Faith and feathers: Both sustain Ted Youngblood as director of missions

No one seemed to mind that Ted Youngblood, a self-proclaimed details man, took 10 minutes to tune his guitar and check microphones. 
   
Ten minutes of a life sentence isn’t too much to ask or too high a price to pay for the show that followed.
   
Close your eyes too long and it might as well be Hank Williams up on stage as Youngblood’s 1958 Gibson becomes completely submissive to the task at hand — praising the Lord. 
   
Refrains of “I Saw The Light” swirl around the roof beams of the Bullock County Correctional Facility chapel, not strong enough for the “free-world people” outside to hear but plenty loud for the angels.
   
The memories of the Auburn juke joints and fraternity parties where Youngblood’s fingers earned him Troy State University tuition in the 1960s have mostly faded, but the same guitar-melting talent — 50 years worth — can still be heard every Thursday night in the southern part of the state. 
   
Though not proud of his honky-tonk past, the clapping once-cuffed hands and soaring once-broken spirits bear witness that those days served him well.
   
For 40 or more minutes every Thursday night, Youngblood, director of missions for Bullock-Centennial Baptist Association, leads more than 50 eager inmates of the county correctional facility in Union Springs in worship. 
   
Next comes the preaching and the praying. It’s been that way for six years. 
   
Youngblood is one of the few bivocational directors of an Alabama Baptist association and has been since 1999. 
   
Regarding how he was picked for the job, “Men came looking for me,” he explained. “I believe God sent them.”  
   
Though wearing the distinction of prison chaplain, Youngblood isn’t officially a man of the cloth but of feathers — he owns and operates a chicken farm outside of Union Springs. 
   
“I kind of practice my sermons on them,” Youngblood said of his poultry. 
   
“I walk up and down each of the chicken houses eight or 10 times a day, and I kind of talk to them and try things out. But I found out they’re Methodists when it comes to baptism — they don’t like getting dunked.”
   
But they do like laying eggs. In addition to his association duties, Youngblood processes 6 million eggs a year.
   
“I hate to say this, I mean, I know the president of the United States is a very busy man, and he does a lot of great things, but I am busier than him. I know I am,” he said jokingly.
   
Though there is a strong emphasis on ministering to Bullock County’s Hispanic community — a house on Youngblood’s farm provides temporary shelter to a family of Hispanic refugees from the hurricane-ravaged Mississippi coast — the majority of the Christian work that occupies him and the Baptists of Bullock County is largely prison-oriented. 
   
The prison came to the county in 1987, and within a few years’ time, Bullock-Centennial Association — the smallest association in the entire Southern Baptist Convention, according to Youngblood — added a chapel at the prison built from the salvaged remnants of an old school building.
   
Inside the chapel’s brick walls, the 60-year-old chicken farmer has all the righteous charisma of a young Billy Graham, a sincerity of Christian commitment found only in jailhouse religion. 
   
“If you love Jesus, shout ‘Amen,’” Youngblood thunders to the crowd of inmates.
   
“Amen!”
   
“If you know Who holds your future — say ‘Amen.’”
   
“Amen!”
   
“If this chapel is your island of heaven in this five acres of hell — say ‘Amen.’”
   
“Amen!”
   
“If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have anything,” said Earl, an inmate. “That’s a fact.” 
   
Each December, men and women from each of the association’s nine churches prepare and deliver care packages to the inmates containing snacks and personal-­hygiene items — most importantly, deodorant, Youngblood said. 
   
“This is a poor prison. You can’t buy deodorant if you’re indigent,” he said. “I have known of a situation where a guy who is real mean … is behind someone who is poor and who might be smelling. I’ve known for the guy behind him to just slap him right there and say, ‘Now don’t come back here smelling.’     Now we give them that deodorant because it’s so basic, so guttural, so deep-down-in-the-ditches Christian.”
   
It is in those ditches that Youngblood thrives.
   
“They’ll come up to me and say, ‘We don’t deserve this.’ They say, ‘We never knew that anybody like you would come along and give us, you know, this package,’ and it just breaks their heart,” Youngblood said. “It’s just the most moving thing, and you know that the Holy Spirit is dealing with those people when that sort of thing is going on, you see.”
   
He continued, “We’ve learned that that is how to get to their hearts, to show them you care and that you don’t want anything in return and that you’re doing it because you love God. When they realize that you’re doing it because you love God and it causes you then to love them, then that, like I said, it’s worth more than a thousand sermons from Billy Graham. Now that’s a good story.” 
   
If the Lord owns the souls of those men, then Youngblood, for an hour and a half each week, is in every sense their manager, the curator for Christ in the museum of crime known as Alabama state prison. 
   
His concern for the people of the prison is far too genuine a thing for a photograph to truly capture — were cameras even allowed inside.