In spring 1974, as Watergate prosecutors began to issue indictments against Nixon administration aides and the US House of Representatives considered whether the President himself should be impeached, the prominent liberal writer Richard Goodwin visited Washington, DC. The mood was sombre, but even in the “grimmest gathering of political sophisticates,” he noted, a laugh could still be guaranteed. One only had to refer to the religious conversion of Charles Colson, former special counsel to the President. Colson was widely associated with the partisan excesses of the Nixon administration and with its efforts – some of them illegal – to undermine and stigmatize any sources of opposition to the presidential will. The Wall Street Journal had referred to him as “Nixon's hatchet man.”Footnote 1 As prosecutors closed in, however, Colson announced he had accepted Jesus Christ into his life. Goodwin observed that the story “was sure to touch off an instant competition of Buchwald-style one-liners, tinged, nevertheless, by a slight underglow of professional appreciation for what appears to me a supreme con.”Footnote 2
Doubts about the authenticity of Colson's conversion never entirely disappeared. Within a couple of years, after Colson had served a seven-month prison term, published his conversion narrative, Born Again, and established a ministry directed towards prison inmates, many liberal commentators were more prepared to accept that the change in him was genuine.Footnote 3 But others continued to wonder, pointing both to the manner in which the publicity surrounding his conversion and ministry had enabled Colson to return with remarkable, as if almost plotted, facility to a position at the centre of national events, and to the continuous seam of authoritarianism that ran through his work for Richard Nixon into his crusade to make prison inmates obedient to God.Footnote 4
On the evidence of the handwritten daily journals and letters that he wrote while in prison, Colson's conversion was not a slick career-rebranding device. The journals and letters are introspective in tone, sometimes expressive of the joys of faith, at other times riddled with spiritual doubt. Colson's decision after release to engage in a prison ministry is not just explicable in terms of his own realization – articulated throughout the journals – that many prison inmates were victims of injustice and that, in environments so profoundly marked by bitterness and despair, secular rehabilitative regimes simply could not succeed; it also was consistent with an increased evangelical interest in prisons as a mission field during the 1970s, stimulated in particular by the violent suppression of the Attica prison riot in September 1971.Footnote 5 Moreover, that Colson was able to open up prisons to his ministry owed as much to autonomous changes in official attitudes and policies as to his own will to secure a public redemption through the evidence of works. Formally incorporated in August 1976 as Prison Fellowship (PF), Colson's ministry offered prison authorities an alternative to secular rehabilitative programmes that were widely judged to have failed and, in its emphasis upon peer-led inmate fellowship groups supported by community volunteers, to a costly, inflexible system of permanent correctional chaplains that could not meet the increasingly diverse religious needs of the American prison population.Footnote 6
The aim of this article is make more explicable the subsequent stage in the development of Colson's prison ministry: the establishment of Prison Fellowship International (PFI) and its expansion to the point where, claiming more than 125 national affiliates across all six inhabited continents, it has become one of the largest para-church organizations in world evangelicalism.Footnote 7 Colson's ambitions for international outreach emerged very early. During a European trip in spring 1977, he discovered “an enormous interest in our prison work.” He instructed PF's executive vice president Gordon Loux to maintain a list of “key contacts” and “prison groups” overseas and send them PF newsletters, brochures, speeches and other material: “I think we can have an impact on prison problems all around the world.”Footnote 8 But Colson also cast the expansion of PF's activities abroad as counterintuitive, because the organization faced more than enough challenges establishing its presence at home. That the expansion occurred was due to the will of God and the demands of others. It was, he told the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, “a remarkable story of God's sovereignty; we had no intention of spreading our ministry abroad until we had our act together in this country, but the hunger is so great there, as it is here, that we could do no less than dutifully respond.”Footnote 9
PFI owed its origins to the existence of transnational evangelical networks in which Americans were prominent but not dominant and to a crisis of penology, experienced across a number of countries other than just the United States, which attracted the interest and concern of religious bodies as well as secular public-policy advocates. The organization was also profoundly shaped by the creative tension between Colson's empire-building instincts and the insistence of PFI affiliates that they have a voice in the direction of the organization and that an American model would not always translate successfully to other national contexts. Indeed, PF's encounter with the world had notable feedback effects on Colson's own religious ideas and on the practices of his original ministry back in the USA. Albeit within definite limits, PF became more ecumenical in its philosophy, and it also embraced initiatives that had first been trialled overseas, including the establishment of separate prison wings run according to a Christian ethos and the use of Alpha course materials in its programmes. In his account of the American evangelical humanitarian agency World Vision, David King has traced a shift in the organization's ethos since the 1960s from a sectarian emphasis on mission to a “practical ecumenism” involving collaboration with non-evangelical and often secular partners in service of goals that focussed increasingly on relief and development.Footnote 10 A similar story can be told with respect to Prison Fellowship: this article offers a case study of the transactional manner in which American evangelicals, operating in global settings, exercised leadership in the final decades of the twentieth century.
CONTEXT A: NETWORKS AND INTERLOCUTORS
Prison Fellowship International did not spring entirely spontaneously from Colson's sudden realization, following his European visit in 1977, that his prison ministry might have an overseas as well as a domestic market. PF's first overseas affiliate – Prison Christian Fellowship (PCF), launched in London in spring 1979, and eventually renamed Prison Fellowship England and Wales (PFEW) – initially developed out of a transatlantic network of Christian political and business leaders fostered and maintained by the Fellowship Foundation, based at Fellowship House in Washington. The fellowship – originally titled International Christian Leadership (ICL) – had played a key role in establishing the architecture of American civil religion in the postwar period, organizing the annual presidential prayer breakfast and more generally making the introductions that sustained a grand interlocking web of lay Bible study and prayer groups across elite circles in the United States.Footnote 11 As swiftly as Colson had found Christ, the fellowship found Colson, brought him into contact with other evangelicals in Washington and exhibited him as a symbol of the potential for national spiritual and political reconciliation after the Watergate scandal.Footnote 12 Colson's first venture in prison ministry – a series of two-week seminars for inmate “disciples” who then returned to their institutions to seed and direct their own groups of Christian prisoners – was hosted at Fellowship House and loosely modelled on the fellowship's own cellular organizational structure.Footnote 13
In the 1950s, the fellowship – as ICL – made a number of attempts to establish an effective leadership group in Britain, as Frank Buchman's Moral Rearmament had managed to do in the interwar period.Footnote 14 These efforts were unsuccessful: its representatives lacked the right connections, Moral Rearmament was still working the same market, and the national Anglican establishment remained confident that its institutional genius and resources were equal to the challenges confronting the church.Footnote 15 By the late 1960s, however, there were new opportunities. Following Buchman's death in 1961, Moral Rearmament fell into decline, the Church of England found that it was rapidly losing its influence on public culture and private behaviour, and ICL positioned itself as a channel through which men of stature could explore the salience of Christian principles to the leading issues of the day.Footnote 16 In 1966, ICL sponsored a four-day conference in Cambridge on the theme “A Relevant Faith amidst Rapid Change”; British speakers included the Bishop of Coventry; George Thomas, minister of state for Wales; and the industrialist Viscount Caldecote; alongside ICL delegates from the United States, Africa and Europe.Footnote 17 Thereafter, ICL's British leadership began to organize regular weekend conferences at Windsor Castle, as well as a series of talks and discussions under the collective pseudonym Christian Responsibility in Public Affairs.Footnote 18 An ICL dinner at the House of Lords in October 1967 attracted acceptances from the Archbishop of York; Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls; Lord Longford, Leader of the House of Lords; and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party.Footnote 19
By the early 1970s, then, ICL was enjoying considerable success in its efforts to access the higher echelons of the British establishment. It was also keen to draw promising young men – the political, religious and business leaders of tomorrow – into its activities.Footnote 20 One of these was Michael Alison, who had followed a classic establishment route through Eton, Oxford, the Coldstream Guards and time at a merchant bank before his election as a Conservative MP in 1964. After the Conservative victory in the 1970 general election, Alison became Parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department of Health and Social Services. More unusually, perhaps, he was a devout Anglican evangelical who had studied theology at Cambridge and pursued ordination prior to deciding on a career in politics.Footnote 21 In 1967, Alison – who was highly regarded by the Archbishop of York – had been invited to become a lay member of the Church of England's Council on Evangelism, an effort to reverse the discernible drift away from the church at the grass roots and to “make more effective the Church's representation of the Gospel today.”Footnote 22 Alison regularly participated in ICL meetings and those organized under the banner of Christian Responsibility in Public Affairs.Footnote 23 In April 1972, he chaired a private dinner for younger men nominated by the ICL leadership in Britain at which the speaker was Sir William Armstrong, head of the home civil service.Footnote 24 Following the February 1974 election, when the Conservatives were replaced by Labour as the party of government, Alison was invited by Douglas Coe, who led the Fellowship Foundation, to visit the United States in order “to gain a picture of what we are involved in.”Footnote 25 During that trip, Alison was introduced to Charles Colson, attending a fellowship breakfast in Boston at which Colson, recently indicted, presented his personal confession of faith. Upon his return to London, Alison wrote to Colson on the theme of belonging to God, a letter Colson credited with influencing him to plead guilty to a felony charge – because he could not claim fully to belong to God while he was still trying to defend his past pre-conversion conduct in court.Footnote 26 Alison sent another letter during Colson's time in prison; Colson described it as “wonderful.”Footnote 27 Alison and his wife, Sylvia Mary, continued to be involved with Fellowship Foundation activities throughout the 1970s, serving as members of the fellowship's core British leadership group.Footnote 28 Whilst her husband helped to establish a Christian fellowship in the Houses of Parliament, Sylvia Mary Alison organized a prayer and Bible study circle for Parliamentary wives, inspired by the example of the fellowship's Congressional wives group in Washington.Footnote 29
It was Sylvia Mary Alison, more than her husband and as much as Charles Colson, who adopted and nurtured the notion that, as with the broader fellowship, Colson's prison ministry might also travel across the Atlantic and contribute to the efforts of British evangelicals to bring a rapidly secularizing country back to God. Her efforts in England and Wales would represent the first critical proof of concept for the internationalization of PF's work. Colson had stayed with the Alisons during a visit to Britain in June 1976 to promote Born Again. When he talked to them about his plans for his prison ministry, Sylvia Mary, who had worked as a therapist in a psychiatric hospital prior to her marriage and who, consistent with her attendance at Holy Trinity, Brompton, the principal pioneer church for charismatic Christianity in Britain, herself frequently experienced prophetic visions, was stirred and intrigued.Footnote 30 In early 1977, she visited Colson and his wife in Washington, and was present in the PF office when news came through that the Federal Bureau of Prisons would increase the ministry's access to federal correctional institutions. She shared with PF staff a prophecy “that God was going to bring revival to the prisons throughout the world.”Footnote 31 The following year, on another trip to the United States, Sylvia Mary attended a PF seminar conducted at a women's prison in California. It was, she recalled, “an amazing experience for me. I felt so at home there, totally identified with the prisoners and also at one with the visiting team.”Footnote 32
In April 1978, during a Fellowship Foundation weekend at Windsor Castle, Sylvia Mary discussed Colson's ministry with Lord Longford, a former government minister well known for his interest in prisoner welfare and penal reform. The next day, Longford informed her that he had received some divine instruction: God had told him that Sylvia Mary should take the lead in setting up Prison Fellowship in England.Footnote 33 Over the summer, Longford and the Alisons met regularly to pray for further guidance. They decided to hold a conference in November, inviting participation from professions, groups and institutions with an interest in the spiritual well-being of prisoners, and they arranged for Colson to speak about the inspiration behind his ministry and about some of its programmes.Footnote 34 Around two hundred people attended.Footnote 35 Through the autumn and winter, Colson and Loux – who were by now also considering the possibility of establishing PF affiliates in Canada and Australia – channelled advice to Sylvia Mary about how to incorporate a separate British trust.Footnote 36 Prison Christian Fellowship was formally launched in March 1979.Footnote 37
CONTEXT B: JOHN STOTT, LAUSANNE AND ANGLICAN EVANGELICALISM
Sylvia Mary Alison had first committed her life to God whilst attending Billy Graham's Harringay Crusade in 1954.Footnote 38 Involvement with the Fellowship Foundation eventually brought the Alisons into Graham's outer circle, and they corresponded warmly with him from the 1970s onwards.Footnote 39 Colson himself had recognized the value of having Graham endorse his ministry in American prisons and he also considered the structure of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association a potential model for PF to follow as it moved to expand overseas.Footnote 40 But by the late 1970s the mode of American evangelicalism that Graham represented did not seem as possessed of integrity and at ease with modernity as it had to European audiences two decades before. Graham's 1966 Earls Court crusade had failed to stimulate popular interest on the same scale as Harringay; his own reputation was then damaged by his reluctance to offer a firm public judgement on the conduct of his friend Richard Nixon during the Watergate affair; and increasingly, in the form of the New Christian Right, there arose other, angrier evangelical accents which threatened to interfere with the frictionless reception of Graham's ministry overseas.Footnote 41
It was not his association with Graham, then, that generated an audience for Colson's concept of prison ministry beyond the immediate base of those associated with the Fellowship Foundation. Colson's own personal story was, of course, compelling; more directly and willingly than Graham, he could speak to a chastening experience of corruptive power, eliding his personal fate with the broader reputation of the United States after Vietnam and Watergate, in a manner that made his evangelical message more marketable to religious centrists and progressives in Britain and mainland Europe. Moreover, Colson's ambitions for his ministry – to bring individual inmates to Christ, to materially aid their rehabilitation, and, more broadly, to advance the intellectual case for reducing the role of prisons in the struggle against crime – were compatible with the indigenous Anglican evangelical tradition, cerebral and socially concerned, embodied by John Stott, president of the Evangelical Alliance. The influence of this tradition was already discernible in the distinctive form taken by the British version of the fellowship, which prioritized the discussion of ideas and the application of Christian principles to public policy far more than did the American movement.Footnote 42 In his first correspondence with Colson, Michael Alison, who himself had been led to God by Stott in 1948, offered a more theologically informed perspective on Colson's situation than Colson had hitherto received from any of his fellowship associates in Washington, where questions of faith and purpose tended to be addressed in less stringent terms.Footnote 43 Colson – who would emerge late in the decade as a trenchant critic of the intellectual emptiness of much American conversion discourse – replied that no letter he had received over the past year “impressed me quite as much as yours.”Footnote 44
As Colson began his sentence, John Stott's vision of an intellectually sound, socially concerned evangelicalism, advanced in Britain through his own writings and the National Evangelical Congress at Keele in 1967, received the endorsement of the world evangelical movement in the form of the Lausanne Covenant.Footnote 45 In 1977, Stott and Alison collaborated on a proposal for “A Community of Christian Concern,” loosely modelled on the Fellowship Foundation but based in London – a proposal that was eventually to mature into the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.Footnote 46 Having read Born Again, Stott invited Colson to contribute to the 1979 London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity, which had as their theme “Crime and the Responsible Community.”Footnote 47 Rigorously peer-reviewed prior to delivery (Colson was encouraged to acquaint himself with the more recent scholarly literature on the origins of crime), the lectures allowed Colson to present himself to audiences in Britain and beyond as an established authority on the subject of criminal justice as well as a committed evangelist.Footnote 48 In time, Colson's thinking would become more formalistic and severe, asserting that the human systems of justice that sent men and women to prison ultimately descended from divinely ordained natural law.Footnote 49 But throughout the first decade of his ministry, Colson reflected earnestly on the role that could be played by penal reform in reducing the prison population – through the offer of a “second chance” to first offenders prior to incarceration and through restorative justice, probation or community treatment programmes – as well as on the importance of convincing those who continued to be incarcerated of their need to return to God.Footnote 50 In the attention he gave to both public policy and the souls of “unreached peoples” languishing in prison, Colson seemed to symbolize the promise of an American evangelicalism recharged with the spirit of Lausanne. His lectures were the best-attended of the series, with over seven hundred people present.Footnote 51 Around the same time, Colson was also interviewed by Third Way, a British evangelical magazine which aimed to offer a perspective on current issues informed by the Lausanne Covenant.Footnote 52 When Colson's second book, Life Sentence, was published in Britain towards the end of the year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan – a liberal evangelical himself – noted with approval the challenge to Christian conscience presented by the author's account of his often difficult early ventures in prison ministry: “This is a brave book. Let those who read it with an attitude of cool detachment ask themselves what they are doing for those in our prisons – and at what personal cost.”Footnote 53
CONTEXT C: THE TRANSNATIONAL PENAL CRISIS
The internationalization of Colson's prison ministry, then, was dependent upon his access to social capital accumulated by the Fellowship Foundation in Britain as well as in the USA. It was also conditioned by the broad consonance between his personal conviction that systemic social pathologies were unlikely to be solved simply through a chain of individual religious conversions and the new emphasis upon a holistic gospel (soul-winning and social-political involvement) within world evangelicalism. But international audiences were also receptive to Colson's message because the specific mission field in which he worked – prisons – was attracting increasingly anxious attention across Western societies. From the mid-1970s onwards, the sociologist David Garland has argued, Britain and the United States experienced a common “crisis in penal modernism,” marked by new doubts about whether prisons were actually achieving the objective of inmate rehabilitation – and, furthermore, whether the reform of inmate character was a legitimate liberal policy goal.Footnote 54 In these two countries – and elsewhere – prison riots and other forms of inmate protest prompted closer scrutiny of the conditions that prevailed in penal institutions, disclosing the pervasiveness of problems like overcrowding, understaffing and outmoded physical estate. It was evident that prisons currently lacked the resources necessary to sustain the liberal hope that they might function successfully as nurseries of inmate reform. In Britain, just as Colson delivered his London lectures and prepared for the publication of Life Sentence, a year-long official inquiry into the state of the nation's prison services was coming to the conclusion that, through the use of noncustodial sentences, courts needed to reduce the numbers of offenders sent to prison. The inquiry also recommended that the penal system itself redirect its efforts towards providing inmates with an experience of “positive custody,” to include more purposive work and education opportunities and, where possible, greater engagement with the local communities outside each prison.Footnote 55
Until the 1970s, the British penal system was pretty much a closed world. A narrow, elite circle of Home Office officials, though consulting periodically with academic experts and reputable reform groups like the Howard League, maintained a tight control over the inputs into policy deliberations. Aside from the access granted to official boards of visitors, individual prisons remained largely veiled from public view; they issued no welcome to lay outsiders who wished to scrutinize their work or to the concept of community involvement in their programmes.Footnote 56 As in the United States, however, the growing public perception of dysfunction in the prison system broadened the range of actors and agencies seeking to have an influence on penal policy and practice.Footnote 57 Prominent amongst those contributing to the renewed public debate about the state of Britain's prisons and the broader purpose of imprisonment were the churches. In 1977, after three years of study, a working party for the Church of England's Board of Social Responsibility produced a report entitled Prisons and Prisoners in England Today which concluded that, as there could be no confidence in its rehabilitative function, imprisonment should be used “as sparingly as possible.” The report also encouraged members of the church to explore ways of involving themselves in community service and post-custodial programmes.Footnote 58
However, on the question of how the churches might engage with incarcerated offenders, the report settled for the status quo, with the chaplain of each prison identified as the necessary “focal point” of contact between its inmates and the local Christian community.Footnote 59 Sceptics observed that many prison chaplains had become institutionalized and were not always anxious to augment their in-house religious programming with contributions from outside. If the church was to fulfil its responsibilities to prison inmates, chaplains would need themselves to be “encouraged” to accept the involvement of Christian volunteers in their work. “It is too easy to say that the Church has Prison Chaplains, and leave it at that,” asserted one extended critique of the report. “Too often, one hears of the Prison Chaplain being totally isolated from local clergy and congregations.”Footnote 60 The Prison Chaplaincy Service (PCS) itself acknowledged the difficulties it faced in trying to meet the spiritual needs of inmates out of its own resources. In July 1979, Canon Leslie Lloyd Rees, the chaplain general of prisons, noted that its complement of full-time chaplains was significantly under strength; moreover, he was finding it “increasingly difficult” to recruit suitably qualified candidates to positions in the service.Footnote 61
This was a propitious time, then, for Charles Colson and Sylvia Mary Alison to be initiating a religious outreach directed towards British prisons. Within the UK prison system, and also without, confidence in the ability of secular programmes to reform and rehabilitate prisoners was fading fast. The crisis had also stimulated some serious reflection within religious circles about whether the churches as institutions were doing enough to minister to prison inmates and aid their release from the vicious cycle of crime and punishment. Did the surrogate medium of the prison chaplaincy satisfactorily discharge the duty of every Christian to love and care for the sinner? It was amid the vitalizing eddies of such debates that Prison Christian Fellowship began to plant its roots.
DEVOLUTION OR US DOMINANCE? THE GOVERNANCE OF PRISON FELLOWSHIP INTERNATIONAL
In some respects, by the end of the 1970s, Charles Colson was operating in the mode of the classic American evangelical entrepreneurs – Billy Graham, Bill Bright, Bob Pierce – of a generation before. He saw no reason why what was happening in Britain, with the creation of PCF, could not also happen elsewhere. Christians in Canada, Jordan, Spain and some African states had already been in contact about the possibility of setting up their own national Prison Fellowship ministries.Footnote 62 PF's annual report for 1978 observed that the organization would soon need to consider the establishment of an international arm “to assist other countries.”Footnote 63 Colson's own instinct – consistent with the model offered by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which closely managed its international offices from its headquarters in Minneapolis – was to remain in firm charge of the process of overseas expansion. As PF moved to establish a ministry in Australia, Colson told Loux that he wanted to ensure “that we keep our control” by setting specific targets for what its Australian representatives were to accomplish.Footnote 64
Yet Colson also seems to have intuited that, in this post-Lausanne era, adopting the older model of directive leadership from the American metropole would limit the enthusiasm for his ministry amongst precisely the pools of indigenous evangelicals that Prison Fellowship needed most to attract: those with the initiative and talent to convert their nation's prisons into a fertile mission field. Moreover, there were wide national variations in how penal systems worked and in their arrangements for meeting the religious needs of prison inmates. Returning from the exploratory London conference organized by Sylvia Mary Alison in November 1978, Colson observed that he had been “very careful not to appear to be trying to export some American solution to the British problem.”Footnote 65 In contrast to the United States, British courts had not recently issued a sequence of judgements upholding the right of prisoners to access religious services of their choice.Footnote 66 Where Prison Fellowship USA had been able to bypass the existing system of correctional chaplains and minister to prisoners directly, PCF first would have to negotiate general terms of access with the Prison Chaplaincy Service and then elicit the cooperation of individual prison chaplains for each of its local initiatives. The British experience revealed that no single ministry model would fit all national contexts. This was also the conviction of Sylvia Mary Alison. She argued that, if PF was to extend its operations beyond the United States and Britain, it had to do so in a manner that respected the autonomy and creativity of its international affiliates. Colson could be invited, as he had been for the London conference, to share his vision as a new national ministry began to form, but then he should go home, leaving the task of organization and decisions about specific programmes to those on the ground. Alison told Colson that God “has many flowers in His garden: they are all flowers, but look different. Don't let's worry about national variations, as long as Jesus is Head.”Footnote 67
The structure of Prison Fellowship International, established in late autumn 1979, evolved to strike a balance between Colson's instinct for control and Sylvia Mary Alison's faith in the genius of localism. The organization – comprising thirty-two national ministries by 1987 – was jointly owned by its affiliates, with American influence on its board restricted to five members out of twelve.Footnote 68 This framework, Alison believed, would “allow individual countries to develop their own way, and not have an American pattern imposed on them.”Footnote 69 However, in order to guard against the creation of counterfeit PF operations or the takeover of existing affiliates by unbiblical forces (such as adherents of the Unification Church), national ministries were required to apply to PFI for charter status and share with it their member mailing lists and financial accounts.Footnote 70 PFI also created a fund to help seed new ministries, offering grants for PF start-ups in the Third World, loans for everywhere else. The expectation was that chartered affiliates, once they were firmly established, would donate 5 percent of their annual budgets back to PFI, affirming the principle of common ownership.
There was the rub, however. Even as their overall numbers increased, individual national affiliates rarely had enough money left over from resourcing their own operations to contribute substantially to the central PFI budget. In 1983, PFI received over $358,750 in support from Prison Fellowship USA; donations from other member countries totalled only $6,272.Footnote 71 In Britain, PCF itself led a hand-to-mouth financial existence for much of the early 1980s, some months barely covering payroll; the crisis was only eased in 1983 by a $10,000 loan from its American cousin and a sizable grant award from the Jerusalem Trust.Footnote 72 On the occasions in subsequent years when Sylvia Mary Alison would complain to Colson that he was treating PFI in a proprietorial fashion, he would deny the charge but also point out that all but a fraction of the organization's income had been raised in the United States, often from donors he knew personally: “So I do feel a great responsibility to insure that the ministry is well managed and well run.”Footnote 73
PFI's financial flows, then, tended to be centrifugal, but there is evidence of a genuine two-way exchange in programme ideas between the American core and its family of affiliates. Some key ministry initiatives such as in-prison seminars or the Sycamore Tree Project, a restorative-justice programme, were pioneered in the US and then journeyed outwards through the PFI network to be implemented in other countries. In the opposite direction, having been conceived in Britain, travelled the Alpha course, including a variant – Prison Alpha – specifically tailored for use in penal settings. The original Alpha course was developed at Holy Trinity, Brompton, where the Alisons were regular worshippers.Footnote 74 Holy Trinity's team of pastors started taking the course into British prisons in 1994.Footnote 75 A couple of years later, Prison Fellowship England and Wales decided to train its own volunteers to deliver Prison Alpha, with the two ministries beginning a close collaboration.Footnote 76 In 1999, having been endorsed by Governor George W. Bush, Prison Alpha was piloted in a Texas state penitentiary; at its international convocation in Bulgaria, PFI adopted the course for worldwide use.Footnote 77 Around the same time, in another Texas prison, Prison Fellowship USA was trialling the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), under which the organization was handed responsibility for running a separate residential unit with the aim of reforming prisoners through conversion to Christianity and preparing them for release by means of a curriculum focussed jointly on practical skills and the inculcation of biblical values. This too had been modelled on practices developed outside the USA. The once-common concept of a correctional facility run on religious principles had been revived in Brazil during the 1980s by the Association for the Protection and Assistance of the Convicted (APAC), which was invited by the Brazilian government to administer the Humaitá prison in São José dos Campos.Footnote 78 The low recidivism rates reported for former inmates of Humaitá, and those of other jails with APAC programmes, attracted international attention.Footnote 79 In 1989, APAC changed its name to Prison Fellowship Brazil and became a charter member of PFI.Footnote 80 Prison Fellowship USA started exploring the possibility of bringing the APAC model to the United States.Footnote 81 By 2002, it had succeeded in opening IFI prison units in four American states: Texas, Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota.Footnote 82
NEGOTIATING ACCESS: THE ECUMENICAL STYLE OF PRISON FELLOWSHIP INTERNATIONAL
In its early efforts to gain access to the federal prison system in the United States, PF's distinct identity as an evangelical Protestant organization presented no particular difficulty, because evangelical inmates were held to have the same right to religious provision as inmates belonging to other churches and faiths. But that identity, had it remained emphatic and hard-edged, would have proved incompatible with the goal of expanding PF's ministry overseas. In England and Wales, the Prison Chaplaincy Service, which functioned as both the gatekeeper to and monopoly supplier of religious programming for inmates, was initially very suspicious of Prison Christian Fellowship. The service had no objection to the Alisons and their associates organizing local groups to pray for the work of the chaplains in each prison, but PCF volunteers would not be permitted to minister to inmates directly.Footnote 83 The British chaplains were probably aware that Colson had publically called into question the effectiveness of their counterparts in American prisons and that Prison Fellowship USA had also cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Prisons in experiments with religious provision that did away with the role of the state-employed chaplain, relying instead on a pastor appointed and funded by PF itself.Footnote 84 As the Bishop of Southampton, who had pastoral responsibility for the chaplaincy service, informed the Archbishop of Canterbury, there were “certain worries” about PCF: “They are a high-powered evangelical group who are not content with being a prayer fellowship and want to do other things.”Footnote 85 Colson himself acknowledged the British chaplains’ concerns “that we might get in their way or take over their responsibilities.”Footnote 86
Rather than cast their disquiet in terms of their own self-interest, however, the chaplains made a stand on the principle of religious inclusiveness: they demanded assurances that PCF's mission to evangelize British prisons would conform to the spirit of Christian ecumenism and cooperation that characterized the PCS's own provision of religious services to inmates.Footnote 87 Although PCF already had a Catholic, Lord Longford, on its board of trustees – it pointedly added another in 1981 – it took over three years of diligent courtship, the appointment of a more sympathetic chaplain-general, and some personal representations from the Alisons to the Archbishop of Canterbury before the denominational heads of the PCS were prepared to attest to the fellowship's “ecumenical character” and commend its work to chaplains and governors “as a supplement to the ministry of the Church in Prisons and Youth Custody.”Footnote 88 Only then were PCF volunteers afforded access to prisons in England and Wales, with a programme of in-prison seminars beginning in 1984.Footnote 89
PFI's embrace of an ecumenical identity was the necessary cost of it doing business in many religious markets overseas, but, through the 1980s and 1990s, the organization seems to have embraced that identity with ever-increasing enthusiasm. In 1983, following the establishment of Prison Fellowship Northern Ireland, Belfast was chosen as the site for PFI's first major international symposium. The theme, “Reconciliation … in Christ,” pointed towards both the traditional goal of evangelism (bringing the individual into the Kingdom of God) and PFI's comprehension of its ministry's broader purpose: to transcend and heal the wounds in the Body of Christ by engaging different social and religious groups in the common enterprise of sharing God's love with those in prison. Even in Belfast, a city toxic with sectarian tensions, a start had been made. PFI declared, “we have witnessed in our symposium and in the community around us God's reconciling power at work as people from diverse racial, cultural, social and church backgrounds have spoken to each other with integrity and listened to each other with respect.”Footnote 90 In 1990, in the wake of PFI's expansion into Latin America and as the fall of the Berlin Wall opened up a whole new mission field in Eastern Europe, Charles Colson observed that one of the organization's key tasks was “to bring together people” from different traditions – Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox – “to be one Fellowship with a Christian background.” Indeed, he went on, “I do not know any other ministry that has busied itself so much about it than our Prison Fellowship.”Footnote 91 Colson himself was an enthusiastic participant in the consultations between evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics that produced the 1994 statement “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The statement argued for the reduction and elimination of conflict between the two communities and a new era of cooperation in the Christianization of the world: “we are called and we are resolved to explore patterns of working and witnessing together in order to advance the one mission of Christ.”Footnote 92
Prison Fellowship USA suffered a significant attrition in financial support from conservative Protestant donors as a result of Colson's commitment to a mission goal in common with the Catholic Church. But its attachment to ecumenism had always been discretionary and contextual. In the United States, there was little honouring of the principle in relation to non-Christian faiths; the organization saw itself as engaged in a hostile competition with the Nation of Islam as both ministries worked to claim the spiritual allegiance of African American prisoners.Footnote 93 Its approach to the reform of individual inmates, moreover, remained distinctly evangelical, emphasizing conversion, atonement and the moral value of Bible study.Footnote 94 In his own later writings, Colson sought to etch a bold, sharp boundary between evangelical Christianity and a mainstream culture that he regarded as morally chaotic and spiritually adrift by describing the necessary, systematic elements of a biblical worldview.Footnote 95 For as long as Prison Fellowship USA operated in an open marketplace of prison religion, its particularism offended no constitutional principles, but the creation of IFI units under the aegis of the state made such methods more contentious. In 2006, a federal judge ruled that the InnerChange programme in Iowa was “pervasively sectarian” and that, because the alternative therapeutic programmes available to inmates were not nearly as well resourced, the Iowa Department of Corrections was thus involved in an unconstitutional endorsement of Prison Fellowship USA's evangelical system of thought.Footnote 96 Across the Atlantic, Prison Fellowship England and Wales was looking to run its own experiment with the APAC model, but there was strong debate internally about the aims of such a unit: should it simply try to introduce inmate participants to the principles of a Christian life in the ecumenical manner of Prison Alpha, or actually emulate InnerChange in seeking early conversion, genuine repentance and the inculcation of an evangelical Christian mindset by the end of the programme?Footnote 97 At a time when the Prison Chaplaincy Service was extending its definition of ecumenism to ensure that it treated Christian and non-Christian faith traditions with equal respect, the outcome of this debate mattered.Footnote 98 In 2006, after a year of operation, a pilot InnerChange programme established by PFEW at Dartmoor Prison was shut down on the grounds that its content was incompatible with the ethos of a multi-faith chaplaincy. Georgina Wates, PFEW chair, observed that “we don't fit in with the multi-faith agenda. They think we should be teaching a bit of every religion and that what we're teaching offends other faiths. If we teach Jesus is the Son of God, of course it is going to offend people.”Footnote 99
CONCLUSION
The Dartmoor InnerChange experiment failed in part because PFEW had overwritten the principle established by its own founder, Sylvia Mary Alison, that ministry initiatives by PFI affiliates should be sympathetic to local conditions. PFI had not been intended to function as a mechanism for universalizing the American evangelical example. It was itself a product of transatlantic exchange, as Charles Colson's British interlocutors nourished his interest in solutions to crime that integrated conversionism and intelligent policy reform, modulated his message to conform to the post-American spirit of the Lausanne movement, and insisted that the globalization of his ministry would be more securely advanced by devolving the responsibility for growth to national affiliates than by relying on his own personal mastery of the political arts. Moreover, in many regions of the world, official clearance for in-prison programmes and the staffing of an effective ministry were dependent upon Prison Fellowship committing itself to Christian ecumenism and working through indigenous Catholic or Orthodox clerics and lay volunteers. The organization embraced an ecumenical identity with a measure of genuine enthusiasm, Colson asserting that the broader goal of Christianization more faithfully reflected God's purpose on Earth than any effort by evangelicals to remain untainted in their associations. Yet, as the experiences with InnerChange demonstrated, a residual tension persisted: between the principle of self-determination and the appeal of American leadership, between the ethos of inclusiveness and the force of evangelical conviction. InnerChange may have emerged from an engagement with Catholic partners in Latin America, but the model was attractive to Prison Fellowship because it offered an opportunity to expose prison inmates, without pluralist diversions, to a totalizing evangelical vision of what God wanted them to be. Against the evidence of Prison Fellowship's commitment to the devolution of authority and to co-creativity in its relations with global affiliates, the IFI programme told its captive subjects that there was only one righteous way of being in the world.
