The IFI Chronicles: What I can't do

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What changes a man?  How do men move from the darkness to light?  How do criminals go from lawbreaking to law-abiding? How does an evil man become a good man?  What can we do as a program/ministry to ensure this happens?

 

These were the basic questions we consistently asked ourselves as an IFI staff.  We had a bottom-line mandate from the State of Iowa: Keep ex-offenders from coming back to prison.  To some extent the process by which we achieved that goal was not interfered with as long as we were achieving that goal.

 

The first (and foremost) answer we concluded for the question, “How can we change men?” was, “We can’t.”  Possibly we could change men to become worse, but certainly we couldn’t, within our own power, change them for good.

 

I think we all recognized that the establishing of IFI in Iowa was miraculous.  Iowa was not on the radar for Prison Fellowship.  A state like Florida was.  It was a southern conservative state with lots of rich people and Jeb Bush as governor.  Brother George W. was instrumental in IFI Texas, so Florida seemed a natural place to go.

 

But somebody from Iowa heard Chuck Colson talk which made him interested in Prison Fellowship. Then he heard about IFI and he suggested it to the Director of Corrections and the Governor and wha-la, IFI-Iowa, without a major Prison Fellowship presence or donor base or volunteer pool. It was as if God said, “I’m going to show the world something riiiiiiiight…here.” and he placed his finger on that Newton Prison.

 

So we understood that we couldn’t make it happen.  And that really was not some kind of trite christianese slogan, we really couldn’t do it.  Our weakness was hilariously evident. Yet, men began to change, and people in the prison took notice.

 

We weren’t without responsibility or action or effort. We all worked a lot of hours.  We were called to be faithful as a co-laborer in the work, but we could claim no credit.

 

I began explaining what we did to people in agricultural terms.

 

The Bible is full of agricultural terms and analogies. Everyone in Bible times had an intimate relationship with agriculture, or farming.  They either directly or indirectly worked on farms or for farmers of some kind of sustenance occupation, which was convenient for us in Iowa because our prison was surrounded by pastures and fields.

 

The “Parable of the Sower” in Matthew 13 was a crucial passage for us.  It describes the planting of seeds and the growing of crops and the reaping of a harvest.  John 15 talks about Jesus being “The Vine” and producing fruit.  It is a difficult task, being a farmer.  There is a lot of preparation and maintenance of the fields and crops.

 

A farmer maintains an environment where crops can grow. A farmer cannot cause crops to grow.  He can till and weed and water and fertilize and prune and care for a field, but he has not the power to cause one grape to ripen on the vine.

 

That was our task, to maintain an environment where God would do His work.  We could weed, water and prune in the men’s lives, but we couldn’t cause them to Love God or grow.  That was God’s responsibility.

 

chris