Correctional facilities must grapple with unprecedented levels of overcrowding, violence, and suicide, as well as rampant mental illness among inmates. The tightening of budgets and the resulting loss of vocational, educational, and treatment programs pose additional difficulties. In the midst of these struggles, faith-based approaches, led by faith-motivated volunteers and prisoners, are providing the most innovative, holistic, and effective programs available in correctional facilities today.

It’s hard to overstate the current challenges facing the American prison system. Rampant violence, extremely high levels of offender recidivism, mounting taxpayer cost, and difficulty retaining employees, typify recent headlines from the world of American “corrections.” But prisons do little to meaningfully correct offenders’ past transgressions, nor do they deter future offending.
Many American prisons have become so violent that they comprise what Cambridge University prison scholar Alison Liebling describes as “failed state” institutions. In “failed state” institutions, even the most basic levels of safety and control are not provided by authorities. For an example, look no further than the New York Times, which recently reported on the horrifying conditions at Rikers Island, where whole sections of the prison are run by detainees, who fashion make-shift weapons out of the complex’s crumbling buildings. Staff members and detainees have been beaten and stabbed. One detainee reports having been denied food for two days by the gang that controls his unit. Thirteen people have died at Rikers so far this year.

These institutions not only cause more human damage than they prevent, they produce emotionally crippled citizens and elevate the likelihood of reoffending. New research from the nonpartisan Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., moreover, highlights the likelihood of “mass incarceration” becoming a permanent feature of American society.
In the midst of these failures, a new, more successful model of correctional programming is quietly taking hold in the United States. The model draws on innovative work inside some of America’s largest and most violent prison environments. These new approaches are being developed primarily at maximum-security prisons, which have long been under-resourced until lethal violence has boiled over. In the face of this reality, prison administrators have become increasingly open to “outsourcing” rehabilitation programming to religious volunteers. As a result, in an increasingly large number of prisons, religious programming is now the dominant source of inmate rehabilitation.
An Interracial, Ecumenical, Personal Church
For many inmates, religious practice not only provides a momentary escape from prison life. It does something deeper and much more foundational: it helps them redefine and reclaim their lives.
Over the past ten years, as we conducted the research described in our new book, we have had the distinct privilege of sitting with men in prison as they engaged in religious worship. Many of these experiences have taken place in America’s largest maximum-security prisons, including Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Sing Sing (NY), Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman (MS), Darrington Unit Correctional Institution (TX), and Lawtey Correctional Institution (FL), among several others. We have been struck by the reverence, energy, and seriousness with which inmates cultivate a practice of faith.
Perhaps the most striking feature of “church in prison” is the robustly interracial character of the “congregation.” As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out in 1960, American religious practice is nothing if not racially segregated. By necessity, religious worship in prison, however, is both racially integrated and remarkably ecumenical. To witness the sign of the cross and hear a call-and-response during one and the same ceremony—sometimes even from the same practitioner—is not uncommon. For long-time inmate religionists, cross-fertilization of worship becomes a normalized practice, with inmate lifers often referring to themselves as “Bapticostal,” “Catholipalean,” or as one Florida inmate put it, “agnosti-pizza” (“I just come for the pizza”).
Religion in prison is characterized by a relaxed and non-hierarchical openness to various forms of religious practice in a doctrinally neutral space. It is first and foremost preoccupied with the meeting of immediate physical and spiritual needs. Prisoner prayer groups, Bible studies, outside church volunteer groups, yoga practitioners, Buddhist meditation leaders, and many others all combine to create a remarkably elaborate menu of religious options for prisoners. Diverse practitioners and non-believers are welcomed by faithful inmates, who understand themselves to be imperfect seekers. Perfectionism in faith and the performative gestures that often accompany corporate worship are simply not present in prison. By definition, everyone there has fallen.

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We must view false teachers the way God describes them. We must see their teaching as that which can sink a soul into the pits of hell like a reef takes down a cruise ship or oil tanker. We must see the doctrine they teach like sea foam filled with death and decay, knowing that they are fruitless and uprooted, awaiting God’s judgment, and then we should be spurred on to guard our own doctrine even as we pray that some will be snatched out of the flames.

Since the beginning of time, there has been a war against God’s truth. From Satan’s fall to the garden of Eden to the false prophets of Ezekiel’s day who cried “peace” when there was no peace, to our day, there have always been those who speak against God’s Word and lead God’s people astray if they can. The world has always known false teachers.
In our day, we are bursting at the seams with them. Everyone knows they exist, even if they are unable to identify them, but not all seem to realize the danger they pose. For some, false teachers are the fringe group that is better ignored; for others, they are just Christians who think differently than we do. So how do we rightly view false teachers, and are they as threatening as some suggest?
We should first define what we mean by a false teacher. What we do not mean is someone who gets a doctrine such as the issue of baptism wrong. That would be an error, not a heresy. When we think of a false teacher, we think of the example given by the Apostle Paul, who writes to the Galatian Church, “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!” (Gal 1:8). A false teacher distorts the gospel in some way. In other words, false teaching often touches the person or work of Christ. Doctrines such as salvation by grace alone through faith alone, the sinless life of Christ, the deity of Christ, the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ, the gospel, and the necessity of repentance, are non-negotiable doctrines, and to teach anything contrary is to become a false teacher.
A second distinction of a false teacher is someone who, after having an error corrected, refuses to adjust his teaching. Of course, we all teach error, and for most of us, if we realized where that error was, we would correct it. But refusing to correct an error once exposed as an error makes one a false teacher when we speak of central doctrines that affect one’s faith. One has to move from “I didn’t know what the Bible said” to “I don’t care.” At that moment, a false teacher is born.
In the book of Acts, Apollos is an excellent example of someone teaching an error because he was teaching the Baptism of John, not knowing anything different. However, when corrected, he adjusted his teaching accordingly, and it is said that “he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 18:28).
So the first question is: just how dangerous are false teachers? Secondly, how do we respond to false teachers? To answer these questions, there’s no better person to turn to than Jude, the half-brother of our Lord. Jude paints the most robust imagery of the false teacher anywhere in Scripture. He describes false teachers using five main illustrations and, in those, answers the question, “how dangerous are false teachers?”
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If you’re going to have bubble-gum for your songs, why not be consistent and have candy-floss for the sermon? No, rather, if you are going to have a meaty, expositional sermon, why not worship with hymns and poems that are poetically competent, accompanied by music for reverent, mature sensibilities?

Services at many evangelical churches are a strange experience of bubble gum for a starter, followed by sirloin steak for a main. That is, for twenty minutes or so, we mash our jaws on vapid clichés, juvenile imagery, hokey sentimentalisms, jangling rhymes, and musical nostalgia. It’s all made pleasant by the refined sugar of pop music with its predictable melodies, formulaic chords and overpowering percussion. This is the average musical fare in an evangelical church. Any objectors to the nutritional value of bubble-gum will be summarily silenced with a few ad-hominems (“legalist”, “elitist”, “traditionalist”, “Pharisee”) and then given the standard-form lecture on Romans 14, Scripture’s supposed silence on musical form and genre, and the narrowness of critiquing another’s musical preference. I think it’s bubble-gum, but that’s just my truth, you see.
In other words, when it comes to the first part of the service, form does not matter. It does not matter what poetry you use, what verbal images, what musical instruments, what melodies, or what rhythms. In the first part of the service, these forms are all neutral, amoral, and without significance. They serve as placeholders for Christians to fill in their own sincerity and love. It’s all sweet nothing: zero-calorie warming up of the jaws for the real meal.
In the second part of the service, everything changes. Suddenly, an intense seriousness takes over. The passive spectators, who were being amused and entertained by syrupy chords and manipulative modulations, are replaced by furrowed-brow students, pencil behind the ear, prepared to conscientiously record the outline of the coming expository sermon.
And make no mistake, this sermon will be the purest beef. No antics or histrionics will be used to gain or keep attention. Vacuous stories will be vigilantly avoided. Mere talking about or around the biblical text will be a fail. Too many testimonial illustrations will be frowned upon, as will clichés. An economy of words will be practised, even though the sermon itself may run to fifty minutes or more. From the merest ephemera we have just sung, we come to high-density, compressed truth.
In contrast to the vapid sentimentalisms we just sang, the sermon will be rigorously tied to the biblical text, explaining, persuading, illustrating and applying what the text says. In other words, the form of the expository sermon is shaped by the meaning of both the text itself and the Bible as a whole. The very shape of expositional preaching emerges from the belief in an inerrant, inspired Scripture. Not only the content of the sermon, but its very shape carries meaning. The form of the sermon communicates submission and reverence towards God’s Word. The form has a meaning: preachers must submit to God’s Word and transmit it accurately.
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