IT IS understandable, when there is a chronic shortage of parish priests in England and Wales, if dioceses are reluctant to direct clergy and Readers towards working in prison as chaplains. The Bishop of Gloucester and Bishop for Prisons, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, believes that this is wrong-headed. “I absolutely long for more people to become prison chaplains,” she says.
“Often there are people in dioceses — even, perhaps, bishops — who don’t see chaplaincy as as important or as significant as parish ministry. We preach the gospel and talk about lives being restored — well, if ever you want to find people at their most broken, go to the prison.
“We need to be flagging this as one of the really key ministries we should be training people for. I would love to see every curate [as part of] their parish training do a placement in a prison, or at least go and see what it’s about. Otherwise, how will people ever know if this is their calling?”
Placements are certainly the best training for prison chaplaincy, the Revd David Hinks says. He was working for the diocese of Winchester, in what was then the department for social responsibility, when he met some “pretty inspirational” prison chaplains. “That piqued my interest,” he remembers. “When I was recommended for ordination [in 2003], I already knew that at some point it would develop into ministry within the criminal justice system.”
He was struck by Hebrews 13:3: “Remember those in prison as though you were in prison with them.” He explains: “That was quite a powerful verse for me because prisons aren’t really thought of that much. People who live near one just see a high wall and, at best, perhaps look away. At worst, they think: ‘They should lock them up and throw away the key.’”
As a curate on the Isle of Wight, he began working at the local prison for one day a week as a chaplaincy volunteer. “That’s where I really came alive,” he says. “Meeting with people sometimes at their lowest point, their angriest, their most forlorn point — I felt I was able to help them.
“As someone who has been a victim of crime myself, I don’t condone or accept crime in any way whatsoever, but it’s important [to bear in mind] that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God — and everyone is a child of God.”
The Revd David Hinks, Managing Chaplain of HM Prison and Young Offender Institution Winchester
Today, he works at HM Prison/Young Offender Institution Winchester, in the city centre, which also holds young offenders aged over 18. As its managing chaplain, he co-ordinates a team of chaplains of various faiths and is part of the prison’s senior leadership.
The Revd Lesley Greenwood-Haigh had a 30-year career as a radiographer in the NHS before she was ordained in 2012.
“I knew that God was calling me, but I didn’t want to be a parish priest, because I think I would have got annoyed with the inconsequentials of parish ministry. I remember arguing with God a few weeks before I was due to be ordained deacon: ‘Why do you want me to be a priest? For everything that I’m passionate about, I don’t need to be one.’ And he said to me, clearly, which is unusual: ‘The collar is the key to get you into the places where I need you to be.’”
She had “no interest” in prison ministry, until she spent two weeks in a high-security prison in the course of her theological training. “I came face to face with some people whose crimes had been quite horrific. I was supposed to be ministering to them and yet what they had done was evil.
“I was really struggling, until I read something that has stayed with me: ‘There’s nothing that anyone can do that can completely mar God’s image within them.’ That’s who we are ministering to: the image of God.”
Over those two weeks, she says, she “fell in love with prison ministry because of the rawness of people, because if you’re in prison you can’t put on a mask”.
As a curate in West Yorkshire, her training incumbent allowed her to do a session a week at HM Prison/Young Offender Institution New Hall, a women’s prison that also houses young offenders aged 18 to 25. Today, she is its managing chaplain.
CANON Vanda Perrett’s calling to prison chaplaincy was also unexpectedly direct. As a 30-year-old nursery-school teacher, she had been recruited by the managing chaplain of HM Prison Guys Marsh, in Dorset, to teach special-needs reading and writing there four days a week, while also supporting chaplaincy as a volunteer.
Canon Vanda Perrett, Managing Chaplain of Werrington Young Offender Institution
“I went to have a look around, and I felt as if I’d come home,” she says. After the managing chaplain fell ill, she began — rather irregularly — carrying out his statutory duties, conducting services and doing pastoral visits, “because there was nobody else to do them”.
The prisoners subsequently wrote to the Bishop, she recalls, and said: “Could you please ordain her? We tell her all our sins, and we’d like her to give us the absolution.” When she learnt what they had done, she started the process of discernment. “I wanted to be able to say to them, ‘I have tried, but the Church didn’t want me.’ I was astounded to be accepted.”
She was ordained deacon in 1998. A priest cannot be employed as a prison chaplain before completing a curacy and then, owing to personal circumstances, Canon Perrett stayed on in parish ministry. It was not until 2020 that she chanced to see an advertisement for a managing chaplain at Werrington Young Offender Institution in Staffordshire.
“I felt impelled to open the job spec. I’m not someone who often hears God’s voice, but, as I read it, it was almost like being punched in the solar plexus. In that moment, I heard God saying: ‘You will go there.’”
Today, at Werrington, she is chaplain to 76 boys aged 15 to 18. “In this job, I’m their nan,” she says. At Guys Marsh, most of the prisoners had been old enough to be her father or grandfather.
The Revd Edith Peck has worked for nearly five years in Hollesley, Suffolk, as a part-time chaplain in Warren Hill, a prison for serious offenders, and Hollesley Bay, an open prison and young-offender institution for men over 18. “I feel like I have finally found my niche, in my sixties,” she says.
Previously, she had “done various jobs”, such as “quite a bit of admin over the years, worked for charities, cared for my dad and other people, been a mother mostly”.
She was licensed as a Reader in 2019. Two years later, she recalls, “I was looking for work and I saw a generic advert for prison chaplains. I’d never been in a prison before in my life and I was worried about how I would respond, but I can honestly say I felt straightaway at peace there.”
The Revd Edith Peck, Anglican Chaplain of HM Prison Warren Hill and HM Prison and Young Offender Institution Hollesley Bay
She was ordained priest in 2024, having originally attended a Bishops’ Advisory Panel in 2016 and not been recommended for training. “I was reluctant to revisit [the idea of ordination], but the prisoners spoke to me about being their shepherd and bringing the sacrament to them, and that renewed my desire,” she says.
The Revd Dr Richard Bunday was recently appointed managing chaplain of Haverigg, an open prison in Cumbria which primarily houses men convicted of sexual offences who are preparing to be released. He previously spent five years at Garth, a long-term high-security prison in Lancashire.
After he was ordained, at the age of 23, he spent 20 years in parish ministry, latterly as Vicar of St Michael’s, Kirkham, a market town in Lancashire where there is an open prison. Over the ten years that he served there, he says, “We must have had 25 to 30 prisoners coming into the church on temporary licence as they began to reintegrate. I started to take a keen interest in prison ministry and thought: Can I contribute in some way?”
WHAT are the hallmarks of a good prison chaplain? Humility, Mr Hinks says, and “a certain amount of vulnerability”. “It’s about being able to listen, and able to cry, both with people and for people. And you’ve got to be honest and speak the gospel truth. Prisoners can see through someone who’s trying to be something they’re not.”
Prison chaplains are not allowed to evangelise, but the maxim attributed to St Francis of Assisi is very relevant, Mr Hinks says. “‘Preach the gospel. Use words if you have to.’ It’s very much about demonstrating a better way of behaving.”
“As chaplains, we have to embed FOMO [fear of missing out],” Canon Perrett says. “We have to make our lives look so attractive: in the way in which we handle ourselves and the way we treat other people.
“The number of boys who tell me: ‘God cannot love me because of what I’ve done.’ We don’t have people in here because they’ve stolen a car. Some of the crimes are awful, but we have to love people as God would love them, and sometimes that is very hard to do. I say to them: ‘You need to see yourself as God sees you, and you need to help me to see you as God sees you.”
Canon Helen Dearnley, Anglican Chaplaincy and Faith Adviser for HM Prison and Probation Service
For Canon Helen Dearnley, Anglican chaplaincy and faith adviser for the Prison and Probation Service, “the rawness and the realness” is one of the joys of prison ministry. “Often, in parish, people will shake your hand at the end of the service and say: ‘Good sermon, Vicar!’ In prison, there is a real intensity in the responses we get. You can’t hide behind platitudes: there’s a hunger to know more.”
“Questions do come, like ‘Why did God make you good and me bad?’” Mr Hinks says. “It’s the sensitivity and the care we take in answering those sort of questions that makes a good prison chaplain.”
Miss Peck agrees that prisoners “can spot bullshit a mile away”. For her, the essential quality is “just being available — and interested. Many of them have not had anybody remotely interested in anything they’ve got to say or how they’re feeling. Our door is always open. They’ll come in to us full of rage and they’ll feel much better when they’ve just had a rant.”
In a women’s prison, Mrs Greenwood-Haigh says, the most vital skill is “being able to see beyond what they present to us”. “They’ve hidden themselves all their lives really,” she says. “Many of our women have no self-worth. You’ve got to show up. You’ve got to be persistent and just keep giving and giving and giving, and not expect them to give anything in return because they can’t. I can never say to them, ‘I understand what you’re going through,’ because there is absolutely no way that I can understand the lives they live.”
Women’s prison ministry in particular is “incarnational ministry,” she says. “If you don’t have a passion for it, it will destroy you. At New Hall, we are dealing with women who have had unspeakable things done to them, and they accept that as normal. You hear dreadful things, and it can be overwhelming. You need to be very resilient and very self-aware: you need to know what your own triggers may be.”
CHAPLAINS have statutory duties each day — visiting everybody new in the prison each day, visiting those in health care, those in segregation (who are under restricted movement in single cells, usually for their behaviour), and those preparing to leave prison to go into the community, as well as Sunday worship week by week, and additional services for holidays and holy days.
To be a prison chaplain is definitely a calling, Dr Bunday says. “You know when you’re in the right place.” In some ways, he says, his ministry in prison is no different from his parish ministry — “We all need to be needed and wanted and loved” — but he believes that two essential characteristics for clergy working in prisons are “being non-judgemental and being confident in attentive, respectful, and non-coercive listening”.
“Many of the lives we’re dealing with are shaped by trauma, whether that’s physical, emotional, or systemic, and that requires justice and care and compassion,” he says. Part of the ministry of prison chaplains “is creating safe and predictable spaces for prisoners, offering gentleness in a sometimes harsh environment and enabling prisoners to find their dignity”.
A prison chaplain needs to be “as wise as a serpent as well as as gentle as a dove”, Mrs Greenwood-Haigh says. “We have to be cynical, because the women have had to learn to be manipulative to get what they want. It isn’t just the person in front of you: it could be somebody else that is putting pressure on them because they know that they’ve got your ear.”
Of course, there are challenges — besides the inevitable burden of paperwork and the constraints of getting everything cleared. “Prisons are not nice places,” Mr Hinks says. “You can’t dress that up. You do get rejected at times, and there can be verbal and physical abuse sometimes.”
Dr Bunday describes the work as “costly”. “Chaplains have to be brave and grounded in the belief that grace is bigger than failure and that humanity is never reducible to the worst thing a person has done. If you hold that at the forefront of your mind, then hope emerges.”
What he has found most disturbing is when a prisoner has taken their own life. He has seen the impact that this has had, not just on other prisoners, but on staff as well. “Sadly, I’ve been pastorally involved in many such incidents,” he says.
None the less, being a prison chaplain is the “most remarkable” job, Canon Perrett says. “As a chaplain, you can make a difference every single day — sometimes just by choosing to sit with someone and have a cup of coffee, because they’ve never had that before.”
“It’s so rewarding, just to be a listening ear,” Miss Peck says. “We haven’t got an agenda; we’re not looking at our watches going: ‘Oh, your time’s up.’ If somebody needs to come and talk to us, we have that freedom to allow them to.”
The people she works with mainly, she says, “are hungry to be part of a Christian community, to learn [about the faith], and to worship together”. She says that attendance at an average Sunday service at Warren Hill is about 20 to 24, out of about 260 prisoners. “If you extrapolated that to the wider population, our churches would be full to bursting.”
The Revd Lesley Greenwood-Haigh, Managing Chaplain of HM Prison and Young Offender Institution New Hall
Mrs Greenwood-Haigh says: “The biggest joy is when you see hope coming back into somebody’s eyes. We do have incredible success stories. We’ve got somebody in with us now who, at the age of nine, saw her father murder her mother. She’s been coming into prison from the age of 18, and she’s now in her early thirties — and she’s just got confirmed.”
“The most wonderful thing is hearing from people who have left the establishment and have not reoffended,” Dr Bunday says. “They’re settled with a home, with quality relationships — and they are beginning to flourish as a result of their experience in custody and the support that’s been given to them.”
Once someone becomes a prison chaplain, “they tend to stay with us for a very long time,” Canon Dearnley says. “The average stay in a prison is six or seven years, and people will work round several prisons — often for a large proportion of their ministerial life.
“They might serve in a local prison, then move on to a long-term prison — which is like chalk and cheese — before working in a high-security prison, perhaps, or a female prison, or even a YOI. Each sort of prison requires different skills.”
“You never work in this job alone,” Canon Perrett says. Not only do prison chaplains have access to “all sorts of support networks”, but “God’s presence is with you all the time — and I’ve never had that same experience in my ministry in parish life.”
A LAY person cannot be an Anglican prison chaplain unless they are a Church Army evangelist or a licensed Reader. Nonetheless, there are many opportunities to get involved in ministry to prisoners. Chaplaincy volunteers, who might help out with carol services, for example, do not need the same level of clearance as chaplains.
“If you’ve got a prison near you, contact the chaplain and ask how you can support them,” Bishop Treweek says. “What do they need from you? What do people in prison need from you?”
She would like to see a “mutual relationship” between Christians on both sides of the prison gates, “both learning from our prison chaplains and supporting them”.
“One of our chaplaincy volunteers was in New Hall herself many years ago and she and I go round different churches and deanery synods to try to get people on board,” Mrs Greenwood-Haigh says. “What I would love is to have an advocate, hopefully in each parish, but definitely in each deanery, who can provide a link between the prison and faith communities. These women get a lot of support in here, but once they go out through those gates, that’s it.”
It is not uncommon for prisoners to find faith in prison or renew a faith they already had, but only about one in five are able to find a faith community they can connect with once they are released.
Bishop Treweek is anxious that more churches should sign up with the Welcome Directory, which offers advice and training for people of all faiths who want to welcome prison leavers and lists places of worship that open their doors to people who have served time. The roster of Anglican churches, she says, is “woefully thin”.
“People get very nervous about safeguarding, but I always say: ‘You’ve got people in your congregations already who have been in prison, you just don’t know it.’”
welcomedirectory.org.uk