The Art of Discipleship

Note: This commentary was delivered by Prison Fellowship President Mark Earley.

In January 2001, the doors of Washington, D.C.’s, ninety-year-old Lorton Correctional Facility shut for one final time. No more would it house some of the most notorious and dangerous prisoners in our society.

It seems the prison facility is undergoing its own rehabilitation. Earlier this month, officials opened the former prison doors for quite a new purpose. Plans are underway to re-open a section of the prison as a community arts center. The graffiti-covered walls will host murals and paintings, and artists will splatter imagination and color on canvases in former cells converted into studio space. Walls that once witnessed violence, desolation, and despair will now witness creation in the making.

As we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the ministry of Prison Fellowship this year, I can’t help but think of Lorton Correctional Facility. It is a prison that Prison Fellowship knew well. Some of the first Bible studies, discipleship programs, and seminars that we ever held took place behind its barbed-wire fences. I wish I could tell you that Lorton shut down in 2001 because every offender had been transformed through the Gospel, and the culture around the prison had changed dramatically enough that crime had disappeared.

While the circumstances for Lorton’s closing were far different, it does not change the fact that the very idea gets me dreaming.

What if instead of spending billions of dollars building more prisons to warehouse offenders, Christian men and women around the country rolled up their sleeves, moved out of their comfort zones, and began going behind bars to teach and mentor inmates? What if instead of seeing the revolving door herd hundreds of thousands of re-offenders back to prison each year, the Church opened its arms to embrace the returning prisoner with the Gospel and with life-on-life discipleship? And what if Christians just like you began to have such an impact on the culture around us that broken families, violence, and poverty—all of which fuel crime—began to disappear? Yes, sin and crime will be with us until Christ returns, but what if we made such an impact that prisons were forced to start shutting down?

It’s a vision of transformation of prisoners and of culture that sounds a little apocalyptic. It sounds a little like the kind of day Isaiah talked about when swords will be beaten into plowshares and lions will lie down with lambs. It sounds like the kind of day worth working toward, doesn’t it? And it sounds a lot like the vision of Prison Fellowship.

As I think about the artists who will roll up their sleeves in the renovated studio space of a former prison, I wonder if I could call some of the men and women reading this commentary today to join me in a different kind of artistic endeavor. As Vincent Van Gogh once said, “Christ is more of an artist than the artists; He works in the living spirit and the living flesh; He makes men instead of statues.”

We can join Christ in His work if we can cultivate that same vision for restoration. Would you join Christ in the ministry of transformation of souls? If you are interested in joining in this ministry of re-creation of lives, community, and culture, please call us (1-877-322-5527) or visit our website at www.prisonfellowship.org to find out how you can help.

Perhaps together we can begin to put prisons out of business.

Apply today for the 2007 Centurions Program and study Biblical worldview for a year with Chuck Colson! Deadline for applications is November 30.

Learn how you can become a prison volunteer.

Visit the Lorton Arts Foundation website.

Bill Turque, “The Art of Rehabilitation,” Washington Post, 17 September 2006, C01.

Timothy Dwyer, “An Era of the Arts Dawns at Lorton,” Washington Post, 21 September 2006, VA03.

Robert E. Pierre, “In Show of Prisoners’ Artwork, It’s Redemption That’s on Display,” Washington Post, 1 October 2003, C03.

Amber Healy, “From Cell Blocks to Stage Lights,” The Connection, 15 December 2005.

Robert Chesshyre, “The Fine Art of Starting Over,” Observer (London), 17 September 2006.

Candace Rondeaux, “Global Ministry Supports Offenders Here at Home,” Washington Post, 27 August 2006, PW06.

Steve Turner, Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts (InterVarsity, 2001).

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