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Practice Resurrection—TOGETHER

There are roughly the same amount of men and women in Washington State prisons as there are churches.

What if every church became a local reentry team—a resurrection community—walking alongside just one neighbor leaving the tombs of incarceration?

We seek to equip parishes—faith communities small or large, traditional or rag-tag—in every American town to build supportive pre-release relationships with just one person returning to their community from prison.

We believe this could empty the prison system over time.

Think about it:

A local church community, gathered in the name of forgiveness and resurrection, has everything a releasing person might need to rebuild a new life: trusting friendship and community, pre-release housing searches, rides to appointments, job connections, funds to pay off stranglehold fines and get a driver’s license, hope.

Just as importantly, this relationship would transform every church. Accompanying one person out of the underground reveals the wounds in the wider community—and often uncovers those hidden inside the church as well.

ONE PARISH ONE PRISONER pairs your congregation with someone releasing to your area and guides your 7-person team (including the pastor) through a two-year journey of relationship-building, release planning and holistic reentry support together.

We believe this gets at the roots of mass incarceration today: healing and integrating our communities, where we discover that we need—we belong to—each other.

DAN’S STORY

JOIN ONE PARISH ONE PRISONER:

WHAT IS A PARISH?

For us, it’s a local resurrection community.

Historically, “parish” refers to the neighborhood, the local unit of the wider “church” movement.

We believe the original Greek work for “church”—EKKLESIA—is best translated as movement.

So the One Parish One Prisoner goal isn’t to get returning citizens into worship buildings.

No, our goal is to mobilize a movement of faith communities engaged in personalized reentry support—in every city across the land. If mass incarceration is the mass tombs of our society, where we bury our problems and community members, we see One Parish One Prisoner as a way to “practice resurrection” on a massive scale.

Jesus loved someone in the tombs, his friend Lazarus.

He called the local community to roll away the massive stone barriers, welcome Lazarus back into the land of the living, while removing the grave clothes. How could this not transform everybody involved? Local churches in America can rise to meet the urgent need for post-incarceration reentry solutions.

We can become resurrection communities in an age of mass incarceration.

MUTUAL TRANSFORMATION

We find that, as we exchange letters with someone in a prison cell, drive to a facility for a visit, grow to care about them, laugh with them, know their children, and even encounter some conflict or heartbreak, our own hidden issues come to surface—the very “underground” realms in us that God wants to heal.

In this way, we let go of old ideas of trying to save or fix anyone—that’s God’s mysterious work. Instead, we open ourselves to the heart of Christ savoring a unique community member whom our legal system treated as disposable. We experience together more of God’s kindness that leads us all to fresh repentance. Mutual transformation.

We want to help churches like yours—or parishes in your region—walk through this unforgettable process together.

how do we begin?

First, tell us a little about your church/congregation/community in this brief interest form (you’ve scrolled past a few times). There’s zero commitment. Simply CLICK BELOW to get on our radar and we’ll get in touch with you:

Second, as you await our reply, share this page with others in your congregation. Together, take some time to learn about your next steps by clicking below. In this process of discernment, your community is already “approaching the tombs.” Feel free to pass these details along to your pastor and/or leadership team to jumpstart the conversation.

A New Underground Railroad

In America, roughly 700,000 men and women are released from prison into our communities every year. But without access to new relationships and opportunities, with many barriers to “reentry,” most remain in the “underground” street economy. They eventually get arrested, and sucked back into the prison system, disenfranchised and dead to society.

Michelle Alexander, in her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: Colorblindness In An Age of Mass Incarceration, calls for "a new underground railroad."

Like the mass movement before the collapse of slavery in the South, Alexander says we need a new movement of homes, churches, informal networks within communities to embrace and route people out of captivity today.

This is what we are building, together.