Changing the World  by  Chuck Colson

While updating and revising The Body, a book that calls Christians to a deeper commitment to the Church, my colleague Ellen Vaughn and I came across a keen observation by John Calvin that speaks volumes today. The great reformer said that wherever the marks of the Church are evident--preaching the Word, the sacraments, and church discipline--inevitably, the surrounding culture will be changed. That's crucial for Christians to remember today when so many feel beleaguered and helpless against the onslaught of secular relativism on the one hand and the threat of terrorism and militant Islam on the other. I sense that a bunker mentality is setting in. People seem to be saying, "Why worry about the world? Let's just get ready for Jesus to return." This is wrong. Sure, these are tough times, but that's all the more reason for the Church boldly to be the Church. And Calvin's maxim is true; I've seen it at work in the toughest places in our society--inside cold and barren prisons like Newton, Iowa.

It was on a gray December day two years ago that I first visited Newton for the dedication of our second InnerChange Freedom Initiative program. I must confess, I wasn't expecting much. The IFI participants had only been together for a couple of months--not enough time, I thought, for them to bond into a group and really come alive. Besides, this was the Corn Belt, not the Bible Belt.

Was I ever wrong! When the gates to the compound swung open, excited men swarmed around. I was greeted like a long-lost brother. Before the dedication service, I met with the men in a cell block, challenging them to murmurs of "amen." When I finished, instead of applauding, they jumped to their feet, thrust their Bibles in the air, and chanted together, "This is my Bible." They lifted their Bibles a second time: "It is a lamp unto my feet." They continued in a great festal chant, verse after verse from the Psalms. I looked out over 200 men on fire for God and thought, I could march these guys right out of here and storm the gates of Hell.

How could this have happened in two months? These men, after all, came from many different prisons. At least half were unbelievers when they arrived. The IFI staff explained that when the Christian inmates arrived, they began to meet for prayer regularly. They prayed for the rest of the prison. As new inmates arrived, they were witnessed to and invited into Bible study. The Christians didn't just stay in their own shell, they reached out to others. The same thing happened in the IFI programs in Texas and Kansas, and it's now happening in the IFI program in Minnesota. But the proof is in the statistics. The Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council recently released a study: The two-year recidivism rate among inmates who completed the Texas program is 8 percent, compared with 22 percent among inmates screened for the program but who didn't participate, and compared with 67 percent among Texas inmates generally. As I write, the University of Pennsylvania is readying a similar study. The evidence is indisputable: The Church behind the prison walls is transforming the surrounding culture.   
There's a lesson here for the rest of us. Christians are shamefully casual about the instrument God ordained to carry on the work of His earthly kingdom. We pick and choose where we worship and then behave like spectators, not participants. Not to commit ourselves wholly to being and building the Church is a flagrant disregard of our biblical trust. This is why 68 percent of Americans say there's no such thing as absolute truth. As the culture sinks deeper and deeper into the morass, we blissfully put on our skits and sing our happy clappies. When we get serious and become the Church we're supposed to be--worshipping, praying, studying the Word, disciplining, and then evangelizing and defending Christian truth--our culture will be transformed. If it can happen in the prisons where people come from the most hopeless backgrounds imaginable--if we can create a community of joy and excitement and peace behind bars--we can do it anywhere.