“It’s a great opportunity to get them in the doors of our church, to have them see what resources and youth group and all the other things that might be of interest to their families if they don’t already have a home church,” said Rice-Minus.
Rice-Minus has served as an Angel Tree volunteer, an experience that became “an opportunity to have a ministry of presence in the lives of those families that goes well beyond Christmas.” She and her family actually ended up befriending one of the families they had delivered a gift to.
“We ended up asking the oldest daughter of that family if she babysat…and so she ended up babysitting for our girls,” said Rice-Minus. “And to this day we still have an ongoing relationship with that family and have gotten to know them very well. They have two girls.”
“Then last year, I actually got the opportunity to drive them down to meet their dad in prison in North Carolina,” Rice-Minus said. “They had not gotten to see their dad in person, even though they talked to him regularly by phone, in 15 years.”
“It was just this amazing moment of reconciliation in person,” she added. “Since then, they’ve also started attending our church just in the last year. So, you know, the program is so much more than just the Christmas gift, especially for churches who will lean in to trying to build relationships with families.”
“[Angel Tree] often becomes the first way we engage churches,” Rice-Minus said. “But we have so much more to offer.” Moreover, Angel Tree serves families of incarcerated people throughout the year, not just at Christmas time, as Wilson also alluded.
“In about a dozen cities across the country, we do sports and STEM camps for Angel Tree kids, and we have church partners help us with those as well,” said Rice-Minus. For example, in Washington, D.C., “every year we host a basketball sports camp for local Angel Tree kids. So they come out, they get to learn basketball skills. They hear the gospel message. They hear a testimony from someone who has been in their shoes having a parent incarcerated.”
“We also have a breakout where we do prayer and offer resources to the parents and guardians who have brought those kids,” said Rice-Minus, “because often [it] can be a very lonely road to be a parent or grandparent.”
“And so we’re able to pray for them,” she said. “We’re able to connect them to other partners like Celebrate Recovery, and then we’re also able to showcase our summer camp partners and mentoring partners.”
“We work with a number of different mentoring groups: U.S. Dream Academy, Big Brothers, Big Sisters,” said Rice-Minus. “And then we have hundreds of Christian summer camps as well who partner with us. And we actually provide free summer camp scholarships to Angel Tree kids to go to Christian summer camp.”
For churches that are interested in serving the families of those who are incarcerated, Rice-Minus suggested signing up for Angel Tree. “We joke at Prison Fellowship that January is not too early to sign up for the next Christmas season,” she said. “There’s also opportunity to build relationships with those families all year round. If there’s a STEM or sports camp in your area, we rely on our church partners to volunteer during those days to provide care for those families during those days.”
There are plenty of other opportunities for churches to get involved in ministry within prisons and even jails. Churches can also help incarcerated people reintegrate into society and can engage in the broader work of advocating for justice.
For church leaders in particular, Rice-Minus suggested Prison Fellowship’s Restore Conference, which will be in Washington, D.C., Sept. 15-16. The conference “really speaks to all of these opportunities and how to go deeper,” she said.
“With God, all things are possible. I wouldn’t be where I’m at today if I did not give my life to Christ. The Bible tells us any man that is in Christ is a new creation. Old things pass away. Behold, all things become new,” said Wilson. “Because I became a new person in Christ, I no longer found my identity of the things of the world. I found my identity in Christ. And so with that, he does exceedingly, abundantly above all things we can ask.”
