PRACTICE RESURRECTION: Churches As Local Prisoner Reentry Communities In An Age of Mass Incarceration

“I’m studying how churches in America—in an age of mass incarceration and its undoing—are recovering a resurrection imagination, ethic and practice: by becoming reentry communities, building relationships of mutual transformation with releasing prisoners in their communities. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Chris Hoke Underground Ministries Contact Me

About this pastoral study project

Over the last decade, an awareness of the humanitarian crisis of mass incarceration in America has grown. But emptying these mass tombs will take more than legislation that releases bodies from prison gates. These two million men and women will need to be embraced, reintegrated into the communities that relegated them to the “social death” of incarceration in America. They will need people to help roll away the stones of the many civic barriers to reentry. We need a movement of local resurrection communities.

In Washington State, there are roughly the same amount of churches as incarcerated men and women. What if every church were to be in reentry relationship alongside one person releasing from prison into their local community?

At Underground Ministries, we have been building a program, One Parish One Prisoner, pairing congregations with releasing individuals, guiding them through the journey of becoming effective reentry communities—where maybe the church can “practice resurrection” and recover its original mystery and mission in this post-church age. In this PSP, I hope to step away from full-time program management to more deeply study how these reentry relationships can be viable expressions—and mutual experiences—of Christian resurrection in this generation.