Walking Into the Worst Place on Earth
In 1969, Chuck Colson was one of the most powerful men in Washington. By 1974, he was Federal Prisoner 23226 at Maxwell Air Force Base prison in Alabama, convicted for his role in Watergate.
Before his sentencing, a friend named Tom Phillips handed him a copy of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Colson sat in his car and wept. Something broke open. He gave his life to Jesus that night in a driveway in Massachusetts.
What Prison Taught Him
But the real transformation happened behind bars. Colson watched men -- men everyone had written off -- wrestle with genuine questions about meaning, guilt, and whether redemption was possible for someone who had destroyed everything.
He realised these were not bad people in a bad place. They were broken people in a broken system. And nobody was telling them they could be restored.
When Colson was released in 1975, he did the one thing nobody expected from a disgraced political operative: he went back to prison. Not as an inmate. As a servant.
Prison Fellowship
In 1976, Colson founded Prison Fellowship, which became the world's largest outreach to prisoners and their families. By 2025, the organisation had operated in over 120 countries, reaching hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people annually.
The programme did not just preach. It provided job training, mentoring, restorative justice programmes, and family support. Angel Tree, one of its initiatives, delivered Christmas gifts to children of prisoners on behalf of their incarcerated parents -- reconnecting families the system had severed.
Colson once said: "I found God in the last place I expected -- not in the corridors of power, but in a prison cell."
What This Means for You
The places you least want to go may be exactly where you encounter God most clearly. Colson found purpose not by climbing back to influence, but by descending into the place of his humiliation and choosing to serve the people there.