More than 700 inmates and prison staff gathered last week at the John H. Lilley Correctional Center in Boley, Oklahoma, for an outreach event led by Victory Christian Center, one of Tulsa’s largest churches.
Organized by Pastor Paul Daugherty and a team of 32 volunteers, the outreach included worship, preaching, baptisms, and the distribution of hot meals, Bibles and Christian books. According to the church, 41 individuals were baptized and more than 400 men made professions of faith.
“Today was a blessing beyond words,” the church shared on Instagram following the event. “We were welcomed into an Oklahoma men’s prison to share the hope of Jesus! God moved powerfully through salvations, baptisms, and life-changing moments of connection. His LOVE truly knows no walls or limits.”
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The team served 1,000 hot meals, distributed 700 Bibles, handed out 620 New Life books and 710 Words That Change the World booklets, and gave 100 gift bags to prison staff through a partnership with CityServe Oklahoma.
Daugherty told CBN News the idea for the outreach began just three months ago when he felt God prompting him to reach those behind bars.
“I was like, man, I really feel like there’s a harvest of people in the prisons that we could reach with God’s love that [only a few] churches in our city [are] really going after,” he said. “I really want[ed] to reach almost every prisoner we can in an outreach.”
A timely connection with Oklahoma Chief Operating Officer Brian Bobek, a Christian who began attending Victory Christian Center, opened the door to the prison system. Daugherty said Bobek encouraged him to plan something that would draw inmates out of their cells.
“I said, ‘I don’t wanna just do a small service for 10 or 20 guys. … I want to reach almost every prisoner we can,'” Daugherty said.
On June 23, the team launched the outreach on a dry field inside the facility. Despite uncertainty about how many would attend, 751 inmates ultimately came to hear the Gospel.
“When I saw them getting out of their pods and walking towards the field … I just started weeping,” Daugherty recalled. “This looks like a picture out of the Bible when Jesus saw that village of Samaritan people. He said the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”
The pastor described seeing hardened men transformed by the love of Christ. “I saw all these [inmates] walking towards us like zombies … literally coming out of [the prison with] depression and despair and discouragement and shame,” he said.
Despite some initial fear about standing “in the middle of 751 prisoners with no handcuffs,” Daugherty said he knew he was where God wanted him to be.
“I just started hugging them and shaking their hands and praying for them, and then I did an altar call,” he said. “Over 400 hands went up.”
He said many of the men were incarcerated for sexual crimes, violent offenses, or drug-related charges, ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s.
One of the most memorable encounters for Daugherty was with an inmate who told him he had once been saved at Victory Christian Center when Daugherty’s father, Billy Joe Daugherty, was pastor in the 1990s.
“He said, ‘I was part of the choir and I sang in the worship [team]. … I made some really bad choices and … I got locked up in the year 2000,’” Daugherty said. The man recounted that before his death, Billy Joe Daugherty had visited him in prison and told him he loved him and that God forgave him.
Now, decades later, the younger Daugherty was standing in the same prison, preaching to him once again. “He said, ‘Here you are … the son of my pastor that saved me, 1751740506 ministering in my prison,'” Daugherty recalled. “I’m getting teary-eyed like, ‘Man, God, what a story of grace.’”
Daugherty believes the outreach is just the beginning. “We’ve already lined up the prisons for the fall and the winter,” he said. “Prisons started calling that they want [us] to come.”
Reflecting on the experience, Daugherty said there’s a deep hunger for something real, both inside and outside of prison walls.
“I think people are really waking up to the reality that our world … is so broken,” he said. “There’s just so much shallowness. Jesus is that answer.”
Victory Christian Center hopes to continue expanding its prison outreach in the coming months.
“Praise God. Let’s keep doing this,” Daugherty said.
Approximately 1.8 million men and women in America are incarcerated, and approximately 1.5 million children have an incarcerated parent, according to DOJ statistics.
However, recent data from the annual State of the Bible report found that only 40% of American Christians who actively and regularly engage with Scripture either agree or strongly agree that they value caring for incarcerated individuals.
In a recent op-ed for The Christian Post, Cody Wilde, the senior vice president of correctional programs at Prison Fellowship, encouraged believers to get involved with prison ministry, emphasizing that “we are called by God to love the guilty as well as the innocent.”
“We are called to follow Jesus outside of our comfort zone, to follow Him toward those He loves. And the reward for doing so is nothing less than the joy of participating in God’s loving work here in our own communities,” he wrote.
The language here is important. ‘Remembering’ in the Bible — and particularly in Hebrews 13 — isn’t just recollection. It’s beholding something. A call to “remember” the imprisoned is a call to look, to behold, to make them real to your senses,” he added.
“In saying ‘remember those in prison,’ the writer of Hebrews is asking us to behold the sacredness that exists in those who are forgotten. We are invited to participate in God’s work, to share in something He is already building, when we join any effort to minister to the incarcerated. We’re coming alongside the work of God’s grace.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
