The gospel behind bars
Prison ministry in the Council of the North grounded in the power of grace and transformation
Across the Council of the North, Anglicans are bringing the healing and reconciling presence of Christ to northern prisons.
On a snowy Sunday afternoon in Iqaluit, Captain Cyrus Blanchet makes the drive to Baffin Correctional Centre. “Sometimes it just gets tiresome, dragging myself out there on a cold day, going in there with my bag of hymn books and Bible….”
Still, he goes—and he knows he doesn’t go alone. “The good Lord goes with me and before me,” he says.
In Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Kathleen Stewart leads weekly evening prayer at the Saskatchewan Penitentiary. Music plays an integral part. One particular inmate is put in charge of planning music for the services. Stewart tells the men: “’I’m just here to do ministry with you as best I can and try and work together as a group’—because the hardest thing they have, of course, is to work together.”
Stewart sees a lot of guitars—and hears a lot of country and blues. She says the former Chaplain used to call one of the lead singers “‘the Johnny Cash of the chapel’.”
Blanchet describes an impromptu sing-along at Baffin Correctional: “A fellow said he could play the guitar—actually he was pretty good, and he wanted to sing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’—which isn’t really what I expected from him. But he really knew that one and we all sang that and enjoyed it.”
In between guitar riffs and gospel songs, these ministers weave Anglican worship in several languages, Bible study and personal testimonies. “When I can, I get someone with a guitar, or if not, we still sing, mostly in Inuktitut,” says Blanchet. And we have a Bible reading [from the new Inuktitut Bible] and a message and prayer.”
Parishioners are also involved in Blanchet’s ministry: “A couple of fellows in the Inuktitut congregation come with me from time to time. They’re older, maybe in their 60s. And when they come, there’ll be prayer in Inuktitut—and the people like that because it’s their first language. He also explains: “There’s people in the church who have been in jail, they come out with me sometimes….They don’t like going out there very much. But they do.”
Blanchet says, “There’s lots of tears over the years I’ve been there—there’s Kleenex out in the middle of the table. You know, the subject isn’t even particularly emotional, it’s just reading the Bible or singing a hymn. But it means something to them. Or the Holy Spirit is just convicting them or there’s something spiritual going on there.”
Pastor Martin Carroll ministers at Yukon’s Whitehorse Correctional, a brand new prison he describes as “almost like maximum security—there’s 600 cameras in this place, everything’s electronic keys, they have sensors to track you—it can be intimidating.”
But these barriers are worth getting past in order to get to the heart of ministry.
And this ministry is not limited to within the walls—especially in small, isolated northern communities. Carroll explains: “Some of them I know and have met on the street, so we maintain a relationship if they should happen to be charged and incarcerated.” And then Carroll is there when they’re released: “We had one person who finally came to the end of the line, I counselled him through it.
“He attended some of the church services and seems to be on a little bit of a straight and narrow right now, so we continue to pray with him and talk to him on the street.”
Stewart sums up her prison ministry in Prince Albert in this way: “I’m the Anglican presence for these guys while there’s no one else there at this time. So it’s encouraging to me that it’s a ministry from God, but it’s being done through me.”
A version of this story was first published on www.anglican.ca and is reprinted with permission.
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