and prerequisites for admission to the program, and the workload is heavy.
When a student has earned 90 credits, he takes on the added responsibility of ministering inside the prison under the supervision of the inmate ministers. They lead prison congregations, and also leaven the huge prison population with their daily presence and counsel, which is where they face their biggest challenges, according to Jim Rentz, senior chaplain with the prison’s chaplain’s department, which oversees and mentors the inmate ministry.
“Men in prison are in a constant state of crisis—it’s 100 percent of the time,” said inmate minister Tom (inmates’ names have been disguised for publication), who graduated from the Extension program in 2007. “Rejection is a big part of the ministry; you have to get used to it.”
The inmate ministers, Rentz said, “walk with tears in the cells.”
Still, the entire prison population, including Death Row and the prison’s hospice program, is visited by these ministers and those in training every month—more than 5,000 souls in all. At one level, this is just another example of Warden Cain’s philosophy at work—from the radio station to the prison farm: every inmate deserves and needs a job, and if they’re in good standing, they have one.
But one warden’s idea has gone far beyond what anyone hoped or imagined. According to Tom, the program is “building God’s church, calling out his lost, and rescuing them daily.”
Unlikely candidates for ministry
“How can you make criminals pastors?” Rentz has been asked in churches where he speaks about the program. His reply: “St. Paul was a criminal, and God forgave him.” Before coming to Angola, Rentz says, “I was very opinionated about who could go to heaven. I’ve come to learn something—the grace of God, it’s all-sufficient.”
Robson, who also teaches in the Angola program, echoes that. “These men,” he says, “have been judged by every entity in their life … and rejected by them. So when they meet Christ, he judges them with grace. They experience true conversion, and welcome him as their Judge. Their learning curve is a leadership curve—true humility for these guys is to find out what God wants them to do.”
Men like Jerry, 45, a third of the way through a 40-year sentence for attempted first-degree murder; or Tom, 37, doing natural life without parole, now have a story of conversion and a call that defines them beyond their sentence.
They may not walk out of Angola alive—90 percent of the inmates never do—but they are recognized leaders in the church there—13 congregations, 435 services a month, up to 800 worshiping together and growing.
Robson estimates half the prison population now is Christian, and believers of all faiths manage to coexist with minimal problems. Overall prison violence has dropped dramatically—65 percent—in the 15 years the seminary program has been in existence.
In 2006 Warden Cain went out on a limb again with an idea of sending out some of the now many inmate ministers as missionaries to other prisons. Once more, and pretty quickly, success overwhelmed skepticism—”in every prison we’ve sent them to, the violence has gone down,” Rentz said.
Inmates must apply and qualify for this opportunity, and 24 are serving this way in other Louisiana prisons today. All of them are brought back every three months for support and education in the larger ministerial group. As a result of the program, now Louisiana felons are being sent to Angola for the last year of their sentence in the hope that contact with the Christian leaders there will at least keep them from ever going to prison again.
The successes of the Angola Extension continue to spread and attract attention. It has been replicated in two other Louisiana prisons and in other states, with plans for more.
Parachurch organizations augment the Extension program by bringing in guest professors. Samaritan’s Purse sponsored an apologetics conference with Norman Geisler of Veritas Evangelical Seminary. Pastors, including John Piper and John MacArthur, also have been guest speakers at Angola.
On one level, this is a story about the power of one, from the vision of Cain to the steady, quiet mentoring of Rentz or Robson, whom many of the inmates regard as father figures.
“We wouldn’t be able to do this without someone like John,” Grubbs said. “Few of these men have a good relationship with any other man; the example of someone who stands up for himself and is a godly man who loves the Lord—it makes all the difference.”
But Rentz and Robson are the first to say they play supporting roles in what God is doing inside Angola.
“When I drive through that gate every morning,” Rentz said, “I see 5000+ inmates and 18,000 acres. I cannot possibly reach all these men.” He knows the ones who can are inside, sinners Christ has transformed, one at a time. Whether they ever drive through the prison gate again, their testimonies are opening prison doors now.
Not principles but a person
Robson sees the leadership equation here in simple terms. “People are not changed by principles or concepts; they are changed by the person of Christ. We never give these men a ministry until they have met Jesus and received his message,” he said. Robson teaches students to read and study Scripture, grounding in God’s Word the message each inmate has already been given.
“We get them in the neighborhood—they already are enthralled by the Bible and devour it,” he said.
Learning and leadership in Angola happen on the same curve and often in the same moments, many of them outside the classroom.
“Birds’ nests on the ground” is what Robson calls the frequent impromptu teaching and mentoring opportunities he has with inmates in different places throughout the prison. And they foster community as well as leadership.
Everyone in a prison, Robson said, understands two things: authority and community. For the Angola Christians, authority begins in the message, both written and embodied. Pastors are respected for their example, not their office, and there is no hiding it if they lapse, which does happen.
Self-sacrifice doesn’t go unnoticed either. Recently, Rentz said, an inmate minister who had been promoted to a program for model prisoners outside the prison asked the warden to relieve him. Even though the opportunity could have led to an early parole hearing, he told the warden he belonged with the men he pastored, back in prison.
“That decision really strengthened his leadership,” Rentz said.
The gospel in prison is a story as old as the Bible itself, and the Christian community has learned some of its most important lessons there, especially about itself.
“The Angola church is the heart of what we’re doing,” Robson said. “We can’t do without them; they can’t do without us.”
In a place where identity and survival are found in gangs, almost all the gang leaders, Rentz said, are pastors now.
In God’s grace equation, much starts with little, or nothing at all. Perhaps the most profound lesson Angola has to teach is found in what God does with limitations, and with suffering, both of which permeate prison life. In contrast to the church outside, Robson said, these leaders “do not own a ministry; they own a message.” They have lost their freedom, and, by the world’s standards, their futures, because of their crimes.
“Our cross,” prison minister Tom said, “is very highly personalized.”
But he and others speak with joy about their callings, and grace continues to overflow from this crucible, in ways and moments no one plans or anticipates.
At a recent graduation ceremony for the Angola Extension, Norris Grubbs felt another of its ripple effects. A mother of a graduate came up to tell him how her son, who had been estranged from his father all his life, had been sending a copy of every one of the class papers he wrote for the program to his dad, through her. The son never knew that privately his father was reading them, and though he never reconciled with his son, the papers were instrumental in his becoming a Christian before he died.
She told Grubbs, “I didn’t think that I would ever have an opportunity to be proud of my son.”
It was yet another reminder of what Paul, himself a prisoner, said when he wrote (2 Tim. 2:8-9): “This is my gospel, for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But God’s Word is not chained.”
Philip Apol is a Christian Reformed chaplain in South Bend, Indiana.
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