As God’s co-workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain (2 Corinthians 6:1).
We are God’s co-laborers in the work of reconciliation. Paul is describing his own ministry in 2 Corinthians 6, and yet we have the same calling to work together with God.
In the preceding verses (2 Cor 5:11-21), Paul writes that God has reconciled all people to God’s self through Christ. Our relationship with God has been restored, and God is not counting our trespasses against us. This is grace. And, as new creations in Christ, we are able to respond to God’s grace with faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). We have been given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18), the ministry of restoring our relationships with each other.
If we deny the restoration of relationships, though, we accept God’s grace in vain (2 Cor 6:1). When we isolate people in prison, when we put our neighbors in cages, we deny them opportunities for healing and reconciliation. Rather than sharing the grace we have received, we put obstacles – physical boundaries – in their way. But our calling is to reject the practices of punishment, and receive this ministry of reconciliation. Our calling is to work together with God in the healing of relationships.
Our invitation, then, is the same as Paul’s invitation to the Corinthians: to open wide our hearts. This work of reconciliation isn’t easy; we will endure afflictions, hardships, and labors (2 Cor 6:5-10). Opening our hearts to our trespassers isn’t easy.; we will require patience, kindness, and genuine love (2 Cor 6:6). But we are reminded that we are empowered and enabled by the grace and power of God who listens to us and helps us (2 Cor 6:2).
This week, how is God inviting us to participate, to work alongside God, in this ministry of reconciliation?
“For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.” 2 Corinthians 5:10 (NRSV)
I grew up in an evangelical environment with a paradigm of punishment that largely matched the world around us. Despite the common refrain of being “in the world, but not of the world,” I heard in church environments and ‘secular’ environments alike that people were in prison because they deserved to be there. Prison was the just reward for committing crimes. When we visited those in prison, we did so to convert them to a more moral way of life – a moral way of life that also happened to be our particular interpretation of Christian faith.
Central to that same faith was the idea that Jesus washed away our sins. Jesus’ death on the cross took on the punishment God had in store for sinners. In the grand scheme of the cosmos, we were guilty criminals but Jesus gave us some sort of spiritual ‘get out of jail free’ card. That logic stopped there, however, and did not extend to material reality. In the culture I grew up in, there wasn’t a whole lot of second guessing whether somebody in prison deserved to be there or not, the atonement of Christ notwithstanding. We certainly didn’t discuss whether prisons should exist or not!
When I came to this passage in Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, this statement about judgment jumped out of the page like it was written in neon lights. “For all of us must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive recompense for what has been done in the body, whether good or evil.” It turns the paradigm of who is guilty and who is liable to judgment on its head. Whereas my context often considers someone who has committed a crime (a definition rife with prejudice enforced by the state) the one guilty or at least liable to judgment, Paul reminds us that we all appear before God accountable for what has been done in our bodies.
When Christians consider that judgment, we should consider prisons. How will we be judged by the record of incarceration in our midst? How will we be judged by the rampant abuse in our carceral systems? How will we be judged for condoning slavery in our prison systems?
Often, we are more afraid of the consequences of doing something about that sin than God’s judgment of it. The abolition of prisons often scares people more than the potential judgment of our permissive posture toward them. Yet, Paul has news for us. “We walk by faith, not by sight,” and we cannot fear the possibilities of a prison-free world more than the consequences of continuing a carceral state. Our savior was lynched by just such a system, and Jesus did not die so that our world could remain the same.
“Everything old has passed away,” Paul writes, “Everything has become new!” May that inspire us to see our carceral world as something that needs to die, so a better world can live.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.
The people call for a king in 1 Samuel. The people call to be ruled. Samuel lets them know what the cost is going to be and yet they still call for a king. They are jealous of the other nations. The king will take but they don’t mind. The king will order about but they don’t mind. We have a king in this land in the prison industrial complex. We have a king in this punitive idea of justice. We are ruled and the church says ‘thank you’ to King Justice for the privilege of being ruled. The church has been complicit because it wants to be like other groups. The church has been complicit because we take the status quo more seriously than the words of the prophets. The Bible exists to justify our place in society. When it challenges that position, it is just meddling.
We are a divided society. We have divided ourselves. We have pushed others outside the bounds of society and labeled them and branded them with the finality of permanent records. We have ceased to listen to the God who breaks chains and longed to be respectable to powerful of this world. In Mark, people accuse Jesus of being possessed because he is ministering to folks who have been cast out of society. Instead of questioning their own structures of power, they question Jesus, but he turns it back in their face. Satan does not cast out Satan because a house divided will not stand.
Lincoln uses this language to talk about the United States before the Civil War. He says, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
Similarly, the church’s complicity with the prison industrial complex will not dissolve it. We will either oppose and destroy that evil, or we will oppose and destroy the Scriptures and the God revealed therein. Will bind the strongman, the lord of this world, the deceiver who deceives us into thinking justice is only found in the pain of others or retribution? Or will we have faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who defeated death on the cross and came to set the captives free?
Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
The prophet Isaiah’s dramatic vision of God’s heavenly throne offers lessons to Christian abolitionists about where we look for leadership and whose voices guide the movement.
Abolition is fundamentally a grassroots movement, guided by those who are most affected by the system: incarcerated people organizing for their own liberation, formerly-incarcerated people, people with loved ones who are incarcerated or system-impacted. Allies on the outside dedicate themselves to following the leadership that already exists.
What does this have to do with Isaiah? In Isaiah’s vision, he sees the seraphs around the throne of God crying out: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” Every place on the earth is full of the glory of God. The glory of God which is the impetus toward justice is everywhere—there is nowhere on the earth that is God-forsaken. This means that every prison, every jail, every place where humans try to exclude or banish people is nonetheless a place where God is present and working toward justice. This fact illuminates for us the divine reality behind the practical reality that incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated folks are leading the organizing toward abolition.
Isaiah’s vision also speaks to the ability of everyone to participate in God’s work for justice, no matter what we may have done in the past. He says: “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips” — yet the seraph cleanses him and sends him out for God.
Outside allies sometimes are uncomfortable following the leadership of incarcerated organizers who may have done serious harm. For those people, it is important to recognize that having done violence or harm does not prevent someone from also being a leader for abolition. In terms of Isaiah’s vision, Christian allies on the outside can recognize that anyone, no matter what they have done, can participate in the work of justice and thereby answer God’s question: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
But “living among a people of unclean lips” is also a description of those on the outside, who live freely in a society that has determined that some people should not have freedom; who participate as citizens in a country that talks about liberty and justice but provides exclusion, control, and punishment. Failure to take action for justice makes one complicit in the injustice of white supremacy and mass incarceration. Yet, the call to Isaiah is also a call to those who are complicit. God calls us, all “people of unclean lips,” from our complicity. God cleanses us. And God makes us ready for God to send us out, to go for God and do the work of justice and abolition.
We follow the leadership of those most affected and we look for God whose glory is present everywhere, leading the whole earth to renewed justice.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
On a street corner halfway between our homes in south Minneapolis, the final groanings of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 turned the world on its head. The viral video later catalyzed another wave of protests in Minneapolis and across the world. George Floyd’s final groans and gasps embodied the bondage to sin, death, and decay in which the whole of creation is held. As Silvia C. Keesmaat and Brian J. Walsh write in Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice, “…creation is groaning for the same reason that believers groan: because it is suffering under the exploitative economic practices and violent militarism of Roman imperial rule.”
George Floyd’s groans amplified the groans of all that suffer under the exploitative economic practices and violent militarism created and reinforced by policing and the rest of the prison industrial complex. The toil, suffering, and death perpetuated by policing has been revealed in different ways since George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police Department and this city, and cities everywhere, rose up in the largest protest movement our country has yet seen.
In the wake of property damage during protests, the city of Minneapolis became a showroom of plywood. Windows were boarded up to replace glass that had been broken or to prevent glass from being broken and those stretches of plywood became canvasses for artists across the area. As Toni Cade Bambara said, “[t]he role of the artist is to make revolution irresistible” and the revolutionary shift toward abolition became newly irresistible for many of us. Muralists painted prophetic images of a world without police, introducing many people to the idea of abolition for the first time. The murals told us that we could defund the police, that we could abolish the police, that we could break out of the endless cycles of police violence and cries for reform and blowback and repression and more police violence.
Abolition is both a horizon of the future that we strive toward and a practice of hopeful lament that exists in the tension between what is seen and what is unseen. Keesmat and Walsh write, “Lament is an act of hope. In fact, it is an act of ‘passionate expectation.’” In the streets and parks, in organizing meetings, in political education sessions, in our demands of the powerful across this land, we lament the violence of the prison industrial complex in all its forms. We lament the ways it fails to offer interruption, healing, restoration, or transformation of interpersonal events and cycles of harm and violence. But as abolitionists, we don’t offer these laments without hope, or with an empty hope that these systems can reform themselves, that only the systems we see now are possible. We offer a disciplined, practiced hope that, as Mariame Kaba writes, “there’s always a potential for transformation and for change.”
George Floyd’s groans were those of suffering and death at the hands (or knees) of violent Empire. The groans that we carry forward in organizing, protest, and other abolition work are more akin to the groans of new birth.
The same street corner that bore witness to George Floyd’s final groans has become a place in which the community has been birthing new ways of practicing safety, meeting needs, and dealing with harm. Over the past year, George Floyd Square has become a hub for community practice, community mourning, and mutual aid. People bring objects to the community run greenhouse; they bring their kids to the community bookshelf or the clothing closet, they walk the labyrinth marked by flowers and photos or they walk the streets that are closed to cars but filled with the names of people taken from us by policing across this country. Signs of what abolitionists and others seek to reject are everywhere, as are signs of what we believe is possible instead. At least three organizations have been birthed out of this space that didn’t exist before: the group that runs the “autonomous zone,” the group that caretakes the memorial space, and protest medics who have supported movement across the region. Beyond the confines of George Floyd Square, the caretaking work of memorial and spacemaking has grown to include a new memorial space where Daunte Wright was killed in nearby Brooklyn Center in April 2021.
George Floyd Square is a lab of sorts, creating and experimenting with what can be, rather than what has been. As Mariame Kaba said in a recent interview, “I don’t know what the end result is going to look like. But it’s part of a long legacy, what we call la longue durée.” We don’t always know how to create these things, and many things happen at once rather than the single narrative of progress many people would want to tell, but we learn as we build together.
God’s Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Abolition is one of the ways, one of the most broad and deep reaching ways available in our time, that the Spirit intercedes and helps us in our weakness. Abolition is one of the ways we reach out with hope for something we’ve never seen. It is one of the ways the Spirit is offering us to deal with human weakness and pain, not by continuing to perpetuate harm but by creating conditions where we can live otherwise.
We don’t always know how to articulate what abolition will look like; it is always a horizon that is in front of us even as we create it. We are invited to stay grounded in the groanings and longings and hope that the Spirit gives, through individual spiritual practice, through communal spiritual practice, and through organizing toward a new world.
Rev. Dana Neuhauser is the Racial Justice Organizer for the Minnesota Annual Conference of the UMC and Minister of Public Witness at New City Church in Minneapolis.
Jonathan Stegall is a faith-rooted organizer with Reclaim the Block, and a user experience designer, in Minneapolis.
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 offers a repeated prayer for followers living in the world: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”
The challenge for the church is of being a body “in the world but not of it” and in some ways this tension between Christ and culture (to borrow language from H. Richard Niebuhr) is made explicit in the context of abolition.
Abolition and restorative and transformative justice require us to admit that we are in the world and to look harm squarely in the face (as Mariame Kaba puts it); to be honest about our own capacity for harm and the harm others do. An abolitionist praxis in the church does not allow us to deny, minimize, cover up, hide, or try to avoid recognizing harm when it happens. An abolitionist praxis means that the church should embrace being present in difficult situations of harm and take up the goal of transforming harm.
But abolition also requires the church to insist on a justice that is not the world’s justice. To deny the evil bargain that (to use Kaba’s language again) replaces “safety” — mutual care for all — with “security” — safety for some at the cost of domination over others. The church, to live into its calling as not of the world, must reject all forms of retribution, exclusion, and disposability, and insist upon real accountability that begins with compassion.
Meditating on Jesus’ prayer can help us find support from God in a practice of opposition to structures of oppression and authentic engagement with the world in all its complexity.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
In Ephesians, we find Paul writing to the believers and giving thanks for their faith in Jesus Christ. He prays for their reception of God’s spirit, and revelation, “the hope to which he has called you,”and “the immeasurable greatness of his power.”
One wonders if Paul had any trouble writing this, or if the church in Ephesus doubted this immeasureably great power. As tradition holds, Paul wrote this letter from prison. But Paul does not leave us with doubt as to where this hope and power come from.
“God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” (1:20-21)
The message is clear: Even those in prisons and jails, even those oppressed and persecuted, can take faith in the power of Christ. And the proof is that Jesus was raised from the dead, and ascended to the right hand. This gives Christ rule, authority, power, dominion. And just as he has the power now, he will have it “in the age to come.”
This tracks with what the apostles were told when they watched Jesus ascend: “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Jesus’ power is not just restricted to what was seen in his life, or at his ascension. His power remains and continues for all time. Paul, one of the first prisoners to teach the church that prisons have no power over the reign of Christ, models a faith and resistance that is stored in the hope of the ascension.
Mitchell Atencio is a discalced writer and photographer in Washington, D.C.
The prophets are often connected with abolition because of the clarity of the words around setting captives free, but the Psalms are also filled with words of abolition because the Psalms are filled with praise of the victory of God.
Ultimately, abolition points to the victory of God. When humans obsess over justifying the status quo criminal justice system, they deny the victory of God. We must mete out justice ourselves because all we have is ourselves.
The Psalms point to a different expectation of reality. “O sing to the LORD a new song, for he has done marvelous things. His right hand and his holy arm have gotten him victory.” If God has won the victory, that means that we don’t need to save ourselves. As well, that means that we don’t need to save others. We are not the messiahs. You are not the messiah. The State is not the messiah.
If we sing a new song to the Lord, that means we don’t need to sing the old song before we knew of God’s victory. We don’t need to sing the song of the status quo and taking justice into our own hands. We are in the season of Easter where God’s justice is most clearly seen in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death and torture. Death has no victory here. Justice is not understood by what we do but by who God is.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord. Can we make a joyful noise while supporting the Prison-Industrial Complex? Can we sing praises to the Lord and ignore those chained up by our society? Can we hear the hills and the seas sing of God’s victory and deny the power of God to transform every heart and mind?
As well, are we ready for God’s judgment of the world with righteousness when we accept and ignore such an unrighteous mark on our society? The Psalms speak of justice and righteousness. God’s justice is not just found in our hearts but poured out across creation and all human society. God calls us to participate in the world being made new through the righteousness of God. God calls us to make a joyful noise. God calls us to abolition.
Rev. Wilson Pruitt is a Methodist pastor and translator in Spicewood, TX.
Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. (John 15:6)
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. (1 John 4:18)
The chief objection I hear to abolition is rooted in consequences, particularly fear of imagined consequences. What will happen if we don’t have police? What will happen if we don’t have prisons? What will happen if we don’t put children in cages and incarcerate migrants? The unspoken bit of these questions is an assumption rooted in fear — and frequently bigotry toward people of color. The objector’s imagination conjures a lawless world full of unrestrained vagabonds and nerdowells. Punishment is the only barrier between us and this chaotic, dangerous world.
The first letter of John says that such a mindset is rooted in fear rather than love. The author urges us to pursue lives rooted in the abiding love of God. This love is the very essence of God, it is who God is. With love grounding our lives and beings, we ought to love one another. Anything that falls short of that mutual love is not of God and it does not come from God.
The carceral system and the police state of the United States of America, whether applied to citizens or non-citizens, is hardly based in love. If perfect love casts out fear, as the author suggests, there is no love at all in such a system. It is entirely based on fear and punishment, precisely the sort of thing Scripture warns us against.
We should be far more afraid of the consequences of failing to abide in the love of God than we are afraid of what a police-free and prison-free world looks like. John’s Gospel makes that clear enough. Affording to John, Jesus claims that God will remove the branches that do not bear the fruit of the love of God. And branches that do not abide in the love described here and in 1 John, Jesus says “such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” Such divine consequences are a much greater cause of concern than the distorted imaginations that conjure caricatural nightmares of crime and violence as a result of abolition.
If we must talk about the consequences of abolition, however, we should return to 1 John. Here, the author promises that if we love one another that God will live in us and that the love of God will be perfected in us. We should let our imaginations run wild with what that could mean. A world where abolition has succeeded is a world where we love one another, and a world where God will live in us. This world is one of abundance and peace, and what could be a better consequence than that?
Indeed, what will happen if we don’t have police? What will happen if we don’t have prisons?
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his)is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.
This passage from 1 John — and indeed, the whole letter — offers a wealth of resources for directing our attention to the needs of those who are incarcerated.
The author writes: “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”
As we develop relationships of solidarity with those who are incarcerated or criminalized, we see them as our siblings in the human family: we see our siblings in need. The question posed here in 1 John is posed for us allies on the outside, we who have freedom and “the world’s goods,” in relation to the needs we see of those we know who are incarcerated: How does God’s love abide in us who see our incarcerated siblings in need and yet refuse help?
In the anthology Thinking Theologically About Mass Incarceration, Benjamin Hartley, Glen Alton Messer II, and Kirsten Sonkyo Oh write from a Wesleyan perspective about the centrality of prisoner support to Christian life: “We believe that the health of the whole Christian community is measured by its love of prisoners; loving the prisoner was and is constitutive of Wesleyan discipleship…Not everyone will be able to focus as much as the Wesley brothers did on prison ministry, but if one is not seeking out ways to love those who are imprisoned — directly or indirectly even in small ways — or is not active in encouraging those who do so, then we must at least ask if we are taking the demands of Christian discipleship seriously” (231). Visiting the prisoner is for everybody. As we might phrase it here, the work of abolition — the work of “changing everything,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it, to allow for a world without prisons — is for everybody, and is work that every Christian is called to do. Abolition is “love in truth and action.” There are a variety of ways to get involved! We offer some possibilities for framing your imagination of how to get involved:
But every single Christian is called to do something to love prisoners. The work of abolition and prisoner support is “love in truth and action.”
The authors continue: “We readily acknowledge that most of us fall short of the mark; it is easy to point out all the ways we are not loving prisoners” (231). Here is where 1 John provides comfort: the author reminds us that when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. God is already in every prison, in loving solidarity with all who are incarcerated. Whatever work we take on to love prisoners, we are following God who goes before us. In every way we fail, when our hearts condemn us because of the ongoing brutal realities of incarceration and police and state violence in our society, we know that God is greater than our hearts and God is going before us. Our love in truth and action is following in the path of God’s love: the loving power of God that will set all the prisoners free.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.
Citations from “‘Get on the Cart!’ Wesleyan Discipleship in an Age of Endemic Incarceration” in Thinking Theologically About Mass Incarceration, ed. Antonios Kireopoulos, Mitzi J. Budde, and Matthew D. Lundberg. New York: Paulist Press, 2017.
