By Message Staff
PINEVILLE – Any given life can be transformed through Jesus Christ, even a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary President Chuck Kelley said Monday, June 5.
“Never forget you can change your life,” Kelley told those attending the monthly First@First Business Leaders luncheon at First Baptist Church in Pineville. “You can be transformed. A stale marriage can come alive. Kids that are breaking your heart can be made different and new. Jesus Christ can make anybody new.
“If you don’t believe me, you come with me to the cell blocks at Angola,” he continued. “And if you just walk around with me, you will pick out our students instantly because you will see something is different about these guys. They will stand out.”
Since 1995, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary has held classes at Angola to train inmates who were incarcerated in what was once known as the bloodiest prison in the United States. Now, instead of committing crimes, thousands have accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior and the prison has seen an 85 percent drop in violence.
To date, 319 inmates have graduated from the seminary’s extension program, and some of those graduates have even transferred to other prisons as missionaries. Kelley said at least 100 inmates are baptized inside the prison every year.
NOBTS/Leavell College has active programs also at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, St. Gabriel; the Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman, Miss.; Phillips State Prison, Buford, Ga.; and the Hardee Correctional Institute, Bowling Green, Fla.
In September 2015, Kelley dedicated a new 11,000-square-foot building that houses its extension center, built by the inmates and funded by donors.
The Joan Horner Center has a computer lab, two classrooms, an auditorium and library, and is named in memory of benefactor Joan Horner, founder of Premier Designs of Dallas. She and husband Andy Horner were longtime supporters of the Angola ministry.
Kelley told the business leaders that in the time NOBTS has held classes at Angola, none of the seminary graduates have asked him for a letter of recommendation to help them get an early release from the prison.
“They know they have done bad things, but they know Jesus Christ can make them different,” he said. “And they want something different to happen in their life.”
In a question and answer time after his message, Kelley was asked how the seminary persevered after the campus was filled with water after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in August 2005.
He said 10 days following the storm, the seminary faculty gathered at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary at Fort Worth, Texas, for a weekend retreat. There, they prayed, worshipped and in the final day mapped out a plan to move forward.
“In that one day under those very traumatic conditions they literally reinvented the entire curriculum of the seminary,” Kelley recalled. “And they came up with every single way classes could be taught.”
