In this moving sermon, Richard Boonstra from Prison Fellowship shares stories of hope, redemption, and the radical love of Jesus for those society often overlooks. Reflecting on John 4 and his own experiences in prisons across Australia, Richard challenges us to stay weird by following Jesus into uncomfortable places, where the harvest is ripe and lives are being transformed. Tune in to hear how God is working in prisons, and how were all invited to partner in the Kingdom work of rescue, restoration, and redemption.
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Read the transcript
Our Bible reading today comes from John chapter 4, verses 3442, just after Jesus has been speaking with the Samaritan woman.

My food said, Jesus, is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.Don't you have a saying? It's still four months until harvest?I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields.They are ripe for harvest.Even now, the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.Thus the saying one sows and another reaps is true.I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you've reaped the benefits of their labor.Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony.He told me everything I ever did.So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with him.And he stayed two days.And because of his words, many more became believers.They said to the woman, we no longer believe just because of what you said.Now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.

This is the word of the Lord.
Introduction
Good morning. Thank you for having me here this morning. my name is Richard Boonstra, and I'm the, the state manager for Victoria for Prison Fellowship. apologies to those who are here at the 8 a.m. service. You're going to hear the same things again, but, it's how it goes.
I didn't come to the Ministry of Prison fellowship to work. it hasn't been part of my career. My career is, teaching. So I'm a school teacher and a school principal by trade, and I spent many years teaching and leading in Christian schools.
However, in 2016 2017 we moved to Melbourne and I felt the need to just get out of Christian school, out of schooling and do something different. But my my passion for Christian ministry started when I was very young, newly married in in the 1980s, and it all started when I was at a small group, and it was a small group for newly married couples, and our small group leader said, hey, I'm a volunteer with Christian Fellowship, and we've got a workshop at Canning Vale Prison in a couple of months. We need some more volunteers. Who's interested?
And I felt something in me just thought, yeah, let's do that. So I put my hand up, said, yeah, I'm interested. And my friend next to me, he said, yep, we'll do it. So we had to wait for a little while until the training day comes, because you don't go into a prison without training. By the time the training day came around and I could get the training done, my friend had dropped off. So it was just me. I still went ahead and did the training and, we completed the training. The day arrived of the workshop. I got in my car, drove down to Canning Vale Prison, which is about a half an hour of where I lived. Got out of the car in the car park, looked at the walls, the razor wire and I thought, what am I doing here?
I had that moment where you sometimes have where you think if someone told me that they had to cancel it, I'd be okay with that? No worries. But they didn't. They still went ahead, so I thought. Stop it. Swallow it. Come on. So I went ahead. Went through the doors. Bang! No. Two doors in a prison opened at the same time. And they didn't just bang, bang, lock. Click. That was it. I was in, I couldn't get out if I wanted to. Anyway, I went through to the room where we had the workshop, and I'm sitting here thinking, oh, what am I doing? And, the guys came in and started coming in from the different units of the prison for the seminar, and it was like a fog that just the sun came out and disappeared. All that fear and apprehension just went and I thought, huh, I think this is where I should be. This is my happy place. And I just thought I had the greatest time. I had a great day just sharing with the guys. You know, one of the best things is to talk to them and treat them as people. Not to look at the greens that they were wearing, but to think of them as people and to treat them as people. From there, I straight away signed up to join a team and we went in to, Fremantle Prison. Fremantle Prison, if you don't know it, some of you may have been to Perth, may have been for a tour of Fremantle prison because now a museum and now that it's a museum, probably gives you an idea of what it was like. It was built in 1850s and nothing had changed. There were no toilets in the cell. There was just a bucket. And the cells were made for one two people per cell. It was pretty rough and spartan. We were a team of about 6 or 7 of us. There was myself and my friend from the Reform church. There was a Catholic nun who was with us as well, two salvo guys who probably looked like they came off the ark with Noah, a charismatic Baptist lady and a couple of Anglicans. And we worked so well together. And I thought, this is also what God wants to see people from different denominations working together, sharing the gospel. And that's what we did every Saturday afternoon for about five years. We ran a little chapel service in the prison. So that's my story. And that's why I became passionate about prison fellowship and reaching people in prison. So when we moved to Melbourne, the opportunity came up to work for it. I thought, yes, that would be good. So I did that.
A Broken World: The Bad News
First I'm going to start off with some bad news. There's good news and bad news. I'll start off with the bad news.
We live in a broken world. That's the bad news that we know. And I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you already don't know. Both in and out of prisons, people are broken, and they don't treat each other as they should. They've lost sight of what it means to be truly human. To be living in peace with God and with themselves and with each other and with creation, to find that shalom. People have lost sight of it.
But there is now I'm feeling, and we feel that in prisons too, the beginnings of a yearning. Dissatisfied with what the Western cultural mindset has led them to believe or has promised them, is not happening. And so they're looking for something different, looking for a different way of living.
But first, I'll just show you some statistics from our prisons. As a slice, as a snapshot of the brokenness in our world, you can see that in the prisons at the moment, there are 6551 people in prison. A little bit up from what it was about a year ago. At the end of December last year, we were below 6000, which was really exciting. And I track these numbers, so I'm keen to see the numbers go down. And that's really because of the Victorian Government, the Department of Justice and Corrections Victoria and the prisons have a much more progressive attitude towards the people in prison. I just went on a tour of Western Plains Correctional Centre, which is a new one, opened up, and constantly the staff are talking about the people in our care. People in our care. They adopt a trauma informed and trauma based approach to caring for the people in prison. They're still there. They need to be there. They know that. But while they're there, let's see if we can help them. So that's really the attitude.
But they're competing with the government policy. So the numbers are going up a little bit because of the recent controversies around bail and toughening the laws, the bail laws. So it means more people go to prison instead of go out on bail. So that's where we're at 6500 people in prison. 95% are men, a small proportion of women. But for a woman in prison, it's a lot harder. There's a lot more at stake for families and for kids when mum is in prison. So it's a very different kind of situation and scenario for volunteers going there.
40% are unsentenced. Now this is really interesting because we often think, oh, they're on remand. But when you're on remand, there's so much uncertainty and so much anxiety. What's going to happen? Where am I going to go? Because the remand centre that you're in won't be where you'll stay. You'll be shifted to another prison. Will I have a job when I finish my sentence? What's happening to my family? What about my kids and all this stuff? I've sat with a guy in Melbourne Assessment Prison and just I didn't have to say anything. I just sat with him and let him talk, because he needed to get a lot of stuff off his chest, stuff that was swirling around his mind. And just to have someone listen, who empathetically listened, was important for him.
14% of people in prison are Aboriginal. It's still an imbalance when you measure that against what the percentage of the Victorian population is 1% yet 14% of the prison population. So there's a big difference there. And that's multiplied when you look at places like Northern Territory and Western Australia and Queensland; there's a higher proportion of Aboriginal people. The prison I was visiting in Perth, Fremantle Prison, at one stage we were told there were 80% Aboriginal, and so many of them were Aboriginal people who came from way up north in the more cultural tribal a