TAKING JESUS TO JAIL

It’s 7:30 a.m., and the group gathering in a Los Angeles hotel conference room this January morning doesn’t look like a group at all. Some of the 497 volunteers are barely old enough to vote, others are veterans of the second World War. Bikers from as far away as Alabama arrived on Harleys; Baptists from Roseburg, Ore., arrived on a church bus. Leather riding chaps and knit stockings mingle in a crowd that includes a famous football player, an infamous jewel thief and a guy once judged the “World’s Strongest Man.”

But they’re all wearing identical name tags.

And singing.

A wavering chorus of “Amazing Grace” builds into a raucous celebration of faith as Christian warriors from the nation’s leading prison ministry prepare for today’s mission: an all-out offensive to save some of the approximately 20,000 souls inside various facilities of the Los Angeles County jail system. During the next 48 hours, these eclectic evangelists from 36 states will take their message of spiritual redemption into facilities such as the Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, and the Twin Towers Correctional Facility and the Men’s Central Jail downtown.

They’ll move with stealth and military precision. After nearly 30 years of taking Jesus to jail, the volunteers from the nonprofit Bill Glass Ministries of Dallas, Texas, know that free time is a precious commodity in the grim other world of prison. Inmates are naturally wary of “The God Squad,” as some call the group, afraid to show weakness in a place where weakness can be deadly.

So the bikers move first. They can walk the walk, talk the talk. Sometimes they even ride their Harleys onto the yard. At the Pitchess Detention Center they ease into the jail population as if they belong, heads bobbing to the Sammy Hagar tune blaring from the ministry’s portable sound system. With their tattoos and attitudes, the newcomers draw attention to one end of the sprawling prison yard. When enough inmates have gathered, a speaker climbs atop a four-foot-high platform with a microphone and announces that a program is about to start.

The curious inmates remain in a half-circle around the makeshift stage as Rick Nielsen, a magician from Iowa, takes center stage. He wows a group of gangbangers with a rope trick while his fellow evangelists move into the crowd. A subtle transformation begins. As Nielsen packs his props, he briefly mentions his faith in God and introduces Jerry Graham, a bespectacled man with a thick gray mustache.

No one leaves as Graham begins to speak. About prison life during his stints in San Quentin and Vacaville. About the violence he wrought and the terrifying solitude of the hole. The crowd remains even as he explains his jailhouse conversion at the hands of a Christian evangelist. When Graham finishes testifying, his fellow evangelists step in with spiritual pamphlets and an invitation: Does anyone want to be “born again” as a Christian? This day several inmates step forward, as is typical.

Taking the inmates’ hands in theirs, the evangelists lead the “Sinner’s Prayer,” which reassures that everyone is forgiven in the eyes of God as long as they commit to a life of Christianity. When the prayer is done, the evangelists draw the inmates into hugs and offer congratulations. During the 20 minutes that remain before the prisoners are ordered back to their cells, more than 30 inmates pledge to live as Christians. During the two-day crusade, the ministry claims 5,185 “decisions for Christ.”

Some of those decisions almost certainly are meaningless, done with a hopeful eye toward a retrial or parole-board hearing. The evangelists realize this as they move on. Their job is to plant a seed, they say, and to pray that it will grow. Sometimes it does. But the potential congregation is huge--an estimated 2 million in U.S. prisons alone. The following weekend, a similar Bill Glass group will converge on another prison or jail in another town, hoping to coax other captive souls from the darkness toward the light.

Los Angeles photographer Todd Bigelow, who shoots for the Aurora agency, has spent a year chronicling the Bill Glass Ministries at work in various jails and prisons. His photos on prison evangelism can also be seen at https://www.auroraphotos.com; click on the Features button.