Radix board member Ryan Pemberton recently interviewed Chris Hoke on his work with and alongside incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women. Chris Hoke is the cofounder and executive director of Underground Ministries, which mobilizes faith communities and businesses across the Pacific Northwest into relationships of mutual spiritual transformation with men and women released from prison. He is the creator of the “One Parish One Prisoner” model and movement that empowers churches to draw closer to the tombs of America’s mass incarceration system through relationship with one releasing individual, rolling away the heavy reentry barriers that keep millions of Americans shut out of our communities. Based in his years as a jail chaplain and pastor among gang members in Washington’s Skagit Valley, Chris Hoke created Underground Coffee with a former meth cook and a local coffee roaster, which led to networks of more Underground Employers in multiple industries who hire individuals leaving prison and addiction, putting the street’s “transferrable skills” to productive work in our communities today. He is the author of WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws and Across Borders (HarperOne), and lives with his wife and two small boys in Mount Vernon, WA.
Ryan Pemberton: How do you describe your work to your children?
Chris Hoke: Wow. In all my years as a gang pastor and prison-release organizer, I’ve never been asked this.
I have a story for you.
This summer, I was reading a children’s version of Oliver Twist by Dickens to my first son, Abram, who’s 8. During bedtime stories, it was jarring: from the first page, this destitute kid loses both his parents to poverty, sickness, and the abuse of the “poor houses.” Abram learned what an orphan was: a child with no mommy or daddy. He asked me if there are orphans today. I said yes. But in our country, we usually refer to kids with missing, deceased, or incarcerated parents as “foster kids” or “juvenile delinquents.” Abram said he liked the word orphan better.
As young Oliver Twist tries to survive the abuse of adults and institutions, he runs away to the streets. Other kids take him in. They teach him to steal. They are hungry and afraid of the adult who runs this sad little street operation. This was an easy way to explain gangs, as Abram already knew that Daddy helps men who have been in gangs here in the Skagit Valley.
Little Oliver gets arrested by the police and sent to prison, where he is terrified, unsafe, and alone. Abram was crushed by this.
“Daddy,” Abram asked, in his pajamas, “are there still kid prisons today?” I told him yes. There’s one downtown, a big brick building with heavy doors, where I visited teenage kids as a pastor for years, often called “juvie.”
Then Abram asked if we could bring them food. That was his immediate response. These are the innate impulses of children—to love. He hasn’t yet been indoctrinated by American society to think of kids as criminals or expensive cages as good things. I told him we aren’t allowed to bring food, but they are fed food there—food he probably wouldn’t like.
“Can we bring them markers and paper to color with, and stuff for crafts?” I said I think they’d love to have more art supplies. I felt so proud of him. “Can we bring them clothes?” he asked next. He was so curious. I said the kids have to wear orange sweats, only, in there. In case they try to run away and so they can’t hide anything or hurt each other. But when they get out, they’d probably love some clothes—new shoes, especially.
Abram got excited about this and asked me when we can start. We pinky-swore that when he’s a bit older, we can partner with my friends who visit juvie downtown and go shoe shopping with the Oliver Twists of our town when they get out.
This is the beginning of prison-reentry work: new shoes for people getting out of cages. Getting kids involved. The next generation walking together into a new story: where we belong to one another.
So, when I tell Abram that I work with men getting out of prison, he understands.
It’s also about relationships.
Since he was in diapers, Abram has known Alex, whom he considers an uncle. Abram knows that Daddy met Uncle Alex in jail Bible studies many years ago, before Alex went to a big, scary prison. He understands that Alex used to be a lost kid in gangs who hurt himself and others, and is now Daddy’s friend and his soccer coach with me. Alex is the most tender coach in the league, with tattoos on his face, who opens each practice in a circle, checking in on how we’re all doing. He knows Alex works with Daddy at the office to help many more men and women getting out of gangs and coming home from prison.
Another part of our work is a program called One Parish One Prisoner. Abram just tells his friends, “My dad helps lots of churches show Jesus’ love to people getting out of prison.”
Works for me.
Ryan: You have seen behind the curtain of our relationship with incarceration more than most. Can you speak into our relationship with punitive legal systems? Why is it so attractive to us?
Chris Hoke: I no longer believe people find it attractive, necessarily.
I think American culture has been raised on a steady diet of punitive myths—narratives—for generations. Law and Order has now reached its 30th season of programming on television. Superhero movies boast the highest budgets and box office returns. We are shaped as a society through a steady catechism of Good Guys vs. Bad Guys—wide-screen liturgies where victory over fellow humans through righteous (and often spectacular) violence and technology… saves us. Most American adults go to bed watching these stories.
The only cinematic genre where ‘bad guys’ transform—repenting to community while experiencing divine love—is Christmas movies. One month per year, Americans are presented with a counter-narrative in every telling of A Christmas Carol. I’m not sure if people recognize how powerful Scrooge’s repentance story is in reforming all our mainstream myths. But you know what? It’s undeniably attractive.
Whether it’s the hardened gang member or the wealthy capitalist, Ebenezer Scrooge is the model for all whose lives are not yet beautiful: he is conquered not through battle or prison sentence, but by recognizing he is a wounded little boy inside, that he has harmed his community, and that he doesn’t want to die before learning to live in a new way. It’s truly magnificent.
I get to see this transformation in folks leaving prison and in fearful church members every week: Scrooge’s Christmas morning joy, community members suddenly awake and desperate to love and cherish, to ask for forgiveness, and to share our days together. Repentance is the most attractive narrative we have, I believe.
But we choose the stories we tell ourselves—and to our children.
The Department of Corrections or Dickens? As David Dark writes, “Life’s too short to pretend you’re not religious.”
Ryan: What are the theological underpinnings of our commitment to a punitive worldview? Where did those commitments come from?
Chris Hoke: It’s a big question. Here’s how I think about it.
Nearly 1,500 years after Jesus’ shimmering life and message burst into human history, a few things happened in Northern Europe. The Catholic Church was as corrupt as a barrel of worms, and folks broke from it. The printing press suddenly allowed anyone to get a copy of the 66-or-so scriptures. With no Pope and no binding doctrine, a lone Swiss lawyer emerged to help interpret this intimidating tome of writings for the rightfully protesting masses.
A new Christian story was authored. We got a wrathful, all-controlling deity who is disgusted with human beings—who, in this new story, became utterly ‘depraved,’ with humanity having no essential goodness. This deity’s chief virtue is a compulsion to endlessly punish us and cause us torment, all in the name of a suspiciously European definition of ‘justice.’ And this was labeled ‘holiness.’ In this story, Jesus is no longer God in the flesh, born among us lost humans to be a divine light and heal, liberate, and save (the same word in Greek) us, even after we played out our violence on him.
Instead, Jesus’ execution by our hands oddly became a display of God’s violence and hatred directed at all humanity. Instead of God’s mighty and tender love in the resurrected Jesus conquering the powers of sin (our sickness) and death (our captivity, like a prison), in funky story, Jesus came to save us from God—his punishment—by taking the torture we deserved. If we believe this, if we kneel to this deal, the ‘good news’ is that we are spared eternal punishment and get to hang out with the Punisher in his absolute domain, singing him nonstop songs of praise for eternity.
I think these stories have consequences: we become what we worship.
So it’s not surprising that the new American nation, largely raised on this story, carried out the mass genocide of the indigenous people who were here, followed by an empire of slavery with the terrifying threat of torture, the largest military in human history, and the world’s largest prison system ever conceived. If you have a god who thinks humans are rotten to the core and allows only a select few to avoid eternal torment and punishment, you’ll naturally kneel to the spectacularly violent and feel good about creating hellish systems that send endless amounts of people there.
For me, welcoming people out of the prison tombs we’ve created, building a friendship with one ‘bad person’ in our modern hell of separation and anguish, seeing their unshakable goodness beneath all their trauma patterns (trauma = wound, sin = the sickness that festers), and learning how to walk with them into healing, prayer, and beloved community together, I think it’s the fastest way to dissolve the bad story and practice something more like the New Testament story.
Ryan: How have you seen punitive responses let us down—as a nation, as a community, as a church?
Chris Hoke: Well, punishment hasn’t saved us yet.
If it did, mass policing and imprisonment would have naturally made us the safest society ever, free of violence and crime. Obviously, that’s not the case. Outside of prisons, we are a nation of gun adoration, mass shootings, drug addiction, self-numbing tools, suicide, and staggering rates of isolation and loneliness. We are not doing well.
You’d think churches would be the remnant of hope and healing, but sadly, churches are too often the very communities drinking the most poison (largely evangelicals and Protestants, though most traditions have sipped plenty from this cup)—this narrative of how rotten we all are, steadily singing songs to a violent ruler who tortured his own child to show us what’s coming if we don’t raise our hands and surrender to him.
As you know, Ryan, our generation and those younger than us have healthily started to say “No thanks” to this narrative—and its modern idols—leaving churches en masse. But loneliness is on the rise, especially here in Cascadia, the least-churched part of the country.
How are we called back into a better story?
This is where those leaving prison offer us so much hope, as our mentors. They are way ahead of mainstream culture in recognizing that their lives aren’t working. So many folks leaving prison have the moral courage to learn an entirely new way of being, asking for others’ help. They can guide us vulnerably into recognizing the rock bottom we’ve found ourselves in as a nation. That we human beings are, yes, unshakably good. We can repent, learn new skills, and live a different story together.
Ryan: What are you looking forward to in terms of your work with One Parish One Prisoner?
Chris Hoke: As more communities and congregations learn to love one person coming home from hell through One Parish One Prisoner, I’d love to see a groundswell of new stories. Not just in a metaphorical sense, but in the particulars: grandmothers in retirement sharing recipes with a former gang member through prison letters, fathers reflecting on parenting with their new friend in prison during visits, youth group members making candles to fundraise for their friend’s release and covering court debt and rent as they start a new life.
Presbyterian churchgoers rallying around immigration court cases for their friend in custody, his young son outside the gate with them, now friends with the team’s child of the same age.
A guy home from prison joining the elderly bell choir. Another doing downhill biking, another drafting monthly business plans with team members! They were strangers to each other just two years ago.
I hear these kinds of stories all the time from our teams. One team flew down to Mexico after their incarcerated friend was deported following his prison term. They sent me a photo of them all together in front of an old Aztec pyramid. These relationships could take us anywhere.
I’m looking forward to how this can quietly create new cultures as their friends, schoolmates, and coworkers get wind of it and sense the odd joy being unlocked.
Ryan: What, in your experience, has been helpful for changing minds about punitive systems? How have you helped others see its limits? What are our alternatives?
Chris Hoke: I think it’s a game-changer when you build an actual relationship with one person inside the punishment system. This is what Bryan Stevenson calls “the power of proximity.” Getting close to the actual people and their experience in the oppressive systems we’ve normalized— Friendship is as close as it gets.
When OPOP team members exchange just a few initial letters with a stranger in prison, a light bulb goes off. They often write to us about how suddenly grieved or angry they are by the prison policies that punish, punish, punish. They are suddenly disgusted—conservatives and liberals, young and old—by all the court and legal fees blooming with interest while their friend serves their sentence in a cage.
These volunteer teams in the local community almost naturally begin organizing and advocating on behalf of their vulnerable friend.
Ryan: You’ve been spending more time with the Eastern Orthodox tradition in recent years. What led you to that? How has it been helpful for you—personally and professionally?
Chris Hoke: The black robes, all the art and icons, the incense, and the beards—that’s cool, but that’s not the heart of it. And definitely not how Orthodoxy has been turned into a nationalist tool for right-wing authoritarians in both the East and West. That’s the unfortunate casing.
Eastern Orthodox doctrine has preserved, in some way, the early Christian core imagination. They see the Reformed ideas I described earlier as a very late heresy—no question. Phew!
Over a decade ago, I feared I might no longer be a Christian, as I wanted nothing to do with that ugly narrative of God. But I re-read Dostoevsky’s glowing pages describing an Orthodox monk, Father Zosima. I found that it wasn’t Dostoevsky’s invention, but the best of the Orthodox tradition, largely drawn from Saint Isaac of Syria. Read his work.
The early Orthodox tradition viewed sin as sickness to be healed by the church (the healing institution) and sacraments (divine medicine). Sin wasn’t seen as a crime to be punished by a Western European legal monarch. The central salvation story isn’t a substitutionary death on the cross, but the Resurrection: when Christ breaks out of the prison of Death/Hades and opens a new path in human history, allowing humanity to be liberated. It’s poetic, mystical, full of mystery, imagination, and reverence. I love the bowing, full out on the carpet, like prayer burpees, embodied as ever. Almost instantly, my mind quiets and my heart expands.
The Orthodox icon of the Resurrection—the Anastasis—just Google it for yourself. This image is central to the faith, more so than the Roman Empire’s old execution symbol. In the Anastasis, Jesus breaks open the gates of Hades from within. He opens the underground realm of locks, keys, darkness, and all that we repress. He tenderly takes the hands of all humanity coming out of the opening tombs. Sitting with this deep tradition before me, I realized I wasn’t crazy: I had always been moving to the rhythm of the original Christian story.
That icon is above my screen as I respond to your questions now. It’s part of all our One Parish One Prisoner materials. As the homies would say, ‘This is the O.G. stuff right here.’
I don’t plan to formally convert to today’s Orthodox circles. They’ve just done a good job preserving the early Jesus followers’ story. God bless them for that. Their hymns of repentance are so tender, with no groveling or self-contempt. So many prayers end with, ‘For Thou art a friend and lover of all humankind.’ Bam.
Oh, and the Orthodox tradition doesn’t think right theology, brain chess, can get you very far. They’re big on moving from doctrine to prayer and love. Moving from the head to the heart. Or rather, the head (they use the mystical Greek term for mind, nous) descending into the heart. I love it so.
Ryan: Can you share a bit about your own prayer practices? How have your prayer practices changed from when you began this work?
Chris Hoke: Back when I was spending a lot of time in jails, writing to guys in solitary confinement across Washington State most weeks, I also began visiting monasteries for my own retreats and solitude. I wanted to get away from the worship music I had been leading for decades and learn how to be still and silent. It felt like a way to connect with my friends in their cells, who would write to me for advice on prayer when they were alone.
Monks spend a lot of time in male institutions—simple food, poor clothing, no women, and no cell phones—all within rooms called cells.
I wanted to learn how to repurpose those monastic prayer practices—contemplative prayer that goes deeper than words—so I could offer something similar to my buddies in prison.
I found a guy named Ray Leonardini, who was doing Centering Prayer in Folsom Prison, CA, in the chapel where Johnny Cash famously performed. Visiting there altered my life. I prayed with a massive circle of men inside Folsom and realized that descending into our hearts in silence is like doing internal prison ministry. It’s about going down into our repressed subconscious, opening locked doors within, visiting our most wounded and ugly parts, and learning how to embrace them—just as I had learned to build surprising friendships with men locked inside prisons. Does that make sense?
Whether our staff uses Welcoming Prayer to begin, or Centering Prayer as a 20-minute practice using a single word as a master key to unlock the heart, I’ve been experimenting with any practice that helps me and others vulnerably enter our inner “underground” realm with Christ’s love.
This practice has helped me see how much of a control-obsessed warden I can be within myself. I realize how much I punish myself and lock away my needy and wounded parts that cause trouble. Now, I think of it as an abolitionist prayer practice. I no longer believe we can create new systems in society until we first practice—and experience—unlocking doors, healing, and reconciliation within.
That’s a practice I want to share with my boys. When Abram is old enough to visit juvie with me, he might see reflections of himself: his own wounds, fears, humor, and strength. I hope he’ll learn to embrace them all.