Inside Story
To Tell the Old, Old Story
Helping prisoners hide God’s Word in their hearts
By Rebecca K. Grosenbach
There he sat, the Bible open on top of his head, tears running down his face onto the ground.
“Are you okay?” Navigator Paul Krueger asked the man through the prison yard fence.
“I can’t read this book,” he responded without looking up. “Someone said it was God talking to me, but I can’t hear Him.”
This broke Paul’s heart and captured his attention. As director of The Navigators’ Prison Discipleship Ministries, he knew something would have to change. At that moment a quest began: Is there anything we can do for someone who can’t read?
For the six years he’s been with
the prison ministry, Paul’s focus has been to provide discipleship
training materials for inmates and those who teach them. He has seen
countless lives changed as the message of Jesus’ redemption is allowed
to take hold of people’s hearts.Recently, however, Paul has learned that 70 percent of America’s prisoners are functionally illiterate. He could produce the finest materials for the church behind bars, but they would have limited affect if only 30 percent of his audience could use them. So Paul reevaluated his approach.
“Jesus said faith comes by hearing and hearing—real spiritual hearing—by the Word of God,” Paul says. “And how did Jesus teach? He taught with stories.”
That realization, coupled with the low literacy rate among inmates and declining literacy trend in America in general, prompted Paul to investigate “orality.”
“Oral learning is more than just not using printed materials in our teaching,” he says. “Oral learners don’t want you to give them the story using ‘points a, b, and c.’ They learn by hearing the whole story, repeating it back to you and coming up with their own applications.”
As Paul’s quest to help prisoners hear from God progressed, it was at an international missions convention that he heard for the first time about a solar-powered device that can be loaded with up to 160 hours of recorded information. That gave Paul an idea: to load recorders with Scripture, Bible stories, application questions, and memory verses.
Paul and fellow Navigator Chuck Broughton prepared a series of lessons and had them recorded. “We needed a place to test the lessons, where I could work with the same set of guys over a long period of time,” Paul recalls. “I also needed a place sympathetic to spiritual things.” One place met the criteria: Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
Angola’s warden is Burl Cain, a devout Christian. Among the prison’s 5,000-plus residents there are 28 inmate-run churches and an onsite Bible school.
With the warden’s blessing, Paul and Chuck spent
a week earlier this year on the 18,000-acre Angola prison grounds. They
stayed in a guesthouse, ate meals with the staff, and taught classes to
inmates eight hours a day.The first thing the inmates did was listen to an 80-minute summary of the entire Bible. Paul says, “One 58-year old man told me, ‘I stopped reading the Bible because it was too hard. After hearing this, I know why I need Jesus.’ ”
Paul and Chuck learned that reading a story didn’t have as much impact as telling the story in a natural way. But they were still faithful to the Word. “We review the stories until we’re sure they can repeat them accurately,” Paul says.
They used a variety of methods to help the men remember the stories. “I told the story of the prodigal son using motions,” Paul says. He pulled out his pockets to indicate the son had run out of money. He even snorted like a pig to illustrate the son eating with the hogs. “They loved that,” Paul says.
To help the men memorize verses, they used symbols rather than words. The word “God” was represented by a triangle, for the trinity. A heart meant “love.”
“We are teaching them not just to hide a verse in their hearts but put the whole story into their lives,” Paul says.
Not only have orality methods revolutionized Paul’s approach to prison ministry, they’ve changed the way he teaches across the board. “That week in Angola changed my whole approach—with any audience,” he says. “When I’ve found something this good, why would I use old tools?”
More about Prison Discipleship Ministries.
For more on oral discipleship, visit International Orality Network.
