By Craig Pinley
FOLEY, AL (December 21, 2001) – Some people would do anything to avoid going to jail. DuWayne Winters, an associate pastor at New Covenant Church in Foley, chose jail as his regular workplace instead.
Winters will retire from prison ministry for health reasons January 1 after celebrating his 11th anniversary in that vocation this month. He is chaplain of Fountain Correctional Center in Atmore, Alabama, which houses some 1,100 inmates. Winters, who grew up at First Covenant Church in Rockford, Illinois, has been chaplain for five years at this facility. He admits that the job has had unique challenges, but says the opportunities he has are unlike any other ministry.
“You have more opportunities to introduce Jesus Christ to truly lost people than in a normal church setting,” said Winters, who was first introduced to prison ministry by his co-worker at New Covenant, pastor Robert Simmons. “In a normal church setting, there are not a lot of new people, but in a prison there is a lot of turnover. You also have people coming to prison who are in crisis – and more people will seek the Lord in crisis than not. But, you don’t get the stability in the prisons because of the turnover. And they don’t have to see me or come to church.”
Previously a pastor at Silverhill Covenant Church in Alabama, Winters began full-time prison ministry in 1990 at Tutwiler Correctional Center in Wetumpka, Alabama, the lone women’s prison in the state. Winters found that while some inmates had been to church as children, most hadn’t been involved in church as adults. He soon realized that some in his “congregation” weren’t striving toward the same goal as he was.
“When I got to the prison I found people who had broken all of the Ten Commandments,” he recalled. “That was hard for me because most of the people I knew were trying to keep the Ten Commandments. But people are sinful, our nature is sinful, and it’s become very vivid to me. The good news is that in Jesus Christ we have hope and redemption.”
Winters also discovered that paperwork was as important to his job as people skills, although the latter is far more meaningful. He said those people skills were most needed in telling a woman prisoner her three-year-old son had been killed by a stray bullet just days after the child had visited her.
“You have much more to do with administrative gifts than pastoral gifts because the correctional center requires more administration,” Winters said. “You have to minister to all types of religions and you have to produce the paperwork to cover that. And there is an awful lot of counseling here, which I didn’t expect.
“There is crisis in the spiritual well being of the inmates,” he continued. “If you can reach them with the word so they can see where they’re at within the bounds of God, then prison becomes a more peaceful place. There’s an awful lot of anger and denial brought into this place. Usually the anger is at others and at themselves. You try to point out in scripture the dangers of anger and try to get them to seek sharing their anger with the Lord because He can handle it. But if they don’t know the Lord they don’t know about that resource.”
Being in a medium security prison gives Winters some advantages many prison chaplains don’t have. If inmates get permission from an officer, they can visit the chaplain and when prisoners are taking their allotted exercise time in the prison yard they can see him with few hindrances. “If the yard is open they can get to me,” he said.
Winters serves as the southern regional coordinator for the spiritual life of inmates. As part of that work, he has gone to executions to minister to death row inmates. Winters said the experience was easier to handle because “the man who was executed had become a Christian and he was ready to meet his maker; he was at peace.”
Winters has been grateful for a volunteer program called Kairos that has had an impact in the prison in recent months. Many mentors aid prisoners with job placement and counseling once the prisoners leave correctional facilities. Winters has been encouraged by a new faith-based honor dorm program recently instituted by the state’s commissioner of prison ministries.
The honor dorm allows people who haven’t been disciplined for at least 12 months to enter a mentoring program that uses spiritual precepts. An extensive library has been in place since the program began in October 1999. Numerous classes are brought into the dorms and most of the leaders who lead these programs are Christians. It makes a huge impact on the 70 prisoners, according to Winters.
“These people are almost like father figures for them,” he said. “It’s valuable, and these men don’t realize how valuable they are as volunteers because prisoners realize that they’re not getting paid to do this. Believe me, I was much more rewarded by giving to these people than in any other way. I saw lives changed and I was able to mentor people who needed spiritual encouragement.”
(Editor’s note: This is one of a continuing series of Covenant website stories about Covenanters doing prison ministry. Andy Holt of the Evangelical Covenant Church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was featured in the September issue of The Covenant Companion.)
Copyright © 2011 The Evangelical Covenant Church.