Video Transcript: Healing Communities

We look at people who are incarcerated as inferior. We define them in light of the worst thing they've ever done. We make them subhuman. We don't want to consider them as being children of God. We don't want to consider them as being created in the image of God. There's a stigma our society has given to being incarcerated. And even though Paul was incarcerated for righteousness’ sake, were he incarcerated today, he would bear the same stigma, and he would have to struggle with the gap between expectation and experience piled on by the stigmatization of society and the church. All you have planned for me, and nothing can separate me from your love when there's so much more still worth fighting for. Now I'm moving by faith, and not by sight, towards victory by the power of your night, you're scraping out my path, opening every door. I am your child.

If you can't deal with inmates, you can't tell the story of John the Baptist. If you can't deal with inmates, you can't talk about Paul, because when he wrote, 'I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,' he was an inmate. Now, a good Christian brother came up to correct me one day, and he said, You know, there's a difference between people who do the wrong things and get locked up and people that you mentioned. We're talking about people who do the wrong things. I said, You mean like the man who was walking down the street one day and saw one of his friends being beaten up by his boss. He jumped in the middle and killed the boss. He said, Yeah, that's the kind of guy you locked up. I said, you just locked up Moses! And we can't run from your grace, because your grace is chasing me down, chasing me chasing me down. Oh, goodness and down is running we believe in the power. We believe in the power and I went to jail a boy and I came out a man. And I'm not breaking my arm patting myself on the back. I'm telling you that there are hundreds, 1000s of other nameless, faceless men like me who've gone through the prison industrial complex that have come out on the other side knowing that they can't just go back to their community and act like its business as usual. We have to go back to the community and talk to the young men there and tell them that there's another way.