Columbus St. Cecilia Church has joined a ministry connecting parishioners with prisoners in a mentor-like relationship of encouragement and hope designed to ease the transition from prison to community when the inmates are released.
The ministry, known as HOPE Letters, was begun in late 2019 by James Clay, who spent nine years in the Chillicothe Correctional Institution, and the Rev. Amelia Boomershine of Grace United Methodist Church in Dayton. The two had met at the prison during a Biblical storytelling contest Boomershine conducted and reconnected after Clay’s release.
Today, the ministry works with 10 churches, seven of them Methodist, in Columbus, Zanesville, Powell, Dayton, Athens, Findlay, Lima and Cincinnati and is to add a Methodist church in Toledo soon.
St. Cecilia is the only Catholic church involved to date. It has seven people writing to incarcerated women at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville and imprisoned men at the Noble Correctional Institution in Caldwell. Statewide, about 100 participants in the ministry are writing to inmates at those two prisons and the Chillicothe, Madison and Warren correctional institutions.
Ministry participants write letters back and forth. Inmates can write about whatever they choose – anything from their plans for re-entering society once they are released to their favorite saints. Participants at St. Cecilia meet and share letters they have received and then help one another write responses.
“It’s a great way (for letter writers) to meet other people from other faith-based (church) communities,” said Venita Nevis, the program’s coordinator at St. Cecilia. “Just to receive a card, a correspondence, can make a resident’s day. These people are waiting with open arms to having someone to correspond with other than someone they are incarcerated with.”
“It has really brought us together as a group,” said letter writer Garnett Purnell of St. Cecilia. “It has brought us much closer together with our spirituality.”
“The big thing is the relational part, trying to be relational with somebody and be encouraging,” said letter writer Warren Wright, former president of the diocesan St. Vincent de Paul Society. “Pope Francis talks a lot about encouraging people. I think HOPE Letters is a good way, short of going into the prisons one on one. It is a good way to encounter someone who happens to be in prison at the time.”
Wright said the letters ministry started at St. Cecilia about a year ago through contacts made between Purnell, who is the parish St. Vincent de Paul Conference president, and ARCH (Accompanying Returning Citizens with Hope), a program to help former prisoners, which was established by the diocesan Social Concerns Office and the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
Clay said the relationship between the writers and the prisoners is not a pen pal relationship. “The strength of it is that we’re doing it as a group,” he said. “HOPE Letters is a project that brings hope not only to the person who is incarcerated, but to the writer.
“This is truly not a worldly thing but a kingdom of God thing. Any man or woman who believes in God and has a heart for change and believes that anyone can change with the help of HOPE Letters is the doorway that will change the lives of people.”
“HOPE Letters has really broadened their (inmates’) horizons and helped them be aware of all the issues around our criminal justice system, which is really impactful to our whole society,” Boomershine said. “Some do have a connection with prison, but they won’t talk about it because of the shame. So this helps them to be able to be present in the Church with that situation and do something about it, or at least know that there are those who care for them.”
“It brings hope by letting people know that somebody cares. That goes a long way. And if somebody believes it at their core – they’re good and worthy and beloved of God, no matter what they’ve done, no matter what’s been done to them – that’s the starting place. And that’s a place from which people can have the courage to do the hard work of changing that needs to happen.”
Boomershine already had established a group for families with incarcerated loved ones at her church when Clay attended one of its meetings. Group members asked for his perspective on the best thing that they could do for inmates, and he responded, “‘Let me tell you how valuable a letter is.’ I told them about how many men and women inside don’t get mail because their families, their communities and churches have given up on them. And that’s how HOPE Letters started,” he said.
“The person inside may feel like they’ve lost all hope. Then they get a friendly letter from someone they don’t know, and they say, ‘Who is this angel, this unknown person that cares about me, who even thinks about writing to me?’ They respond, a correspondence starts, and that person starts thinking he may have a future when he’s released. That’s the impact these letters have,” he said.
In their quest to bring parishes and faiths together, the people of St. Cecilia encourage anyone interested in the HOPE Letters ministry to bring the project to their own communities.
HOPE Letters is a signature initiative of the All In Community ministry of the West Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church. It is available to other non-United Methodist groups to adopt as a framework for mentoring by correspondence with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
To obtain a manual on how the ministry works, contact Reba Collins of the Methodist conference at (513) 262-0184 or [email protected]. Clay may be reached at (614) 507-1827 or [email protected].
Jenna Mar is a Columbus Bishop Watterson High School graduate and a student at Kent State University.
Tim Puet contributed to this story.
