Baptists move forward with sixth prison chapel

Alabama Baptists want to reach the state’s prisoners for Christ. And March 14 they gained another avenue as they broke ground for a sixth prison chapel.
   
Located in Elmore County, completion of the first phase of the project is scheduled for August.
   
“We’ve got over a thousand (inmates) who have life without parole,” said Ray Baker, director of chaplaincy evangelism with the State Board of Missions. “They will never walk the streets again.”
   
Baker said others will never have a chance to attend regular church services again because they are on death row.
   
He said the only chance the inmates have for ever knowing any kind of freedom again is through a relationship with Christ. Without [chapels], he said inmates will be in prison forever because they will go to hell.
   
Baker said each prison where a chapel has been built has created “faith-based dormitories.”
   
“It’s like a church group having their own housing unit,” he said.
   
Those living in the units commit to not using profanity, drugs or violent behavior. Failure to behave will result in removal from the unit, according to Baker.
   
He said inmates have volunteered to help with the construction.
   
Similar facilities are also located at Red Eagle Honor Farm, Montgomery; Bullock County Correctional Facility, Union Springs; Donaldson Correctional Facility, West Jefferson County; Staton Correctional Facility, Elmore County; and J.O. Davis Correctional Facility, Ardmore.
   
Michael Haley, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, pointed to the importance the chapels can have in inmate’s lives, quoting from Isaiah. He noted Isaiah was a prophet in Judah when God’s people were being destroyed by Assyrians.
   
“This is a graphic picture, especially when we look around us at these dormitories which are filled with God’s people who have been destroyed by the Assyrians of greed, lust, murder, drugs and alcohol,” Haley said.
   
He said Isaiah 61 paints a picture of inmates who have been destroyed by the Assyrians and how their lives can be turned around through the Lord.
   
Haley also referred to Zechariah 9, where he said the prophet predicts the restoration of God’s people.
   
“If we really believe that God made these people who live in this prison, then we also have to believe that God can restore them if they will turn to them,” he said.
   
Haley said it is important to believe God will take the ground where the chapel will be located and transform it into “a gushing fountain of His truth and His love.
   
“And we have to believe that God will take these prisoners of hopelessness and turn them into prisoners of hope,” he said.