i’ve said before that when i’ve been to the prisons, i’ve come away with this pervasive, inexplicable sense of hope. i didn’t have that yesterday. i spent the afternoon in the marlborough unit of port phillip prison – this is a maximum security unit for inmates with psych illnesses and intellectual disabilities. i left despairing.…
off to port phillip maximum security prison this afternoon, to worship with the men there… we are sinners… we are not only sinners we are weak… we are not only weak we fail… we are not always failures we have destroyed… also we have loved you, God, do not limit us to the stories by…
one of the challenges with thinking about worship in a prison community is the difficulty in being multisensory, when there is so little that can be taken into the prisons. One of the very few things that we can take in is posters. In a previous life, I wrote for Seasons of the Spirit Christian…
of course, it’s becoming patently obvious that my visits to the prison are far more transforming for me than for the prisoners. Which isn’t surprising at all. Jesus seemed to indicate that we might encounter him in the prisoner. i heard the best theology of baptism i’ve heard for a long time, on Monday, from…
i spent today visiting the Fulham Prison in eastern Victoria – a medium security prison for male offenders. part of this project is to work in the prison system, creating opportunities for worship that takes seriously the relationship between the Gospel and the culture and context of prison (you can read more about this here).…
i spent yesterday with uniting church prison chaplains from around Victoria. they have a retreat every couple of months, and i joined them to talk about worship within a prison setting. This is part of an ongoing set of work that i began talking about here. It’s started to take on bigger dimensions, as these…
i’ve spent most of today in the women’s maximum security prison in melbourne. i was asked by the prison chaplain to go to worship, because she thought that maybe we could do some alternative worship there together this year. i’ve spent the last year telling people that alternative worship is not about style – that…
