Cory Martin on Hope and Transformation in Elkhart County Jail Ministry

In this episode, we delve into the extraordinary work of Elkhart County Jail Ministry and its commitment to transforming lives. Our conversation starts with a detailed introduction to the ministry's initiatives, highlighting how individuals are provided with opportunities and support to lead meaningful lives post-incarceration. We'll explore the impactful journey of Cory Martin, the chaplain and CEO, who transitioned from a congressional aide to a jail chaplain with a mission of humanitarian service. The episode sheds light on the deeply personal experiences that shaped Corey’s path and his innovative approach toward rehabilitation.

00:00:28: Introduction of Cory Martin

00:00:35: Cory's background and transformation of jail ministry

00:01:10: Overview of Elkhart County Jail and ministry activities

00:02:18: History of the Elkhart County Jail Ministry

00:03:05: Cory's journey to becoming the chaplain

00:04:00: The impact of relationships on Cory's chaplaincy

00:05:05: COVID-19's impact on the jail ministry

00:06:00: Challenges faced by released inmates

00:08:00: Importance of stable housing and reentry homes

00:10:00: Stigma and challenges of having a felony conviction

00:12:00: Purpose and redemption in jail ministry

00:14:08: Creative initiatives in the jail ministry

00:16:29: The impact of music and art in telling inmate stories

00:18:00: Recidivism rates and inmate transformations

00:19:02: Success stories of former inmates like Bobby and Lisa

00:20:17: Introduction to the jail ministry services

00:20:46: Defining success in the Elkhart County Jail Ministry

00:22:26: The impact of redefining success

00:23:02: Engagement with local churches and assistant chaplains

00:25:07: Introduction to the crocheting program

00:27:04: Changing stereotypes through proximity

00:28:10: Vision for new ministry projects

00:30:11: Creating support communities for the formerly incarcerated

00:31:29: Finding hope in unexpected places

00:33:19: Conclusion and credits

This show is a production of the Community Foundation of Elkhart County. It is powered by equipment from Sweetwater and recorded in The Riverbend building in Elkhart's River District. Editing is done by the award-winning communication students at Goshen College, home of one of the best college radio stations in the nation. Listen to Globe Radio at 91.1 FM. Learn more about the Community Foundation of Elkhart County at inspiringgood.org You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Music is provided by Sensational Sounds. Thanks for listening. We hope you are inspired and inspire good and your community.

Transcript

Marshall King:
Today our guest is Cory Martin, who is chaplain at the Elkhart county jail and is CEO of the Elkhart County Jail Ministry. Corey is a former congressional aide who has transformed the jail ministry. Welcome, Cory. 

Cory Martin:
Thanks, Marshall. It's good to be here. 
That felt like a lifetime ago
Well, I kind of cringe when you say congressional. I'm trying to forget parts of my life. Marshall. 

Marshall King:
I knew what I was doing. I knew I could playfully introduce you because I think it speaks to your own transformation. You were focused on one thing, and now you're focused on a very different thing. And I hope we talk some about that. 

Cory Martin:
Yeah, sure. 

Kevin Deary:
Cory, I'm one of your biggest fans. I had the privilege of going through. You have a, on Thursdays, I forget which Thursdays, but you have this 815 am, have to be at the jail, Elkhart County Jail to have breakfast with the chaplain. And we had a chance to take a tour and to go into Elker county jail. I had not been in the new jail. I had been in the old jail before. I used to work for juvenile detention center in the old building, not the new building. So it was my first time being in the new jail, newer jail. And it is very intimidating. Just the size of those big doors are very intimidating. Just picture wizard of Oz doors, but have a, but have a very different sound and feel. But I was so impressed. This group of maybe ten or twelve of us came together. And you have to be on time because if you're late, you gotta wait a week because the jail works on a very set time. But we were very impressed. I went with another person in how this ministry is shaped. Maybe you can start with the beginning. And what is the jail ministry? How did you become the chaplain of the Elkhart County jail? 

Cory Martin:
Well, the ministry has been around for probably over 40 years now. Back when the jail was in, the old jail was downtown Goshen. So my understanding is a group of churches got together and formed a non profit called the Community Chaplaincy Corporation of Elkhart county. And they hired a chaplain to be in the jail. And that chaplain, Mike Kupke, was there for almost 30 years before he retired. And so I've been there for about eleven years now. I took over after he retired. The way I got there, I took a very circuitous route to the jail. So as Marshall mentioned, I was the district director for a couple area congressmen, and the last of which was on the education and labor committee. And so in my role working for Congressman Souder, he was on the educational labor committee. I did a lot of work with an organization called the Crossing Educational center on education issues. So when Souder resigned, I started working for the crossing, and I met a student my first day on the job. His name is Robert. And he ended up becoming really close with our family, and he ended up being incarcerated in the Elkhart county jail. So my wife and I started visiting him at the jail, and three things happened at the same time Mike Kupke retired. I was feeling it was time for me to move on from the crossing, and. And Robert got arrested. And my wife kept telling me, you should put in your application to be the chaplain. And I would just laugh her off. I didn't know there was a chaplain until two weeks ago. I've never been in the jail. I know nothing about jail ministry. But in order to get her to stop bugging me about it, I put my application in thinking that it wouldn't go anywhere. And that was eleven years ago. So what landed me in the jail washing. Having a relationship with somebody who is incarcerated. 

Kevin Deary:
And then that has grown into having relationships with so many of the folks that are incarcerated. And this one step of chaplaincy has now turned into how many volunteers are part of your team and paid staff? 

Cory Martin:
Well, so we kind of like a lot of people do now, probably we break up the jail ministry pre Covid and post Covid. So pre Covid, we had, I think, 400 volunteers who were actively coming into the jail, providing classes and. But since we've. We're still rebuilding from COVID and things look a little bit different inside the jail right now. We're still able to do a lot, but a lot of our volunteers now we're focusing at the Elkhart county work release center because we have administrative work release center in Goshen and also our reentry housing. So we have six reentry homes on the north side of Goshen that we use for people coming out of incarceration. 

Kevin Deary:
And that, in itself, not getting out of jail. I think many of us, if we're watching, we'll watch people walking down Kenny road seven with a trash bag or nothing or coat. And they're the ones that have been released, and they have nobody to pick them up. They have nowhere to go. And we want them to change their lives. Right. We want them to make better decisions. But not having housing, that's a big issue. 

Cory Martin:
Yeah. So what you'll find is you'll meet some of the best people in Elkhart county. In the Elkhart county jail, you're the brightest, the nicest, the kindest and when you get sit down across the table from them and you get to hear their story, you kind of realize, oh, these aren't bad people. Most of the time, they grew up in very different circumstances than I grew up with. I had every opportunity afforded to me growing up. If I wanted to go down the wrong path, I would have had to intentionally made choices. Cause the path was paid for me to go down the right path. And a lot of people's paths are just paved to go down in the wrong direction. And it's very hard for them. It would have been very hard for them to make the same choices I made in life. And so you meet some of the best people who are incarcerated, who grew up in some of the worst circumstances. And let's say you spend six months, eight months at the Elkhart county jail, and you're released, and you're leaving jail with no place to live, no job, no transportation, no family or friends to speak of, possible addictions, maybe some mental health issues, really difficult family situations. And all the things, all the good things that we do at the jail ministry, inside the jail, they kind of stay inside the jail, because once you leave under those conditions, you're just trying to figure out, where am I going to live and where's all my stuff and where am I going to eat? I mean, you're just trying to survive from day to day. And so we realized quickly that unless this ministry gets really tangible, very practical, very quickly, we're missing out on most of what the good news is. And James, we're told that there's that famous passage in James, faith without works is dead. Before that. James says, if you see a brother or sister and they're hungry and they're naked and they're cold, and you say, be well. Be well fed, I'm praying for you. And you walk on, but you don't do anything to take care of their physical body. What good is that? And so we think the good news should be more than just you get to go to heaven when you die. That's not bad news, that's good news, but it's not the best news. We want people to be able to experience the kingdom of God on earth. And what that means is we're tasked with taking care of people's physical bodies, also, not just spiritually. So we learned quickly, unless you have a stable, safe, affordable place to live when you get out, your life is never going to be stable. It doesn't guarantee it, but I can't guarantee if you're living in a rundown apartment where you're paying too much with a landlord that's not very sympathetic, and you're worried about, you know, being evicted every three months or you're moving every three months. You're living with people who are using or manufacturing. Your kids lives will never be stable. Your kids education will never be stable. Your employment will never be stable. So I think six years ago, we bought our first house to use as a reentry home, and we now have six of them on the north side of Goshen. 

Kevin Deary:
Is it true? And I know it is true, but maybe you can expand a little bit for, if you have a felony, there are. There are many places that will not allow you to live in their homes, right? Apartments, trailers, houses. Maybe you can talk about what that's a little extra. How do you help them? 

Cory Martin:
There's no such thing as serving your time. People who are incarcerated end up serving their time, probably for the rest of their lives, because that felony conviction follows you wherever you go. And it influences employment, it influences housing, it influences everything that we take for granted. As people who don't have that in our past and our record, they let me back up. People who don't have felony convictions just take a lot of things for granted. People with felony convictions are just limited in a lot of opportunities that we're not limited with. And housing is one of them. What I found is most people at the Elkhart county jail, they're not out committing crimes when they're sober minded. Right. Maybe it's a mental health issue that's not been addressed past trauma, that they're trying to work through addictions, or a combination of all three. I always tell people we have, I think it's the second largest jail in the state of Indiana. We have over 900 people incarcerated at the Elkhart county jail right now. We have this population, and we always talk about recidivism rates, and we hear people say, tough on crime. And I encourage people to really, when they hear somebody use the phrase tough on crime, drill down a little bit and ask them what they really mean by that. If Marshall gets arrested, we want Marshall to leave incarceration a better version of himself than when he went in. The only reason that Marshall is going to leave and not recidivate is because he has hope, he has purpose, he has stability. His mental health is good. His physical health is good. His spiritual health is good. He has community, he has family, he has friends. And so that's what we're at the jail, miss. That's what we're trying to help people with. We're trying to provide these opportunities for people to experience what it's like to live in the kingdom of God, where they have all of those things that are necessary for them to be healthy and whole. And if we can help people with those things when they get out, when they're sober minded, when they have a purpose, when they have hope, they're not going to go out and commit more crimes. 

Kevin Deary:
Man, that is very deep. We forget that when people go into jail, their fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and wives and sisters and brothers, and they are removed from society, they look to figure out their purpose. So if. If we are walk through the doors of jail, how do we find the ministry? How is that made available to the. To the folks that are incarcerated? 

Cory Martin:
Well, there are a number of ways people can get involved with the Elkhart county jail ministry. Like I said, we have the ministry in the Elkhart county jail. We have the ministry in the Elkhart county work release center. And then we also have our reentry housing in the north side of Goshen. We. I'll brag a little bit. We have a really fantastic website that people can go. People can go to and find out all about the Elkhart county jail ministry. They can stay up to date on what we're doing on our facebook page, on our instagram page. If you just google and search Elkhart County Jail, there'll be all sorts of information that people can look through. Really cool videos, unsuspecting videos that you're going to run into of a bunch of guys doing a dance routine in the program, Ward, and you'll enjoy it. 

Marshall King:
We want to talk about that. The JL ministry's Instagram feed is filled with, you're a good photographer. It's one of your hobbies. Great pictures of people incarcerated being baptized or knitting hats, which we want to talk about. But you have this sense of marketing as well. And you walk this line between showcasing these people as humans, and you walk that line incredibly well and also telling people what's happening. But you've used videos to do that. I mean, there's a couple videos we could talk about. The flash mob is probably the first one. And then we should probably talk about Tyler Fizzy McPhail, too. But you did a flash mob in a jail. How did you do that? 

Cory Martin:
Well, you know, it's nice to have a sheriff that's just incredibly supportive of the jail ministry that will allow us to do really fun things like this every year for our bank. We try and do a really nice video. That's not kind of your standard video that you might see at banquets. And we had at our staff meeting. I'm not sure who came up with it, but it was kind of a joke at first to have a bunch of guys do a dance routine to I will survive. But the more we talked about it, the more serious it became. But we had to think, you know, you can. We had to think, how do you teach a bunch of guys a dance routine? I'm not a dancer. I know that shocks you, Marshall, but I knew some. I knew. I knew of the lady who did the choreography for the Crimson heirs at Goshen High School. And so I called her, and the first time I introduced myself to her was when I asked her to come into the jail to teach a dance routine to a bunch of guys in the program. Ward. And she was all in. So she came in a few times. Katie and the guys were all in. And so we have this really well done professional video of all the guys in the program war three years ago, doing a dance routine. I will survive. And it is top notch. It's really well done. 

Marshall King:
With confetti cannons. Yeah, confetti channels and disco ball and the sheriff pushing a broom at the end of the video. 

Cory Martin:
That's right. We suckered him into it. I don't think he. I don't think. Well, I don't think he'll mind me saying this if he listens to this podcast, but he came in for the. To the ward for the video. And, you know, every time we pulled something new out of the box, you could just see the blood drained from his face. The disco ball, the drone, the confetti cannons. But he was a good sport and even made a cameo appearance in the video. 

Kevin Deary:
I like to talk about Mister McPhail because that is. It was transformational for me, because he does this, he wrote it, he performs it. It's kind of a bebop rap kind of thing. His words, his feelings, his emotions. You could feel his pulse almost through that on video. And we had the chance to see him. And he is. Some people use music as their way of communicating and sharing and venting, but his was very powerful. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how that happened. 

Cory Martin:
Yeah, well, we're always trying to figure out, how can we tell people's stories? How can we not? We don't want to tell them. We want to help them tell their stories so other people can hear it. And so we do, you know, these videos for a banquet. And we're always trying to find new ways to do it. And Tyler's came about because every now and then we do a karaoke and pizza party for the program ward in the jail. And Tyler asked if instead of doing a song, he said, I wrote my own song, can I do my own song? And so he took the microphone. Everybody's kind of bracing themselves. You know, it could have been really cringey. You never know what you're going to get when somebody says, I want to perform something that I wrote myself, and everybody's jaw dropped. I mean, it was just an amazing. He had a great voice, great rhythm, and a great story. We thought we can do two things at once with this video. We can have Tyler share his testimony and highlight, showcase his musical abilities. So a guy named Chuck Fry in South Bend does all of our videos for us. He is absolutely the best. And then Nate Butler is a producer sound engineer in Goshen. And so he came into the sound for us. And Tyler had an opportunity to have a professionally recorded and shot music video made with this song. And we showed at the banquet a couple years ago, and it was. I mean, it's so incredibly meaning. It was an opportunity that he would have. Here's what we like to do. We like to provide opportunities for people who are incarcerated that they would have never had otherwise. So being in jail is not ideal. But Tyler can look back and say, oh, yeah, that time that I was incarcerated at the Elkhart county jail, and these people came in and made a professional video for me, an opportunity that he may never have again in his life. 

Kevin Deary:
And how has it transformed himself? Is he still El Carter jail? Has he moved on? 

Cory Martin:
Nope. He moved on. He's in prison now. So that's an important distinction. The Elkhart county jail is where you go before I. Or it's when you've been charged with a crime. Once you've taken a plea, you've been convicted, you've gone to trial, then you go to prison. So everybody, most people at Elkhart county jail are pretrial. And so Tyler has gone on. I'm not sure what his prison sentence was, but he's moved on. 

Marshall King:
Now, Corey, you encounter these people. Sometimes they are released back into the community after a stint in jail. They don't go onto prison. You interact with these people on the inside and on the outside. And at your banquet in May, we hear from some of these people, but I mean, and sometimes you talk about someone, and then they do recidivate, to use the word that used but sometimes they become this immense light in the community. Bobby and Lisa are examples of this. These are folks who have become and are now employees of the jail ministry. Tell us their story a little bit without speaking for them too much. 

Cory Martin:
Well, okay, so I will. But I also want to hit a few other things that you've hit on in that question. So, Bobby and Lisa, I got to know them. I wish they could have joined us for the podcast. They are just amazing. 

Marshall King:
We could have them as guests sometime. That'd be fun. 

Cory Martin:
Oh, you would love it. They'd be amazing. Bobby and Lisa, they were the first couple to move into our first reentry homes. They did so well, they eventually bought the house from us. We bought another house with the pros from selling it to them. They now also do the tattoo removal for us at Vista Community Health center. One of the services the jail ministry offers is free tattoo removal inside the jail and then tattoo removal to anybody in Elkhart county at Vista Community Health center. And Bobbi and Lisa are the two who run the tattoo removal service for us in Goshen. So Bobby and Lisa are just. They're incredible people. They're wonderful friends. And depending on how you define success, you can say, okay, Bobby and Lisa are a success. But we're always trying to push back a little bit on how you define success. Maybe in a ministry like this, at the Elkhart county jail ministry, because, Marshall, you said that Bob and Lisa are an immense light in the community, and that's true. I would argue that the people in the Elkhart county jail are immense light and assets to the Elkhart county community. And we have to rethink a little bit about how we define success. If you have. Now, this does not describe everybody at the Elkhart county jail. So I'm kind of painting with a broad brush. There are, of course, exceptions, but you have somebody who grew up in really hellish circumstances, abuse, neglect, addiction, mental health issues, instability, poverty. You grow up like that, and you're raised like that for 2030 years. There's no six month program that will just change people in six months or a year. It takes a lot of hard work, intentionality, to work through all of those, all the issues that, you know, we have been dealt in life. And so for the jail ministry, we think success is that while we're with people, whether it's in our housing, whether it's for the short time in tattoo removal, whether it's during a baptism or a book club or whatever it is we do, we want them to experience something different that maybe they've never experienced before. We would describe that as experiencing the kingdom of God. They feel appreciated, they feel heard, they feel dignified, they feel accepted. They don't feel shame. They feel love. And if they experience that while they're with us, then we have done. We've done what we can. 

Marshall King:
One of the things, one of your phrases that I've heard you say that I really appreciate is, let's not judge these people by their worst day or something like that. 

Cory Martin:
Yeah, I don't think I'm the only one to have said that. 

Marshall King:
I've heard him say it. But the other thing that you say is, if the church could just agree on the four or five basic things that we agree on and not talk about all the things we disagree on, we can do a lot of remarkable good. You talked about the 400 volunteers, pre Covid. What does the engagement with local churches and assistant chaplains and volunteers look like now? 

Cory Martin:
Yeah. So we have 20 assistant chaplains that come into the jail to help with distributing material, meeting with inmates, helping with baptism, special events. We do special events in the jail. So we just have Brooke Rothshank, who is a nationally renowned artist out of Goshen, comes regularly and does painting classes for people inside the Elkhart county jail. But our assistant chaplains come from all different. If there's a denomination in Elkhart county, we probably have. They probably have some affiliation and support the jail ministry in some way. Mennonite, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, everything in between. Missionary, Nazarene, Lutheran. I think the jail ministry is probably just as much a ministry to our local churches as it is to the people incarcerated. The Elkhart county jail, because you realize you can have a. A Methodist assistant chaplain and a Baptist assistant chaplain and a Mennonite assistant chaplain all in the same baptism ceremony together. And then you start realizing, you know, the Methodist might think, oh, well, these Mennonites aren't all that terrible. And the Mennonite might think, oh, not all baptists are really horrible people. They start seeing that we are really all kind of on the same team, and so we're trying to limit the number of hills we're all trying to die on theologically, so we can find plenty of things to disagree with. But if we can all agree that we're just doing our best to follow Jesus, that's all it takes to be involved in the jail ministry. And it's amazing. Once churches focus on that, they seem to get along pretty well. 

Kevin Deary:
Boy, is that needed, especially in today's world, where we need to come together as a nation and a nation under goddess. So on Shane tracks, before we run out of time, one of my favorite winter hat happens to be knitted from your ministry, and I absolutely love it, and it is the warmest hat I've ever had in my life. And how did you get prisoners, particularly men, to get into knitting hats? 

Cory Martin:
Well, there's an important distinction that I just learned, Kevin, with this. It's crocheting, not knitting. There is a difference. Apparently, that's why it's warmer, right? So they crochet hats still involves needles. 

Marshall King:
And I'm not sure how you convinced somebody at the jail to allow you. 

Cory Martin:
You might have to edit that part out of the podcast, Marshall. So they use. Well, okay, so the program director who used to be at the jail, Chris Kozinski, crochets a lot. And she thought, I'm gonna offer this to the women and see if the women are interested in crocheting. And none of the women were. She couldn't get it to take off with the women in the jail. This was probably six years ago. And so she offered it to the guys in the program, Ward. And to date, I mean, they've crocheted thousands and thousands of hats. And so they crochet throughout the year. Then a few times throughout the year, they donate them to different organizations in Elkhart county. So faith mission or Reta or the window. So, you know, somebody will come in from faith mission, and we'll have this big donation ceremony. The guys will just hand over trash bags full of really high quality, beautiful crocheted hats. I mean, I don't know. You can find a higher quality crocheted hat anywhere in America, and it's coming out of the Elkhart county jail. 

Kevin Deary:
I go to church downtown Elkhart, Elkhart community Church, and we have several folks that come from faith mission, and they all have those hats. And they love those hats. 

Cory Martin:
They're really nice. 

Kevin Deary:
They wear them in the summer, they wear them in the fall, and they. And they're beautiful. 

Cory Martin:
Hatsheen, you walk into, one of the things that you'll realize when you walk into the jail is stereotypes that you have get erased very quickly because you wouldn't necessarily expect to see a bunch of guys in the jail sitting around with crocheting looms and needles crocheting hats all day. The thing that. Here's why. Another reason I think this is more of a ministry to the church than it is to people. Incarcerate the Elkhart county jail, because the only thing that will start changing stereotypes is when we have proximity to people. It's really hard to stereotype or make assumptions about somebody that you know really well. It's easy to do it from a distance. The closer you get, the more complicated things become. And so people who are involved in the jail ministry, when they end up coming into the jail and having conversations with people who are incarcerated, any judgment or condemnation that you might have towards somebody quickly melts into compassion and mercy and grace because you realize, oh, if I had been raised in those circumstances, I could very likely be where they're at. That's the biggest benefit to the j. I think to the breakfast with the chaplain that Marshall, or maybe you mentioned, Kevin, is it might be the first time anybody from the outside has got to sit down and talk and have a discussion with somebody who's incarcerated, and they leave with a different impression than they came in with. 

Kevin Deary:
Amen. That's so true. 

Marshall King:
Cory, is there anything the minister, you've been amazing at envisioning new things for the ministry to do, particularly on the outside or creative ways. Is there anything the ministry is looking for at this point, in terms of community partners or something that you need for the folks who are coming out? 

Cory Martin:
I would say a few things. We're always trying to figure out the men and women who live in our reentry homes. Housing itself is not transformative. Tattoo removal in and of itself is not transformative. Those are all good things. But what we're always hoping to build is a kingdom of God type community where people who are in our homes or in tattoo removal get to experience a new type of community where they're valued and treasured and they know they belong and they're not going to be judged. They're not going to experience shame. And so we're getting ready to really think through and work on how we can provide support for people living in our reentry homes. So we had an interesting discussion yesterday with some people about what it could look like to have, you know, maybe a church adopts one of these homes, and they're just involved not to fix people and not to save them, but just to help provide a larger community. That's what we want our volunteers and our assistant chaplains to think of. What we're doing is how are we helping people experience the kingdom of God? Providing by providing them a community where they really feel like they belong and are needed and are valued. So volunteers who are interested in maybe volunteering in our reentry homes or with our reentry homes, with our housing coach, we're really thinking through how can we not just provide housing. How can we use our housing to help provide a community for people? One of the areas where I think. 

Kevin Deary:
It. 

Cory Martin:
The county is lacking in is we have the second largest jail in the state of Indiana. And we tell people who are incarcerated, they need to change their people, places and things. And then kind of the next breath, sometimes we're guilty of saying, but don't come around my people. Don't go to my places and don't do my things. We have a wonderful organization in Elkhart county called the clubhouse. There's one in Goshen, there's one in Elkhart. And they're a support community for people with mental illness at work events. There needs to be a support community for people who've been formerly incarcerated. So we're thinking, we've been thinking through this for a few years, but we're moving intentionally, yet slowly. What would it look like if we had some type of a community center that will serve as a support center for people who've been formerly incarcerated? Because right now you have to drive to Elkhart to go to this class, Goshen to go to this class. And there's people who have been incarcerated. They all share a very similar set of experiences, hurdles, trauma. And right now, there's not a singular place for people to gather for support. And so looking into the future, I think that's probably the next direction that I would see for us. 

Marshall King:
Corey, as we wrap up today, what gives you hope? 

Cory Martin:
You know, it was me with somebody in Goshen just the other day, and he made the comment, I just can't find hope anywhere. That was a direct quote. It just, in everything, everything in the news and the world in America, he just didn't see a lot of reason for hope. And it sounds so weird to say, but I find so much hope in the Elkhart county jail. I'm not just saying that because I'm the chaplain there, but you're meeting with people who have lived through really horrible circumstances, and they are still able to maintain hope. You find, I think, the most hope. Well, I've experienced this. I find the most hope in El Car county, in the place where I should find the least amount of hope, which is in the El Carr county jail. People who have survived so much, overcome so much, persevered so much, and they still have hope. And I think we, the church, have a lot to learn from them when it comes to how do we, you know, I get hopeless because of far less serious circumstances than what some of the people in Elkhart county jail. I mean, I struggle with unforgiveness, anger, hopelessness sometimes. And then I'm meeting with people who have been through so much more. And hope is contagious, and you spend time with a lot of people who are able to maintain hope in the midst of hopeless circumstances. And it provides hope for everybody else. The church, to the extent that formerly incarcerated people are not highly involved in our congregations, it's more to the church's detriment than it is to their detriment, because we just have so much to learn from our incarcerated brothers and sisters. 

Marshall King:
This show is a production of the community foundation of Elkhart county. It is powered by equipment from Sweetwater and recorded in the Viaggio studio at Wee Impact in Elkhart's river district. Music is provided by sensational sounds. Editing is done by the award winning communications students at Goshen College, home of one of the best college radio stations in the nation. Listen to Globe radio at 91.1 FM or online. Learn more about the Community foundation of Elkhart County@inspiringgood.org. dot. You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. We hope you're inspired and inspire good in your community.