Contemplative Prayer in Prison?

When the Invitation gained its nonprofit status in 2017, our mission statement was: a practice of spiritual direction invigorated by the movements of the Holy Spirit in a prison.

One visitor to our website sent me an email to say I had missed a typo—on our main landing page no less. He assumed I mean to say “movements of the Spirit in a person,” not a “prison.”
It pains me that it is so difficult to describe the nature of what the Holy Spirit is making evident in and through the Invitation. Sometimes I want to say, “you know…we are just trying to be like Jesus. We want to pray and act like him. So we pray in a prison.”

Since 2017, the Invitation has grown, and I’ve needed to re-write the mission statement to better reflect the larger scope of how the Spirit is leading us. It’s an agonizing exercise when I truly want to put the prison practices front and center in anything I talk about…ever again. But, somehow the use of the word “prison” next to the word “prayer,” somehow this confuses people. To be fair, it would have confused me ten years ago.

In January of 2014, I began serving alongside Joseph Byrd in contemplative prayer practices and spiritual direction at the EC Brooks Correctional Facility. In the Fall of 2017, Joseph departed and I assumed the lead role of a small group of volunteers who continue to visit the prison twice a month. The practice involves an hour of group spiritual direction in the morning with a larger group of 15-20 men. The afternoon is a two-hour session with a smaller group of prisoners who join me to grow our ability to facilitate sacred conversations as directors. 

When someone becomes a healing presence, transformative ripple effect move out through us. When this happens in a prison? Sign me up. I want a front row seat. Over the years I have watched the men take more initiative, leadership, and ownership in spiritual direction practices. They stories they share about the yard, the cell block, with their bunkies, and guards reveal how our practice extends beyond our meetings.

One prisoner describes kind, self-controlled confidence in his growing ability to listen to others with patience and generosity. Another reports how he chose not to use violence in the yard to resolve conflict. And yet another bears witness to emerging self-love and the ability to forgive himself in ways that allow him to be patient and forgiving of others.

This is not a practice I could have imagined ten years ago. It’s not something I can make happen. It’s the genius creativity of the Holy Spirit. Time and space for contemplative listening in a prison; it’s not a tradition prison outreach ministry where I arrive at the prison to exclusively benefit the prisoners. It’s is a shared prayer practice among equals, a mutual giving and receiving of God. I go into the prison to see Jesus in and among the prisoners in ways we don’t find him outside, even in the church.

Prison Practice During the Pandemic?

The pandemic has kept us out of the prison for over two years. It has been very difficult to navigate the seismic shifts of the world, our country, and the church without being able to engage the deep spiritual conversations with my incarcerated brothers. They have laughed at me with disbelief over the years as I have said several times:

”You are the most sane group of human beings I know.”

They have each made significant mistakes. They each have every rational reason to harden their hearts. Somehow, despite the darkness they have endured and continue to endure—somehow they still come to pray, to sit quietly and listen with open hearts with a kind of earthy vulnerability that keeps me grounded in the reality of hope. That’s holy sanity.

The world was already insane before the pandemic. Today, there is very little that can be hidden.


The first two cohorts of the School of Prayer were launched in 2019 as my DMin project comparing and contrasting the experiences of one cohort inside the prison and one outside. The scope of my project was a spirituality of confinement, how the prison is a kind of modern day desert. My thesis was that the prison offered particular advantages for the sake of spiritual formation. I intended to document tangible signs of growth within the prison cohort that would outpace the outside group.

Sadly, the pandemic ended my access to the prison cohort, however the substantial growth of the SOP in the two previous years has proven the discernment of my thesis accurate. This May of 2022 55 people have completed the SOP and five people have completed our first pilot year of the School of Contemplative Listening. The pandemic thrust the globe into its own kind of confinement. The spiritual wilderness of the pandemic has caused sixty people to discern that determined, practical devotion to God is essential to their well-being.

Conversation #1 Joseph Byrd OLF no. 5 /November 2, 2016

This is the first conversation I did with Joseph. We talk about our friends in the prison some here.

Renovaré Podcast Episode 84 - Spiritual Direction in Prison // Joshua Banner

In this episode of the Renovaré podcast, Nathan Foster graciously draws out much of the scope of what we are up to in the prison.

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