Or you can Volunteer – Volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds and religious traditions. All volunteers should have the endorsement of their own faith community and should be prepared to undertake training. One of the most distinctive contributions a volunteer can make is by providing a link with the world outside.
How?
- Talk to your church minister— is anyone in your church already going in to prisons?
- Do some research: where are your local prisons located?
- What is your gifting? Follow our Links page to see what resonates with you
- Pray for prisons every day, and if you can:
- Start a prison prayer group in your church
- Attend a prison ministry conference
- Shop! Support prisoner rehabilitation by buying gifts made by prisoners, see our Links page
- Read and broaden your understanding of prisons and what God is doing behind bars. Some great books to start with, all available online: Inside Faith by William Noblett; Porridge & Passion by Jonathan Aitken; To Catch A Thief by Richard Taylor; Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson
- Eat at THE CLINK— a high end restaurant inside a prison run by professionally trained prisoners
Ivor Novello wrote about his time served in Wormwood Scrubs for petrol voucher violation in 1944: “When, sometimes, a drama or music company comes from outside, the players little know how much good they are doing, or more and more would go and render such service. There is fine work for them here amongst the casualties on the battlefield of Life: men wounded by faults and by crime and for whom the only cure in an understanding of humanity. The more they can be made to feel that they are not outcasts and moral lepers, the better hope of their recovery…… these touches of brightness, these glimpses of outside, of the life lived by those who have freedom, mean more than is realised by most people.”
