How so?
As I have described it, what I find so powerful about prison ministry is being in a place where the gospel matters.
Outside of the prison, especially in middle-class to upper-class spaces, the gospel is superfluous. Church is something you can take or leave. Faith is optional. Maybe you believe, maybe you don't, but nothing much hangs on the outcome.
A symptom of the gospel not mattering is when faith defaults to consumerism. Our relation to church reduces to likes and dislikes about the worship, the preaching, and the programming. We like this about church and don't like that about church. We prefer this and don't prefer that. Christianity becomes about expressing your consumer preferences.
Another indication that the gospel doesn't matter is over-intellectualizing. The gospel is something you pick apart and intellectually dissect. The gospel is podcast fodder. A new book to read. A Substack essay. A YouTube lecture. The gospel is held at an objective remove and becomes an inert specimen of metaphysical inquiry. You're not a Christian, you're a philosopher, a writer, or a podcaster.
I believe this is why Jesus says it is difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Wealth insulates us from our neediness, vulnerability, and dependency. Wealth keeps us from coming to the end of ourselves. We're cocooned in self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Wealth becomes an existential narcotic. The alarm bells are blaring but we're anesthetized.
In contrast to all this, the gospel matters inside a maximum-security prison. Faith isn't a hobby, a book club, a form of entertainment, or a philosophical inquiry. We aren't sitting at a critical distance. We aren't shopping like consumers. Inside the prison, the gospel is a matter of life and death, the very bread of life, the only power keeping us going. We've come to the end of ourselves and find ourselves in a desperate situation. We hear the sirens blaring, alerting us to the five-alarm fire that is our lives, smoke and flames billowing.
We are the dying, the burning, the drowning. We've come to the end.
And for us, the gospel matters.
