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Some 800 inmates at the Angola prison in Louisiana gathered to view “A New Hope,” a documentary produced by the North American Mission Board on New Orleans Seminary’s extension center at the penitentiary.
ANGOLA, La. (BP) — “Hate and indifference” are the only emotions Donald Biermann says he once knew.
The 54-year-old was “always coiled and ready to strike,” “permeated” with evil – and much like the possessed man whose encounter with Jesus delivered him from a legion of demons, as recorded in the Gospels.
“What I really wanted was to be left alone. I trusted no one and I tolerated no one,” said Biermann, an inmate at Angola, the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Now serving a life sentence for second degree murder, his fourth incarceration, Biermann also had a personal encounter with Jesus.
Biermann was among some 800 Angola inmates who attended a viewing of “A New Hope,” a new North American Mission Board documentary heralding God’s work at Angola through an extension center of New Orleans Seminary. The documentary was featured on season two of NAMB’s “On Mission Xtra” television program, which aired earlier this year on FamilyNet.
Biermann is a 2005 graduate of the seminary’s undergraduate program at Angola and a missionary to others imprisoned at correctional institutions across Louisiana.
Since the NOBTS extension center opened in 1996, 147 former and current inmates have embraced a calling to the ministry and earned bachelor of arts in Christian ministry degrees. Currently, 120 inmates are enrolled, extension center director John Robson said.
“Seventy percent of our students became Christians after they came [to Angola],” Robson said.
The Bible college, as the Angola extension center also is called, has changed the prison’s atmosphere. In 1995, Angola reported 1,016 violent incidents, including assaults, murders, suicides, and escapes. In 2008, there were only 376 incidences of violence, mostly inmate-on-inmate assaults without weapons, according to prison records.
“It’s bigger than any one of us,” Robson said of the center. “It’s not about us. It’s about God being allowed to come in here and do what He does best.”
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Chuck Kelley, right, president of New Orleans Seminary, interviews former Angola inmate Clifford Jones after the viewing of the documentary “A New Hope,” featuring Jones and other students and graduates from the seminary’s extension center at the Louisiana prison.
The New Hope documentary chronicles Angola warden Burl Cain’s work to reform the prison and its prisoners through the introduction of seminary training and its resultant effects.
When Congress discontinued the use of Pell Grants for higher education in prisons in 1993, such opportunities ended at Angola. In an effort to restore higher education there, in 1995 Cain asked the seminary to open an on-site college. The NOBTS administration embraced the idea.
“The potential of what could happen in humans’ lives” was NOBTS president Chuck Kelley’s motivation, seeing the rare opportunity for a seminary to educate prisoners who then can minister to fellow inmates, prison visitors and others.
“God reached down in the most obscure place and raised up diamonds,” Kelley said.
Inmates must have a high school diploma or GED, profess a ministry calling, and receive Cain’s approval to enroll at Angola’s extension center, which has the same academic requirements as the seminary’s Leavell College in New Orleans.
Angola’s current population includes 70 NOBTS graduates. They lead congregations at the six interfaith chapels on the prison grounds, assist chaplains in ministry, and, in a new program, serve as missionaries for three-month stints at other correctional facilities in the state.
Currently, 28 incarcerated graduates are ministering in seven state correctional centers and the State Police Barracks, according to Angola communications officer Gary Young.
Many graduates have been released, including a former inmate featured in the documentary, Clifford Jones, who now serves as assistant pastor at St. John Baptist Church in New Orleans and owns a small home remodeling business.
“The college has been a beacon of light to me,” Jones said. “It has given me so much strength, and study habits [and] hermeneutics to understand and explain the Gospel.”
Encouraged by the success at Angola, NOBTS has opened extension centers at Phillips State Prison in Buford and in Mississippi and is making plans to do the same in Florida and Alabama. NOBTS can open a prison extension center for as little as $60,000.
Diana Chandler is a freelance writer in New Orleans. To view or download the documentary, “A New Hope,” visit the North American Mission Board’s www.omxtv.com website.