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HENDERSON—Providence is ironic sometimes. He had a hard heart. His attitude, in his own words, “was about as bad as it could be.”
And just as God told Jonah to preach to the object of his disdain, the Lord told Ken Hale, “You need to change your attitude because I’ve got a job for you.”
That job was to take the gospel to those he considered “trash”—the inmates of the James Bradshaw State Jail in Henderson.
Some 15 years later, unlike Jonah, his heart aches for the thousands who cycle through that facility without hearing the good news of salvation. For the lack of a chapel at the Bradshaw Unit, few men can gather each Sunday for Bible study lessons prepared by Hale and a growing band of faithful teachers.
The unit sits on 100 acres just north of Henderson where Hale lives, works and worships. He once figured the 2,000 or so men who occupy the facility had reason to be there and deserved no pity. They broke the rules and had to pay the price. That was before he was taken on a tour of the facility.
“As we walked through there Christ began to deal with my heart,” he recalled. Softened by the experience and nudged to action by the Holy Spirit, Hale inquired of the prison warden about starting a Sunday School class in the unit. As providence would have it, the warden, Michael Bell, had once been one of Hale’s Sunday School students and he heartily agreed to allow the class at Bradshaw.
The first Sunday in October 1997, Hale entered the prison and began his effort at freeing those held spiritually captive. All of four men came to that first class. Hale faithfully returned each week, teaching the inmates and leaving in time to return to Trinity Baptist Church in Henderson to lead a Sunday School class there.
For a few years Hale was frustrated at the consistent attendance of 20-30 men each week. Then inexplicably, the attendance boomed, only to be curtailed by prison officials for lack of space.
In addition to class size, language became a barrier. Hale noticed a large number of Hispanic men in the class and discerned that English was not their first language. So he broke up the class and garnered the support of a much needed Spanish-speaking teacher Catalano Manon.
That solved the overcrowding problem for a time.
In 2004 another prison unit, the East Texas Treatment Facility (ETTF), opened in Henderson. The facility housed approximately 2,200 men and women mostly for drug, alcohol and probation violations. Hale determined to open a Sunday School ministry there too.
One of the volunteers from the Bradshaw Unit, Darrel Owens, took the job and had the class up to 50 people within a year before he moved to begin a Bible study at the Billy Moore Correctional Facility in Overton.
Hale took over Owens’ post at ETTF and within a year the class “broke into a full-fledged church” with 300 people attending, he recounted.
The inmates formed a praise band and choir. Hale said, “It’s amazing to see the talent of those inmates in there.”
Seeing the Sunday School program grow at the ETTF and Moore units opened Hale’s eyes to the problem of growth at Bradshaw. They needed more room. ETTF was built with two large gyms that could accommodate 300 people at a time. The Moore unit only houses 500 inmates, negating the need for a large multi-purpose room for its class.
But at the Bradshaw unit—where 2,000 men cycle in and out of the facility every two years or so—only 120 can meet on Sundays.
The man who once had a less-than-gracious attitude toward inmates grieves for those who do not have the opportunity to hear the gospel each week.
“While they are [in prison] they are empty,” Hale explained. “They have to be filled with something.” And if not the gospel, he shudders to think of the consequences.
Those who are discipled in prison tend not to return to prison upon release. Hale said Texas boasts of a 25 percent recidivism rate compared to the national rate of about 60 percent. He credits Christ-center programs like the Sunday School classes for those statistics.
There are approximately 4,500 inmates in Rusk County. But, Hale noted, they are not all from that region. When prisoners are released, they return to their homes across the state. If they are not prepared spiritually to re-enter society, recidivism becomes the problem of every community the former inmates call home.
But Hale does not want to scare people into giving toward the chapel project, he said. The motivation should be lives changed by the gospel. The combined ministry of the three units sees 800-900 decisions every year, Hale said. Of those, 200-250 are first-time decisions for Christ.
He is confident the Sunday School attendance would quickly double with the completion of the proposed 500-seat Bradshaw chapel. The facility has the blessing of state officials, plans have been proposed and a non-profit committee formed to solicit donations for the $1 million building. But funds have been slow in coming. The committee must have all of the money in escrow before construction can begin.
Hale said the chapel would be raised in God’s timing. Chapels have been built at other state jails (The chapels become the property of the state upon completion.). So he knows it can be done. But what has been raised to date, he said, “is just a drop in the bucket.”
“What we’ve been doing is going to any and every church who would allow us to tell the story.”
Hale said he understands that people give faithfully to other ministries that reach worldwide. But what they don’t realize, he added, is the similar impact of the Bradshaw Sunday School ministry on Texas and the world.
On a monthly basis Hale allows one of the inmates to teach the lesson. That routine once put him in a difficult situation. A heavily accented inmate from Africa was scheduled for deportation to his home country. He asked Hale if he could lead a class before he “caught the chain” (prison vernacular for leaving the prison upon release or transfer). Hale wanted to oblige but feared the man’s poor English would make the lesson ineffective. Hale relented and was overwhelmed with the results.
“I don’t know what he did but it was so good. And within two weeks he was gone,” Hale said.
What happens each Sunday in the prison units of Rusk County should not blur the big picture of what is at stake. Hale saw poetic justice in the deportation of the African inmate.
Hale said, “We think we’re in control. The United States government paid to send him to his mission field. That’s exactly how it was.”
How many other “missionaries” could be sent out from the prison at Bradshaw if more men are given the opportunity each Sunday morning to hear the gospel and be discipled?
Hale said he can’t help but wonder.
