Part 3 of a 3-part series exploring a prison ministry at Bibb County Correctional Facility
In the chapel stood a Christmas tree, a festive array of wreaths and garlands, and multicolored lights strung across the railings and the walls. As the hundreds of worshippers quietly filed in, reflective strains from an electric piano filled the room. The worshippers included almost 200 men in khaki prison jumpsuits and a few visitors, or “free world people” in prison parlance.
“This is the day that the Lord has made,” Warden Christopher Gordy of Bibb County Correctional Facility read from Psalm 118 just a few days before Christmas. “We will rejoice and be glad in it.”
With that, the assembled—inmates, visitors, and guards alike—all stood to sing.
The Arrival of the King
The Christmas holidays can be a difficult time for many. Loneliness, loss, and sorrow tend to hit harder this time of year. For men and women in prison who are separated from their families and loved ones by physical and relational distances, the struggle can often be worse.
For this reason, the Christian community at Bibb held two Christmas services in December 2024 for graduates of the Birmingham Theological Seminary prison programs and Unbound216 members, along with their sponsors, faculty, and prison staff. These services used hymns, exhortations, and testimonies to focus on the good news of Jesus’ birth.
Gordy opened the service with a message of gratitude for what the inmates have done, reminding listeners that the faith and hope of the program participants have transformed Bibb prison from the inside out.
“We had a vision to change the culture of Bibb,” he said. “Not through the administration, but from you. We couldn’t do what we’ve done without you and your willingness to participate.”
Noting that a chance at rehabilitation was a gift, Gordy reminded them of the direction their lives could have taken. “[For] some of you, prison saved your life. You were headed in one of two places—here or to the cemetery. But despite your circumstances, you are blessed—you’re better off here than some folks out there are today. Never look at your situation as hopeless.”
Echoing Gordy’s sentiment was Eddie, one of the missionaries to B4.
“Instead of this place being a place of incarceration,” Eddie observed, “this place is now a place of restoration.” He paused to look around at his listeners.
“There are 300 some members in our ranks now. God is so good to us.”
Taking the pulpit for the main sermon was the Rev. E.O. Jackson of Greater New Antioch Baptist Church in Birmingham, who spoke primarily from Philippians 2:14-15. In a message heavy on application, Jackson offered a powerful sermon about the public-facing identity of believers, noting the nature of light to shine in the darkness.
“Jesus is the light,” Jackson preached to loud murmurs and amens from the inmates. “But he wants us to be an extension of his light. This world is dark. There is a great need for light, and you can be those lights to younger men.”
Noting the self-sacrificial nature of candles burning themselves up to provide light, Jackson urged the men to avoid grumbling and to look outwards to those around them in need. “There may be someone down in the valley,” he concluded, “who needs your light to get home.”
Such a message resonated deeply with men for whom the BTS and Unbound216 programs have been lights in their own personal darknesses, and who are now learning to share that light with others.
After the service, area churches, including local PCA churches, partnered with the prison to host a special Christmas lunch in the cafeteria, offering dozens of fresh meals brought in from the outside (a rare treat) and gifts for every inmate present. In conversation at those tables, all differences between inmates and free-world people rapidly disappeared.
Transitioning Out
“There are 106 men in each bay,” chaplain and PCA Teaching Elder Mitch Haubert reminded the inmates in his remarks at the Christmas service. “Each of you represents a family which means there are 106 families in each bay. Think about what it means to leave a legacy: you’re doing this to help you serve and shepherd others, to be the father, husband, or son you need to be. To be the leaders you need to be.”
Such an insight is a sobering reminder that for each one of these men, the goal is not simply a new walk with Christ and a safer place to sleep at night, but restored, renewed relationships with their family and community. Every believer on the inside lives with a unique tension between their two identities, their secular, legal identity as a criminal, and their sacred identity as a new creation in the eyes of God (2 Corinthians 5:17).
For those with more serious charges against them, and as much hostility and suspicion awaiting them on the outside as there ever was on the inside (if not more), the challenges of transition back to public life can be some of the most difficult yet. Job prospects can be frightfully thin for those with felony records, and they return to broken relationships with families and peers in desperate need of mending.
“You might come in as a lone wolf,” Eddie told me,“but over time you realize these people here are your family. You eat, sleep, and bathe with them. But the restoration of your family on the inside drives the need and the desire to reconcile with your family on the outside. People are dying out there. I only have one chance to make it right.”
During my trip to Bibb County Correctional Facility in December, I met two graduates of the BTS program who had recently completed their sentences and moved into transitional housing provided by BTS and Brent Presbyterian Church (PCA). Both Adam and Kenneth attend Brent PCA, a small partner church in the area whose volunteers serve in the ministries inside the prison. After a few weeks of searching upon their release, both men found work in a nearby poultry processing plant, working long hours but grateful to have a steady job on the line. They share a small house that was furnished and renovated by a team of volunteers and partners who wanted these men to feel genuinely at home in their accommodations after years of living in cinder block dorms.
Both Adam and Kenneth acknowledged the difficulties they faced in their reentry, but each of them also shared that God had sustained them through some of the most trying times in their lives on the inside, and that they had no doubt he would continue to do so.
Waiting patiently on God’s provision and timing, Kenneth observed, was key to his hope of reconciliation with his family. But, without his training and spiritual growth in the BTS program, he would have rushed to judgment, made impulsive decisions, and ruined the chances of reuniting with those he loved most.
“Now I just take things one day at a time,” he said, “and I’m at peace with that.”
During his incarceration Adam experienced devastating tragedy: several family members, including two young sons, died in a car accident. He was forced to watch this harrowing news footage on the prison television, with BTS and Unbound216 brothers surrounding him in prayer and consolation as he cried out in grief. But his cries were mixed, he told me, with the recognition that even in the worst pain of his life—the loss of his sons—he could still declare that God was good.
I heard Adam’s same story repeated several times while speaking to inmates—it left a powerful impact on all those who witnessed it that day. But the response was unanimous: that even amid this horror, God was still sovereign, still loving, and still working out his plan of redemption.
“God is either good all of the time or none of the time,” Adam told me, choking up even years after his loss. “And I know which one he is.”
Light in the Darkness
Prisons are a recurring theme in the Bible. God’s people are imprisoned for a variety of reasons, sometimes for their hard-heartedness, other times for their faithfulness to God. Some of Paul’s most powerful letters were written from prison, such as Philippians, where he rejoices in his ability to preach to the entire prison guard, and Ephesians, where he calls himself an ambassador in chains.
But prisons are also deeply metaphorical. According to Scripture, we are imprisoned in our fragile bodies, bound by the shackles of sin, and held captive by spirits of fear and want. Ultimately, our final destination of the grave threatens to imprison us forever. But at every turn in redemptive history, God shows his power to liberate us from sin, fear, and death itself through Christ.
Driving this movement is nothing less than the Word of God itself, which has the power to penetrate every wall, open every door, and break every chain. As Paul wrote to Timothy in one of his final letters, “The word of God will not be bound” (2 Timothy 2:8-9). For the last eight years, the word of God has been sweeping through the bays and dorms of Bibb County Correctional Facility like a mighty wind, clearing out the dust and dirt in the hearts of the men who live there. And, just as God promised, he is making all things new (Revelations 21:5).
This story has been underway for eight years but in other ways, it is just beginning. Everywhere I went in the cell bays, whether walking down the aisles of bunk beds or sitting with inmates in their classrooms, men came up to me and took my hand, thanking me for seeing them, for hearing their stories. They are appreciative of having their experience acknowledged and celebrated.
But my brief mission of telling some of their stories pales in comparison to the brothers’ ongoing, daily mission of caring for others, ministering to the lost, and, in Parker’s words, offering new hope through the gospel.
“We’re here to show guys on the inside that they are someone, and that they’re not forgotten,” he said, “showing them grace like Christ shows us grace.”
Every human attempts to live in isolation from our own Creator. But the transformation from Bloody Bibb to Blessed Bibb demonstrates that there are no obstacles beyond the power of the Searcher of Hearts (Jeremiah 17:10, Romans 8:27).
Bibb reminds us God is at work reclaiming sinners, whether you are in a cell block or a subdivision. BTS students and Unbound 216 participants are a living testimony of God’s ability to reclaim people (and places) from violence, vice, and sin for his own throne.
Ben Morris is a byFaith contributing writer.