Quick To Listen

From a numbers perspective, for every American church, there are about two people returning home from incarceration annually. Yet, just 1 in 5 churches (22%) that average 250 or more attendees have formal ministries for people leaving correctional facilities according to a LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 evangelical and mainline pastors conducted earlier this year. Many pastors just aren’t aware of how dramatically incarceration affects their congregation, says Dominique Gilliard, a pastor at Convergence Covenant Church in Oakland, California. “Churches have created a cone of silence around this issue. It becomes so stigmatized. I can’t tell you all the times I go and preach or teach at a church and the pastor is completely unaware that people are dealing with this,” said Gilliard, who is writing a book about restorative justice. “People are lined up after service to come to talk to me because this is the first time that they heard their church talk about this.” Once church leadership and attendees decide th