Role of the Church in Prisons
April 20, 2013 - Uncategorized
Last fall I received a visit from my mentor, David Rylaarsdam of Calvin Theological Seminary. This time he brought along a friend, Todd Cioffi, the director of Congregational and Ministry Studies program at Calvin College. We spent most of our conversation exploring the role of the Church with regard to prisoners. Without adequate time to arrive at a specific conclusion, in the end we agreed the area of ministry to and with prisoners was in need of being defined more clearly.
Today the most common form of prison ministry is evangelistic in nature. And rightly so. After all this is the Great Commission. But when considering the question of “What is the responsibility of free Christians in relation to prisoners?” can we say that it begins and ends with the preaching of the gospel of salvation? Or does the message of good news expand to address social issues, speaking to both the eternal and temporal needs of society’s fallen members?
Under the Old Testament all of God’s people were generally called to reflect His goodness by acting justly, loving mercy and living humbly.(1) In the New Testament, we, the Body of Christ have received more specific and detailed instructions of how God’s prisoners are to experience His justice, mercy and love.
Scripture says we are to identify with prisoners as Christ identifies with us (2), to pray for prisoners as Christ prays for us (3), to visit prisoners as Christ visits us (4), to forgive their offenses as Christ forgives us (5), and most importantly, to love them as Christ loves us (6). Understanding Scripture in the Bible to be our authoritative guide in life, it is without question that the church has received a much larger, challenging and involved role in God’s plan to redeem, restore and reconcile prisoners to Himself and to community.
For more than two thousand years this same Word has been adhered to and proclaimed by the church. By this Word we are cognizant of how Christ has delivered each of us from some form of bondage to sin. And finally, by this Word we receive the Good News of God acting on our behalf, in Christ, as the grandest illustration of the Gospel of God being validated through the Justice of God.
Historically the preaching of the Gospel, absent the expression of His divine justice, has birthed a misrepresentation of God’s love and mercy. Consider how the evil of slavery played a vital role in the development of America’s early economic system. From 1619 to 1865, in a nation being founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, slaves, bearing the image of God, were perceived to be, and treated as less than human. It took another one hundred years, from 1865 to 1965, for the American power structure to end the evil of segregation by issuing a decree that all people shall be regarded and treated as equal, having full rights as citizens.
However in 1967, voicing his discontent with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voters Act of 1965 being offered as a remedy for injustice, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the reality of the reform… The absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.”(7) In his book, Slavery By Another Name, Douglas A. Blackmon records how, after the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery, granting new rights and protections to African-Americans in 1865, southerners quickly realized that “forcing convicts to work as part of punishment for ostensible crime was clearly legal.” “Beginning in the late 1860’s, and accelerating after the return of white political control in 1877, every southern state enacted an array of interlocking laws essentially intended to criminalize black life.”(8)
In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander effectively describes how the practice of casteism has survived the past four centuries, making seamless transitions from one era to the next, by simply redefining its terms and methods. Alexander explains, “Since the nation’s founding, African-Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institution such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in a new form, tailored to meet the needs and constraints of the time.”(9)
In an age where the United States is revered as teh human rights watchdog to the world, where its President is an African-American, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution still reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Today the new caste system has been termed “mass-incarceration,” and its overseer is the Criminal Justice System. In 1991 the Sentencing Project found “The number of people behind bars in the United States was unprecedented in world history, and that one fourth of African-American men were now under the control of the Criminal Justice System.”(10) The most startling fact is, with its inception occurring in the 1970’s, the Prison Industrial Complex is still in its infancy.
Throughout my 25 years of being subject to the controls of the Criminal Justice System, I have concluded that there is a divinely ordained purpose and need for prisons. However, I am equally aware that the Criminal Justice System, as purposed by the American power structure, is unconcerned with God’s plan to redeem fallen man from sin, restoring their humanity and purpose, and reconciling thier broken relationships. And just as the Gospel is meaningless without the presence of divine justice, thusly, to remove the foundational principles of the Gospel from the execution of justice is to act unjustly and without Legitimacy.
What is the role of the Church in relation to prisoners? To ensure that prisoners, as image bearers of God, are treated justly as God in Christ has justified us. What does a just system look like and how is it established?
Without adequate time to reach a specific conclusion, I believe we can agree there is an urgent need to for restorative justice principles to become commonplace in our social and judicial institutions as we press toward the rediscovery of the beloved community.
PARTING THOUGHT: “The word of the love of God for the world sets the congregation in a relation of responsibility with regard to the world. In word and action the congregation is to bare witness before the world to the faith in Christ; It is to prevent offense or scandal, and it is to make room for the Gospel in the world. Whenever this responsibility is denied, Christ, too, is denied; For it is the responsibility which answers to the love of God for the world.”(11) –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
SOURCES:
1. Micah 6:8
2. Hebrews 13:3
3. Acts 7:60
4. Matthew 25:36
5. Colossians 3:13
6. Matthew 5:44
7. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Cited in A Testament Of Hope: The Essential Writings And Speeches Of Martin Luther King, Jr., Edited by James D. Washington. New York, Harper Collins 1986. p. 557
8. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement Of Black Americans From The Civil War to World War II. New York, Anchor Books, 2008. p. 53
9. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness. New York, The New Press, 2010, 2012. p. 16
10. Ibid. p. 56
11. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics. New York, Simon & Schuster Inc. 1995. p. 352