It has already started. In Oregon.
Ten years ago a small effort to train inmate believers with simple biblical tools began inside the Texas prison system. It became the only disciple-making movement inside a prison system in North America. It has now reached the Willamette Valley — and the first churches have already been commissioned inside an Oregon county jail.
Kristen
A mother, booked into an Oregon jail after a tragedy. One free-world volunteer with clergy visitation started meeting with her. Nobody had a program for her.
She is an artist. She began drawing bookmarks — her own art on one side, Scripture and the prayer requests of other women on the other. One she wrote in Korean, for a cellmate who needed to read it in her own language.
She has since been released into general population and put on a work crew, which nobody expected. Women walk up to her and ask her to teach them the Bible. Officers call into her room in the middle of the day just to talk. Today Kristen is discipling fifteen people across four Oregon institutions — from inside.
The Church of Conviction
A Catholic MMA fighter named John Mance sat in an Oregon county jail with calluses on his knees from praying on concrete. No program found him. One free-world coach requested his name, listened to him, and handed him a vision.
Within months he had five or six men meeting with him regularly. Then guards who had not allowed a baptism in years carried huge totes of water into the yard and let him baptize fifteen men, pouring it over each one. He commissioned them as a church — the Church of Conviction.
When he was sentenced and transferred, the men asked what they would do without him. He had already trained his successor. He is planting again where he is now.
Jonathan
The man now leading that church had no church background and no prior knowledge of Scripture. None. He is not a former pastor or a jailhouse Bible teacher.
He has a Bible, a coach on the outside, and the Holy Spirit. Everything he is given is completely fresh to him, and the pattern is simple enough to hand on: here it is, obey it, share it. He is doing phenomenally.
This is what succession inside the walls looks like. The leader transfers and the church does not die, because the church was never built on the outsider in the first place.
The chain nobody outside can see
One of the women discipled inside an Oregon jail was moved to the state's women's prison. She did not stop. She is making disciples there now, and doing it well.
One of the women she reached reads her Bible in Korean. Others are being walked with in Spanish. That is three generations deep, inside two facilities, in three languages — and not one link in that chain required a free-world volunteer to be in the room.
Men are moving the same way. We are already walking with people in five or six Oregon institutions, and every transfer has turned into a second location instead of a loss.
The largest prison in Texas
Once one of the most dangerous maximum-security prisons in the country — where officers feared for their lives and inmates begged not to be transferred — God began to move.
Within two years, more than 1,000 men were baptized and over 300 inmate-led churches were meeting weekly in nearly every living area of the prison.
A song at 5:00 a.m.
Two trained inmate believers began sharing the Gospel on Texas Death Row. Today six inmate-led churches meet daily, and over 150 of the roughly 200 men there are Spirit-filled believers.
Every morning at 5:00 a.m., the sound of Amazing Grace echoes through the chambers. Of the last 30 men executed, 25 died as Spirit-filled disciple makers.
The walls inside the walls come down first.
Eight years in solitary. Fifteen years in a white supremacist gang, with meth fed to him through corrupt officers to keep him loyal. At the end of his hope he tied a bedsheet to hang himself, and God spoke to him audibly.
He was discipled alone in that cell by the Holy Spirit for weeks before anyone reached him. He renounced the gang, came out of solitary, and became the top trainer in the whole facility — over a thousand men trained since. Released two years ago, he has already multiplied four generations of churches in the Dallas area, and his family is back together.
He is not the exception. In one unit, a man whose body was covered in tattoos of racial hatred stepped into the water, and the man baptizing him was a Black brother who had led him to Christ. When he came up, the two embraced.
The president of a major white supremacist gang — twenty-six years in that chair — now trains alongside Black and Latino leaders in the same room. Men from the Bloods, the Crips, the Aryan Brotherhood, and cartel routes out of Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela are being trained side by side to make disciples. Prisons are the most segregated ground in America, and this is the Gospel cutting straight across it.
Every baptism in these photographs happened because someone already inside made a disciple. The outsider's job was to equip him — and then get out of his way.
This is the whole model, in one picture
There is a John Mance in every jail and prison in Oregon.
There is a Kristen in every one of them too. They are already inside. They are already praying. They may not know Jesus yet. What is missing is not a program, a curriculum, or a budget — it is outsiders willing to go find them and then get out of their way. Twelve state prisons. Thirty-four county jails. We can name the handful where this has started. Nobody can yet name a laborer for the rest.
We believe the men and women coming out of these cells will become some of the most fruitful disciple makers of the lost — and the best developers of leaders — of anyone in North America.
Why we go deep inside the wallsThis is not sentiment. People who have already lost everything are often ready to bear fruit thirty, sixty and a hundredfold. Inside, a man can get the training in three to seven years that takes ten to thirty on the outside, because he has nothing competing for his attention. One man from the Texas work got his passport six months after fifteen years inside and left for Nepal. Another has planted four generations of churches in two years. They come out as workers for the harvest — in our neighborhoods and among the nations.
