In 2004 I received a phone call from an inmate who had been through the School of Christ in Alabama but had been transferred to a private prison in Mississippi. He wanted to know if I could bring the SOC to Mississippi as well. I called the Warden, James Cook, who I had known from the Alabama prison system. He asked me to come and meet with him the following week. I called him the day before our scheduled meeting only to be told it would not be possible to run the SOC because the inmates were being transferred back to Alabama. Mr. Cook gave me the information I needed to contact the private organization running the facility, Corrections Corporation of America, and within a week I was in the head office in Nashville.
CCA runs approximately seventy facilities in the United States. I told them of our vision to teach every inmate the ways of God. When I left I gave them the SOC manual and the rest of the material we had, and two weeks later I presented the SOC to every Warden and Assistant, and the Chiefs of Security. They were ecstatic about the effect they believed the SOC would have on the inmates in their facilities. They assessed how we planned to run the schools on a daily basis, and we explained that we would work with the Chaplains and recruit volunteers. Today, eight years later, we have the school in over sixty CCA facilities. Praise the Lord!
In the first part of May I was in four of these facilities in Georgia. I was blessed beyond measure. The schools are now being run by hired facilitators. One of these facilitators in Coffee Correctional Facility is a Baptist minister who is now in his fifth class. He shared with me his desire to be filled with the Holy Ghost. He told me he had never heard anything like this in his life. CCA is paying him to run the class each working day of the week! All over the country CCA is paying facilitators to run the School of Christ. It’s amazing to be a small part of what God is doing in the prisons of America. Radical changes are being made every day. The presence of God was mighty in every prison last week. Hundreds gave their lives to the Lord. The worship in each place was awesome. In one prison two English men came and introduced themselves to me. I don’t know why they were there, but they were in the right place at the right time. They came all the way from England to get saved in an American prison.
In the next few months I will be in several prisons across the nation: four in Tennessee, two in Kentucky, six in Arizona, seven in Texas, three in Colorado, two in New Mexico, three in Oklahoma, and five in Florida.