How can local churches minister to prisoners?
The man to answer that question is Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship. Paul Robbins, Leadership executive editor, and Christianity Today, Inc., board members Fred Smith and Stephen Brown went to Washington, D. C. to interview the author of Born Again and Life Sentence.
Smith, a Dallas company president, questioned and commented from the layman's point of view, while Brown, pastor of Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church in Florida, contributed the pastoral perspective. In the process, many thorny church/parachurch questions surfaced.
The resulting mosaic touched on the problems of sharing volunteer manpower, spreading the gospel to the unchurched, and dividing the labor between church and parachurch organizations.
Although many questions emerged, they all seemed tied to a basic one: "How can Christians infuse the light of the kingdom into the world's dark corners?"
Leadership: Is the allegation true that most parachurch ministries bleed the manpower and womanpower of the local church?
Charles Colson: No, I don't think so. Last week, for example, I spoke in northwest Indiana, and pastors from most of the churches in that area attended our meetings. As they came through the receiving line after one session, their comments were 100 percent supportive.
Fred Smith: This allegation has been around for a long time, and like most, it probably has a particle of truth in it. After all, there are a couple of potential conflicts in any parachurch/local-church relationship: the denomination and the local dynamics.
The denominational conflict with parachurch organizations is often the most intense, because both have programs to promote.
Meanwhile, the local minister faces conflict in three areas. His people come back from parachurch meetings all excited and energized about some new inspirational program. They wonder why their church can't get involved right away. They fail to realize that most of the work of implementing the programs falls on the poor, tired minister—who has not been out and gotten all excited. Instead, he feels a need to cool them down and get them back to being productive church members. Second, the pastor can't compete with the famous celebrity who heads up the parachurch program. Third, the parachurch organization naturally wants lots of financial support, and that threatens the local church's economy.
But the laymen see the parachurch ministry as an opportunity to cross-pollinate with other Christians. When you're a Baptist, for example, you're looking for an opportunity to be with Lutherans and Wesleyans, to see what they're like.
Steve Brown: Those conflicts do threaten me, Fred, and I wish they didn't. My ministry philosophy says I want people involved in organizations like Prison Fellowship, but it's not easy to step away from our church's programs and say to each member, "What is God calling you personally to do?"
Colson: I can't speak about Key Biscayne in particular, but I do find that laymen often get into parachurch ministries because they've already done everything in the church that's fulfilling to them. Now they see an opportunity to reach out beyond themselves and the local church. The biggest thing Prison Fellowship gives to laymen is a vehicle of direct ministry to people who are hurting badly. They often don't get that in traditional local-church activities.
People have a natural desire to help. Our ministry has no lack of volunteers, and we think the real key is making sure volunteers are challenged. They get on fire; they're giving beyond what they ever thought they could; they want to do more. They get out of the narrow confines of some churches, where they've done all the volunteer tasks and still feel unfulfilled. They go to hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and skid row rediscovering the gospel they've been taught for many years. They see it working in the lives of people in totally different cultures—that's spiritually explosive.
Smith: There is, however, one thing local churches do that parachurch groups can never do—mature the saints. In parachurch organizations, you go to give, not to get. Yes, you get in the process of giving, but that isn't the same.
The maturing of the saints, not the reaching of the lost, should be the number one priority of the local congregation, because if you mature the saints, they'll reach the lost. If you reverse this priority, you create loveless evangelistic programs. People become involved not out of love but guilt or fear and end up spiritually crippled.
Colson: The church and the parachurch can't be viewed as either/or; they must be complementary. If they aren't, one must give way—and if one must give way, it should be the parachurch. The basic unit of the kingdom of God is the local church; the second chapter of Acts teaches us that. The parachurch serves its purpose only when it enables the church to better fulfill its biblical mission.
The parachurch can provide services that the local church, for one reason or another, is unable to provide. One pastor in one congregation can't be expert in nineteen different areas where people want to be involved. Thus he must draw on the training, resources, facilities, and skills of people who have committed themselves to a particular calling—a mission that's part of the biblical command but beyond the resources of the local church.
Leadership: Well over half the people reading this article are serving in churches of less than 250 people. Each of them has probably had ten or twelve appeals for help already this month: Youth for Christ wants to use the church facility for a meeting; Campus Crusade will be in town next week with a Lay Leadership Institute; the Billy Graham advance men have just been through preparing for a metropolitan crusade; Chuck Colson's going to come in a month to speak at the ministerium and will be looking for lay volunteers to minister at the local penitentiary.
What would you say to these individual pastors about the ideal relationship between these parachurch ministries and their 250-member congregations?
Colson: I would tell them we must help each other. I use their pulpits to challenge people to participate in the fellowship of suffering, and they use me to fill up their churches and get local people involved. Ideally, the motives on both sides are pure, although I recognize that's not always true. I've had some disillusioning experiences where churches used me on their big day to burn the mortgage, guarantee large revival attendance, or get more membership. And I probably have taken advantage of some churches by using their manpower without enough regard for their needs. But these situations are rare, and most parachurch ministries honestly work for a complementary relationship. We don't want the church to feel threatened.
Brown: In the beginning, most parachurch organizations seem to have great integrity. Temptation sets in when their bureaucracy begins to grow. They start seeing the weaknesses of the church and think they can do better—not just the special ministry they started, but everything.
Colson: I agree. The parachurch must remain distinctive from the local church. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is a good example of this distinctiveness. They could use their power and influence in ways that could be very threatening to local churches, but they work very hard not to do that.
Smith: There's a correlation in business, by the way. Breakthroughs in advanced technology are usually made by one engineer somewhere in a lonely laboratory. He forms a little company, perfects his idea, and then a larger company comes in and buys or merges with him, because it has the resources to saturate the market with his idea. The original idea may later be modified to suit the needs of the parent company.
Leadership: Doesn't specialization usually preempt generalization? The local church is committed to the general task: taking care of people from the cradle to the grave. The parachurch organization is committed to a specific task: ministering to prisoners behind bars. Doesn't the concentrated focus of a specialized ministry give it an attractive, advantageous quality that a generalized ministry will never have?
Colson: Yes. And if Prison Fellowship used its distinctive appeal to develop a whole range of ministry services, if we began to have Sunday worship for our own people, for example, we'd be out of line.
Leadership: Steve, what does a pastor look for in a good working relationship with a parachurch organization?
Brown: Being a pastor is not easy. In a church of 250 members, you've often got 250 bosses. So more than anything, a pastor looks for understanding on the part of parachurch personnel—that local-church ministry is a tough place to be. That simple recognition goes a long way toward establishing a good relationship.
Colson: That is our biggest problem in parachurch ministries: insensitivity to pastors' needs. We should genuinely desire to put them at ease. We don't want to take over what they're doing; if we do, our mission will fail. I'm fifty years old and can look forward to ten, maybe twenty more years of God allowing me to serve in this way. I want to leave behind something important to the kingdom, because I realize what I left behind in politics didn't matter. If I leave behind a parachurch organization that is at war with the local church, then I've failed. But if I've been able to speak prophetically and energize the church, giving it resources and equipment to do a biblical mission that hasn't been done, then I'll feel I've been faithful to God's calling.
Leadership: Chuck, how would you define a good working relationship with the local church?
Colson: I can tell you what it is not. We've run into the situations where a church or group of churches listens to our teachers, takes extensive notes, and then sets up its own independent prison ministry. This defeats one of our major purposes, which is to develop a national network of prison ministries. When somebody gets out of prison in Minneapolis and returns to Miami to live, we want to be able to call our care committee coordinator in Miami and have him meet this person at the plane. We can't do that if the ministry is fragmented.
Leadership: Doesn't this smack of turfism? The local church's turf is worship services, and Prison Fellowship's turf is anything having to do with prisoners.
Colson: No, I don't think so. Effective prison ministry requires a high degree of training and expertise. The 350,000 incarcerated people in this country cannot be stereotyped in any way except one: they all have a very low sense of self-esteem. Eighty-six percent have average or above IQ, but they're in a dehumanizing environment that makes them feel worthless. And in most of the prisons where we have worked, the local church has done as much harm as it has done good. Most people simply aren't trained to do prison work; they resort to methods that turn off more prisoners than they help. Sometimes it's because of fear, sometimes naiveté, and sometimes it's just lack of skill. For example, tracts usually don't work with prisoners. Once-a-year sermons are worse than useless. Unless visitors are willing to spend regular time caring about prisoners, they're just turning inmates against religion.
Leadership: What mistakes do you think most parachurch organizations have made that you want to avoid?
Colson: The parachurch usually comes in with a well-known leader who gets publicity and attention, while the unappreciated local pastor keeps slugging it out in the trenches. We run into this with prison chaplains. Although I never ask the press to go into a prison with me, they invariably do. And the chaplain, who has sat up all night with a prisoner whose father was dying or has spent hours with a drunk who's been in and out of prison seven times, begins to feel a little resentful of the big splash I make. I try to be especially sensitive to these feelings as they relate to both chaplains and pastors. I make sure I don't go to any prisoners unless our organization can offer them something they couldn't get otherwise.
I want us to stick to our unique services: First, expertise, experience, and training in prison ministry that we've spent five years developing. Second, a national network of care committees, so that people being released in one area can find help in another area. When an inmate fills out a form giving us the name and address of his family, we send it to a care committee in that area, and someone goes to visit the family. That is potent ministry. Third, we take the gospel to the people who will never attend a local church. The biggest problem in evangelism today is preaching to the same people over and over. Most of the people we minister to would not be willing to walk into a local church.
Smith: Too often the parachurch doesn't explain its program adequately to the local pastor. Such groups must tell what they're trying to do. Prison Fellowship is joining the local church in trying to reach needy people, but you're doing two additional things the local church can't do: you're ministering to the national prison population, and you're trying to change the prison system. The local church can do neither. The common purpose is to reach needy people—both can do that. But the local church needs to know that Prison Fellowship is doing more than reaching needy people.
Colson: That's an excellent summary. Jacques Ellul, the famous French lay theologian, wrote that if we can't identify with the suffering masses, our words are empty orthodoxy. We try to help the church identify with the suffering masses.
Leadership: After your organization goes into a prison, how do you build a ministry bridge to the local church?
Colson: When the inmate gives us the name and address of his family, the care committee finds a local church that will adopt them. These are families that would never have gone to church; if they had, they would have felt terribly out of place. Coming by this route, however, they do. The church feels a sense of paternal responsibility for them. It breaks down cultural and spiritual resistance.
Brown: The attitude with which a parachurch organization approaches this is very important. We've already said a pastor can't do 19 different things, but too often he's expected to do 119 things. He feels guilty at night when he goes to bed. Campus Crusade comes in and says, "We're going to win the world by 1985," and he thinks, I'm not even winning my community. Young Life comes in and says, "Kids in this town are drowning in sin," and he thinks, I can't even get my youth group going. Pretty soon he feels like he's drowning in a sea of need that can never be met.
Parachurch organizations can do two things for such a pastor. First, they can affirm him: "Pastor, you're a man of God." Second, they can offer help: "You'd like to reach prisoners, and we are going to help you."
Unfortunately too many groups come in with the attitude "You're not reaching prisoners, even though God told you to. What's wrong with your ministry?"
Smith: Pastors should be allowed to say to other organizations, "Look, I'm not going to help you with this. I'll cooperate in spirit; I'll pray for you; but I've got a ministry that God's called me to do. I've only got twenty-four hours in my day; when he gives me thirty-six, I'll give you half the increase."
Colson: We're not asking for the pastor's time—that's the point. We're only asking the pastor to help us find volunteers. The pastor should not say to us, "Get out—my ministry is discipleship, and I'm not interested in prisoners." First of all, there are people in his congregation who are. Second, prison work is biblical. He can say, "I'm busy twenty-four hours a day, but I'm delighted to appoint a task force in the church to work with you." We're asking the pastor to assign a lay person in his congregation to do the worrying about this issue, because he obviously can't.
Leadership: Are you saying he needs to remove himself from the line of communication, so the Prison Fellowship people talk directly to a lay person?
Smith: Many will be threatened by that.
Colson: But that kind of delegation is good leadership. One of the church's problems in using volunteers is that it doesn't give them things to do. If they volunteer but don't get told what to do or how to do it, they're soon bitter. Prison Fellowship has made its share of mistakes here. We've gone into an area, gotten people all excited about serving in the prison, and then for one reason or another not come back, not trained them and put them to work. It embitters them.
Through these experiences we've come up with some very basic principles on how to use volunteers:
First, when you recruit them, be sure you can use them. Second, screen them. Be sure they're the right people to do the right job. Third, train them. Tell people how to do what you want done. Fourth, be very specific about what you expect. Fifth, hold them accountable. If you give people a job to do and thereafter ignore things, they get the idea the job wasn't very important. But if you check two weeks later to make sure the job got done, they feel important and come back to do more.
We sometimes hear this argument that the parachurch takes volunteer labor away from the local church. I argue just the opposite. The parachurch helps use volunteer labor that would otherwise go to waste in the local church, because we give them jobs beyond the boundaries of their church, where they may be burned out. We must get believers out of their snug cocoons to experience the impact of what the Christian life can really mean to someone who is suffering. In politics, the motivation is the recognition, the stroking you receive, plus a bit of idealism that your views will prevail over the other guy's; it's mostly a reward of the ego. The only reason anybody should give money or time to the kingdom, however, is gratitude to Christ. If Christian volunteers do what they do out of a grateful heart—they'll stay with it. And they will be effective.
Leadership: Will Prison Fellowship help train the local church to eventually carry the organizational responsibility for prison ministry as well as the spiritual responsibility?
Colson: This is the difficult area. Right now we conduct 200 prison seminars each year. Through skilled instructors, we are easily able to train one volunteer for every four inmates. We are contemplating whether we could package this in such a way so we could go to a church and say, "We'll teach you how to put on a seminar in the nearby prison," train them, and then walk away.
The difficulty with this is that it introduces denominationalism into the prison—a huge stumbling block for the inmates. By working through local churches, we could put on three times as many seminars, but we'd be fostering denominationalism. We want to get local churches more directly involved but not at the expense of the unity and effectiveness of prison ministry. So far the only organizational structure we have within the local church is the Prison Fellowship task force, which adopts families.
Leadership: How does that work?
Colson: The best way to describe this is to share an example. After conducting our seminar at a prison in Jefferson City, Missouri, we set up a task force. After several months of ministry they realized that inmates' families coming to visit jailed relatives had no place to stay. So our volunteers started taking them home. That didn't work—too many problems of all kinds. So the churches got together and bought an old building to house inmates' families. It's being run by a former Southern Baptist missionary and a Catholic sister. Thirty women and their kids can stay there every night. During the day, a nursery is provided for the kids while the women visit their husbands. Talk about a witness! It's worth a thousand sermons. Churches are doing this, and we're providing the help and expertise.
Leadership: Just recently we heard a pastor say, "If the church were doing its job, we wouldn't need any parachurch organizations."
Brown: I've probably said that at least twenty times over the years—but I'm convinced it's a lie.
Leadership: Is it conceivable that part of a parachurch organization's ministry is to raise the consciousness level of ministry needs and then begin working its way out of a job?
Colson: In the first Prison Fellowship letter I ever wrote, I said, "I hope that in five years we will have established a model and I'll be free to move on and do something else." Now here we are, celebrating our fifth anniversary, growing bigger daily. It was unrealistic to think we could go out of business in our area of specialization. Somebody has to maintain the national network, somebody has to guarantee access to the prisons, somebody has to certify volunteers. You can raise the consciousness level, but by doing so you've created a movement, and the movement needs a rudder.
Smith: A parachurch organization has a sense of mission that makes members totally committed to a single cause. That's tough to create in a local church because of its very nature. Thus it shouldn't be feared.
Colson: That may be true. But both are needed. The great thing about the kingdom of God is its diversity. We'd be in terrible trouble today if there weren't some intellectuals, like R. C. Sproul and Richard Lovelace, who have profoundly affected my life. We'd be in awful shape without good Christian publishers. We'd be in bad shape if we didn't have good, strong local churches. God has called different people in different areas to provide different resources. All weave together to form a tapestry, which is the building of the kingdom. We can't say anyone thread is more important than another.
Brown: Ninety-nine percent of the people reading this article will agree with that, Chuck. But a day or two after reading it, half will be fighting like cats and dogs with another ministry somewhere. What goes wrong?
Colson: I think you overestimate how many would agree with my statement. Everybody gets a personal vision of the kingdom, and too often it crowds out everybody else's vision. We have to realize that only God has the overall picture.
Leadership: What should a pastor say to people about their financial support of parachurch ministries?
Smith: Many have been brought up on the theology of the church as the storehouse, the treasury. Some say you violate the storehouse concept when you give to a parachurch organization.
Colson: I don't agree with that strict a view. I consider myself a good member of my own church; yet there are needs and causes I want to be a part of, as God leads me. When you start saying all funds must be channeled through the local church, you are defeating the spirit that gave birth to many important movements. I know it's a problem; there are churches where Prison Fellowship is part of the church budget largely because they don't want us appealing to their individual members. I understand that. And although I think the storehouse concept is wrong, I agree there has to be accountability within the local church. I'm not sure you can have a hard and fast policy that's right for every church.
Leadership: Steve, how did you arrive at the financial viewpoint you teach at Key Biscayne Presbyterian?
Brown: Through what I call "significant failures." (Laughter) We tried urging people to pledge individually to specific missions. But we found some very worthwhile ministries were being ignored because they were low-profile and people didn't know about them.
Then we decided to have both specific pledges to a mission budget and pledges to our general expense budget, out of which we'd support lesser-known ministries. That didn't work, because some people weren't giving a dime to some things we felt should be supported. We didn't think someone should be able to say, "I'm giving my money for the pastor's salary but not for Prison Fellowship."
So after these two failed, we decided on a unified budget: we declare a percentage, different each year, that goes to missions outside the church. We're also open to our people giving to programs on their own. But we don't want it going both ways. We tell worthwhile organizations, "We want to support you. If you get money from our church budget, you'll get so much. But we realize you might do better on your own. So we'll still give you credibility with our people and you can try to approach them individually. But you don't get both. You must decide which route you want to go."
Leadership: What practical guidelines would you offer a pastor who wants to cooperate with parachurch ministries?
Smith: Find the person in your church who has a real burden for a specific task, and then let him do it.
Brown: Remember that you don't have to be in charge of everything.
Colson: Remember that the church is not the pastor—the church is all the people. The extent to which the pastor can get lay leadership involved multiplies the ministry of the local church geometrically and matures the saints.
