By Debbie Olujobi

Evangelism is mandatory in Christendom. We are called to spread the good news of the gospel. I have personally held the opinion that the greatest evangelist is the one whose life and general demeanour does all the preaching. Evangelism is humility, generosity, gentility of spirit, charity and empathy. Words are meaningless when acts run contrary.

It has been my experience that kindness is the greatest preacher; showing love speaks louder than any words or even quotes we can spout. Being shy and self conscious made street evangelism a tad difficult for me. Being squeamish also meant I couldn’t do the hospital rounds as I tend to pass out at the sight of blood but it turns out I was a bit bold as I totally fell in love with prison ministration. I won’t lie and say I wasn’t scared the first time but I got over my fear and found meaning in ministrations that lacked half heartedness and spiritual arrogance thats very common among the so called “Free”.

When life brings you down on your knees, you get a new and clearer perspective. Worship has a new dimension to those who have no one on their side anymore but God. Most people in prison find out the hard way that life moves on, family move on, friends will soon forget. Prison either breaks you or shapes you. You harden to survive or you find the elixir of faith and discover hope. Hope that someday when the gates open, you are the one leaving. I have always thought that grace is the separator between the dead and the living, the convict and the free, the rich and the poor. Our lives, circumstances and happenstances sometimes spin out of our control and without the intervention of grace we would all without exception be consumed. Our greed, lust, rage consume us and they can very easily pave the way that lead to captivity of soul, body and spirit.

Hope is a word much bandied and I am sure we all use it many times a day. My favourite definition of it is “to cherish a desire with anticipation” or “to desire with expectation of obtainment”. Hope always has an expectation. It’s not always reasonable and may be totally undeserved but it is always fuelled by a very strong desire or faith. We wish for something and put all our faith in obtaining our desire sometimes against all reasonable expectation.

Hope attains new status when the stakes are all or nothing and I saw that in action this past week. The one rule I observe in ministration is to never ask what people did; it only brings condemnation and judgement and I believe incarceration is judgement enough. With that mind set, I have come to see inmates as friends, I see them more than I see some family members. I enjoy spirited praise and prayer sessions and their commitment to worship is a joy to behold.

I learnt a few lessons in prison ministry, the first being that anger or, should I say rage, has put many decent people in jail. We have all at one time reached a stage of provocation when we thought we didn’t care for the consequences; so did a lot of prisoners! In prison, you will have all the time in the world to care about the consequences you damned. You wake up in the morning to exercise or body search, you do chores and move around the same perimeter till lockdown at dusk. You share a room with people you can’t afford to trust, there is no privacy or vanity and let’s not forget you lose all the comforts.

In prison you are a number and the society decides if you are boxed or erased. It is the nature of man to adapt  for survival’s sake and most people do. I find myself encouraged by the smiles and easy affection of my incarcerated friends. I wish them liberty, we pray about it all the time. I can’t stop myself from warning the young and carefree that there are consequences for fast living and recklessness. I sometimes wish parents would take their older children to the prisons to see young adults on death row or even serving life sentences to drum some caution into them!

So back to my experience this past week. I was on my way out of the female prison when I noticed a new addition to the blackboard on the wall. Three “CC”s (Condemned Criminals) had been added and I had enquired when and why. To those who don’t understand the implication, that means sentenced to death. The reality is that most people in prison are awaiting trial and where bail is denied they can spend several years till judgement is pronounced. It took the wind out of my sails to learn one of my young friends was among the newly condemned and I had to be encouraged from giving in to despair.

She had been playing the drums during worship as usual and had shown no indication of any devastation during ministration just some minutes before. I was even more surprised to learn she had decided to earn her master’s degree from the open University even after that judgement and her attitude gave me a deeper dimension of the miracle that is Hope.

She has decided to put her fate in God’s hands and abide in hope.  And she is not just saying it, she is living it. Other prisoners are encouraged by her abiding faith and they are also hopeful. Hope is God’s gift to us all, its not a preserve of any class or even religion, its like the air; essential and free. We need it in every situation and circumstance most especially when its against all reasonable expectation.