“My life was created with purpose and meaning. Today I am a new creation and I pledge my life to serve Jesus Christ…”
—Michael Tunstall, DOC #210343
Michael Tunstall is in prison in Branchville, Indiana, down on the Ohio River. He is scheduled to be released just before Christmas this year. In a letter he told me something about himself and is looking for connections—not the old connections—he is looking for people who will give him a chance to be the Christian man he has become.
He writes, “…I follow and serve Jesus Christ…today I am a new creation and I pledge my life to serve Him and build the Kingdom of Heaven. Will you help me? God is calling me into ministry. My wholehearted intentions are to do the right things for the right reasons and with the right people.”
As beautiful as his sentiment is, the doors of Christian acceptance generally do not snap open wide for these people. Eyebrows rise when a reentrant claims Christ as his or her savior. Surely, they are still prone to commit another crime, and if not now, probably later. And so, these fervent Christian reentrants don’t get the feedback they expect. They are not usually accepted as genuine, and many cannot survive their disappointment at the doubting Christian community they thought would welcome them.
Are these prison conversions even real? Just consider the circumstances: The penal system is not designed to be kind, and it is not. Most incarcerated men and women are broken. They are humiliated by their circumstances, alienated and separated from family and friends. They’ve probably lost any job they might have had along with every vestige of pride, self-worth, and hope. But this is fertile ground for transformation, and God is a master at fixing what is broken. Lost and alone, they find that God has been waiting for them all along. They may have been completely abandoned, but when they reached the very bottom, they found there was only one place to look, and that was up.
I don’t happen to be Catholic, but the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, a partner of 2nd Chance Indiana, is one of the most powerful inmate-loving, Christians acting-like-Christian organizations in the state. With a small army of volunteers, they meet in person with incarcerated people in prisons and jails from Central Indiana all the way south to the Ohio River. They befriend them. They connect them to job opportunities and provide clothing or whatever is needed upon reentry.
Considering that thousands of reentrants come out of incarceration in Indiana each year, churches of every ilk and denomination should take a page out of the Catholic playbook and do more than talk about the issues we face for the least of these. Remember Hebrews 13:3?
Meanwhile, many people in prisons and jails absolutely have true religious transformations within the walls of incarceration. After all, it was in the belly of a whale that Jonah came to his senses. Whatever lonely, difficult situation we are in, Jesus is there. For many a prisoner, Jesus is more than “there…”
He sets them free,
Jim
