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Building Church Behind the Walls
Richard Prince
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eBook - ePub
Building Church Behind the Walls
Richard Prince
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About This Book
Building Church Behind the Walls is written as a guidebook to developing churches inside prisons. This book lines out the steps to effectively lay foundations for a true church within the walls of a prison and leads the reader in a step-by-step process of partnering with Jesus in establishing kingdom centers behind the walls.
Few individuals stop to consider the impact that prisoners could have on this world. These are men and women of passion and knowledge in the Word of God. Many have spent a long time growing in their faith, giving themselves to study of the Word, and service in the kingdom of God.
In this book, you will learn the importance of developing a church behind the walls. You will learn how to lay proper foundations, step over obstacles that are unique to prisons, and ultimately, how to mine out the kingdom recourses in the recently released individuals that may come to your church.
Because the foundational elements of a church are the same, whether in or out of prison, this book will serve as a great informative guide for any minister. Written in a simple conversational tone, Building Church Behind the Walls is an easy read that is packed with powerful information. As you read it, you will find creative ways to become intentional in the development of any ministry and ways to bring your leaders into greater acceleration in their calling.
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Église chrétienneChapter 2
Laying Foundations
Before any ekklesia can be functional, there must be foundations laid. I am not going to go into a scriptural thesis on the need for foundation laying. I will assume that you will know the importance and the biblical charge to lay foundations. I will also assume that you know that it requires the apostolic and prophetic offices of the fivefold ministry to do so correctly. There are many great teachings on this point available, and for the sake of time, I will simply ask that if you do not know this foundational truth that you get under some good teaching on the subject.
The question here is not if foundation laying is needed but rather how do we lay proper foundations for an ekklesia behind prison walls? The first step in laying foundations starts with the commitment on behalf of the minister and ministry. Sadly, there are so many ministries that start out like gangbusters in prison ministry, but they do not stand the test of time. In all my time in prison, I can think of two or three ministries that were there when I arrived and were there when I left five and a half years later. This creates a problem that seriously inhibits your ability to lay any true foundations. This has also made it extremely hard for other ministries to come in and build on those foundations if any have been laid. The truth is that there are no quick pop-up models for ekklesia behind prison walls.
If you are involved with a ministry that has been doing prison ministry for a long time, then this is not an obstacle you will have to overcome. You will have to determine on a personal level whether prison ministry is a feel-good service for you or an actual call of God on your life to which you are committed. Only when that issue is settled can true foundation laying begin. Get in and dig in. If you are apostolic or prophetic in your office, then as you start to see an ekklesia taking root and becoming established, you will be looking to take more ground in other facilities. You will move more into your role of an apostle over the ekklesia in that facility. Paul was a true apostle. Look at his example of how he started churches and interacted with them after they were established. It will look the same; it will look different.
Content matters
If we are going to effectively build an ekklesia, we need to understand that one of the hindrances in prison ministry revolves around content. A lot of prison ministries are nothing more than scalp hunters. They come into the prison system believing that most of the inmates who come to the services are poor lost souls who desperately need a savior. Their message is a salvation message preached over and over and over. They desperately try to get large numbers of conversions, and when those numbers drop then so does their desire to continue prison ministry. It is true that there are a few individuals who will wander into a service who are lost and looking for a savior and who have not yet been introduced to Him. There is a need for a salvation message, but speaking as a former inmate, I can tell you that many individuals who come into a service are believers, and some of them are extremely knowledgeable in the Scriptures. Some of them know way more than you do and have been walking with Jesus for several years.
The reality of an average group of individuals in any given service is like that on the streets. You will have people that are well versed and extremely mature in their faith, others who have knowledge but no revelation, some baby Christians who are struggling to grow in the Lord, and some who do not know Christ at all. There are a couple of added groups to this list that can make your ministry interesting; those are the ones that only come to get out of the cell, pass contraband, and talk with their friends, and then you will have those of other beliefs who will simply come to be a disruption. I almost forgot that you will also have a wide variety of denominational backgrounds to contend with as well.
So with this crazy mix of unique individuals, what should your content be to lay proper foundations? The Gospel of Jesus Christ. No, I did not contradict myself. It is time for the body of Christ to start grasping the totality of the gospel message. We tend to think when we hear someone say the gospel that what they are referring to is a salvation message or a message that is geared to get someone to make a decision for Christ. Although the good news of Jesus was that salvation is available for all who believe, there was so much more involved. For starters, we know that He went around saying, “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (Matthew 4:17).
I will not go into depth on what all that simple statement means, but just a little understanding is that it was a call to change the way we were thinking and acting and come into alignment with kingdom actions and kingdom thinking. This was being revealed to us through Jesus as He walked on this earth, and a relationship with Him continues to reveal these practices and principles and protocols as we study His word and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. Such practices and protocols include how to build and function as a true ekklesia.
The gospel message is about kingdom living and kingdom norms. It’s how we effectively function as kingdom citizens. The good news is that we are not bound to wallow around in this earth being blinded by the kingdom of darkness, but that God has delivered us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love.
He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son. (Colossians 1:13)
If we are going to lay true foundations for an ekklesia behind prison walls, we need to be growing kingdom citizens, not being head hunters. We always afford opportunity for individuals to come into a relationship with the Lord, but we have to know our audience. Understand that there are individuals in prison as inmates who are desperately looking for a true church and are gifted and called to help an ekklesia form and grow. Teach, train, disciple. If prison is a mission field, then it should be thought of as a mission field in the true sense of the word. Every missionary should be focused on seeing the lost come to Christ, but they are also called to develop a work and see it grow. The latter part of that sentence is rarely given consideration when it comes to prison ministry.
When Paul went on his missionary journeys, he did not just go to get a bunch of people saved. He went to build ekklesiae. The establishment of those kingdom ekklesia was strategic. It was for a purpose. Paul had the blueprints of God’s strategic plan, and he set out to build what God had showed him. Every location where Paul laid foundations was extremely important to the advancement of the kingdom of God. Have you thought about how strategic ekklesia in the prisons across this nation and around the world might be? Have you allowed your mind to consider how powerful these ekklesiae would be if properly developed and fully functional? I discussed some of this earlier.
One of the biggest issues that needs to be overcome in this area for us to truly start building an ekklesia behind prison walls is our own bias and stereotypes that we have towards offenders. Some of them are not without cause, and I am not promoting an approach that removes accountability, but we can be the greatest source of our own ineffectiveness at times. If we are going to truly establish ekklesiae in prison, we must come to the place where we honestly believe in the redemptive power of the cross and accept that these individuals can be, should be, and some already have been redeemed. If that becomes a reality, then it will help us to start believing that ekklesia in prison is not only worth the work it takes to develop but also needed.
This kind of thinking in the mind of prison ministers will help direct and drive the content of the messages that they deliver. It will change the atmosphere of the services, and it will cause a shift in the facilities in which we minister. I have seen it happen. As I shared before, when I first started to go into the prison to preach, my preaching was focused on getting your life right, identity, and coming to Jesus. Nothing innately wrong with those messages, but as I started to settle into ministry, I started to see the real need of these individuals. I started to understand that what I was sharing may have been good, but it was not building anything. It was not creating an impact on the facility to the level I believed it should. I started to dig into the why, and soon, the Holy Spirit started to open my eyes.
What was missing in these facilities was true ekklesia. I started to teach more than preach. I started teaching on the fivefold ministry. I started to teach on ekklesia structure and function. I started to spot the giftings and the calling of God in the lives of the men, and I started to get creative with ways in which these men could start flowing in the gifts that the Holy Spirit had placed within them. Within a short time, we had a worship team of inmates who would open the service and lead the men in worship.
Before long, others started to step out and pray for healing for others, and God was moving. People were getting healed during the worship time of the service. Prayer groups were formed with powerful intercessors shifting spiritual atmospheres both within and outside of the prison. Some of the more mature believers had been holding Bible studies during the week. I started making room for those who were called to teach and preach to fill the pulpit during the service as I sat with them and received from the brothers. Prophets were prophesying; evangelists were winning the lost and bringing them into the services. Within a couple years after starting to make a shift in ministry, we were having church, and the ekklesia in that prison started to come alive.
This should be the norm not the exception. I am sure that there are places and prisons that have this same thing taking place. I know that many facilities have some of these things happening. The point here though is that it is time to bring it into alignment with how a true ekklesia functions, and to do that, we need to be mindful of the content of what we are sharing. In every prison that I have seen or been housed, in there has always been a group of believers that are hungry for a true church. Once you start moving in this direction, you will see these brothers or sisters in the Lord come alive with fresh fire and passion. As you give purpose to that passion, you will start to see a transformation that will begin to sweep through the facility. Light will be shining from a previously dark place.
Do you know them?
Another step in laying foundations is knowing the individuals you minister to. I am not talking about personally knowing their life history or the crime for which they are imprisoned. That information may or may not come, and most facilities and DOC systems discourage that kind of intimate knowledge and sharing. I am talking about knowing them on a spiritual level.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. (2 Corinthians 5:16)
Being able to see the gifts and callings in the lives of the incarcerated is extremely important. Are you prophesying over the inmates? Are you using spiritual discernment as you minister to them? Are you paying attention to the move of the Holy Spirit within a service?
It is easy to get into a routine and a rut with prison ministry. Sometimes ministers stop looking for the gifts and calling of God in the lives of these individuals because we never know how long they will be there. The faces change so often and sometimes so rapidly that it is truly a task to keep track of it all. This can cause us to slip into autopilot and create a show-up-to-preach-and-hope-it-helps-someone attitude. We need to be focused on this aspect of our ministry. We need to be seeing and hearing from God so clearly that at every service, we can sense when God is putting His hand on an individual. It is because some of these individuals are only going to be with us for a short period of time that we need to be speaking over their lives and into their lives regularly. This is an area where I need a lot more work.
The constant movement of individuals throughout the system and the constant fluctuation of individuals coming to services is an obstacle that is unique to prison. Churches always have people who come and go. They always have a fluctuation in their congregations but never to the level that you experience in prison. I will cover this more in the section on overcoming obstacles, but for now, let me say that to lay foundations, you need to start discerning people who come into your service and start speaking over them what God is showing you.
The reason it is important to know these individuals is because in every ekklesia, there needs to be a functioning fivefold ministry of fathers who are fathering sons for the development and growth into their own fivefold offices. You are not Jesus. You do not have all fivefold gifting and functionality in you or on you. You are not meant to be a one-man band in the prison. You need to know who the apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, and evangelists are, and you need to start growing them, fathering them, and using them in ministry. You need to know who the intercessors are and who the worshipers are. You need to know who the administrators are and who the background workers are. You will never develop a true ekklesia or lay proper foundations without knowing the body.
Make room
After you start to know who is coming to your services and you start to see the giftings of God in them, ...