By Jeremy Henderson
Ray Clevenger doesn’t like those cheap little Bibles. He’s not bothered to say it. So Clevenger, retired pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, Heflin, and driving force of the Cleburne County Jail ministry, goes all out. Sometimes he has to scrape — a random $50 from a lady at the McDonalds here, a surprise $1,000 check in the mail there — but he always manages to afford it.
At first the donations went toward Thompson Study Bibles. But Clevenger’s compromised a bit, down to the Scofield Study. It may be a little bit cheaper, he said, but it’s just as good — leather bound, engravable. In addition to underscoring a sense of ownership, that makes it harder for folks to pawn when they get out of jail — no one wants a Bible with someone else’s name on it.
That fact changed the life of one of Cleburne County Jail’s former inmates who received one of those not-so-cheap big Bibles prior to his release. Larry Riddle, director of missions for Cleburne Baptist Association, cites it as just one example of the ministry’s effectiveness.
That inmate “got his Bible over a year ago and I ran into him at McDonalds behind the counter,” Riddle said. “He came out and hugged my neck. He’d been in on a drug charge, got out of jail and did really great for about three weeks … but he started back [on drugs] and sold everything he had. He was down to his shoes and his old shirt and pants and his Bible. He sat there on the floor against the wall on meth for two or three days and finally picked up his Bible. It was all he had left. Nobody had bought it. He read it, got saved and said the Lord had just really turned his life around.”
That, Clevenger said, is what a nice, big Bible can do. He says he’s currently giving away five to seven of them each week. “They’re really making a difference,” he said. “Ol’ Joe Jacks will tell you — what we’re doing has transformed that jail.”
Cleburne County Sheriff Joe Jacks will also tell you he was at first skeptical of the ministry’s potential. “I was a little hesitant trying to set up something like this,” said Jacks, who attends Calvary Baptist. “But it didn’t take long before I saw it was a good thing.”
Jacks said the association’s work, which provides not only Bibles but jailhouse church services and is assisted by congregations across the association, hasn’t just transformed the jail but the whole county.
“My job as sheriff of my county is to … secure my county to make it a safer, better place to live,” he said. “If we can just save one of these people, if we can correct one of these persons that come through here, if we can do that than that has helped me and that has helped my county.”
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