80 San Quentin Inmates Get Baptized After Hundreds Find Freedom in Christ: 'Jesus Gets the Glory'
Hundreds of San Quentin prison inmates were "worshipping, praying, crying, and rejoicing" earlier this week after dozens of incarcerated men gave their lives to Jesus, a national prison ministry reports.
God Behind Bars, which works to restore the lives of inmates by building their faith during incarceration and after their release, held an outreach event at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in San Quentin, CA.
"Eighty incarcerated men baptized at San Quentin prison," the ministry shared online. "After sharing the gospel and hundreds getting saved, all these incarcerated men came up and got baptized! This was late in the evening, the prison lights were on."
"All you could hear was the sounds of hundreds worshipping, praying, crying, and rejoicing," the group added. "Everyone was happily soaked in mud as man after man came up to get baptized! Revival is happening."
Through strategic outreach programs, God Behind Bars works to reach the more than 2.3 million people in the prison system.
"We create satellite campuses in prisons and our whole mission is to introduce inmates to Jesus," Isaac Holt, Director of Innovation for God Behind Bars, told CBN News.
***Please sign up for CBN Newsletters and download the CBN News app to ensure you keep receiving the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
In 2021, the ministry released its PandoApp – a faith-based app that gives prisoners access to worship music and sermons on a tablet. Now more than 550,000 prisoners have been given the tablet.
God Behind Bars CEO Jake Bodine told CBN News he started the organization in 2009 with the mission to "reach the least of these," and it has blossomed into a revival-type movement at correctional facilities across the country.
"I was 20 years old and began to see so many of my friends getting arrested… I felt the Lord's voice in my heart say, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' I knew that my only response was 'Send me, I'll go.' From that small yes, God has done more than I could have ever imagined…72 prison church campuses have been launched all over the United States," Bodine recently shared on Instagram.
"We have seen almost 1,000,000 salvations," he added. "Over 10,000 baptisms! Jesus gets the glory, it's all about Him. Just remember, your seemingly small YES to God, can go farther than you could ever imagine. Give God your YES!"
The ministry's goal to win souls for the Kingdom of God is exploding into an ongoing outreach that is providing hope in a dark place, a message of redemption to the broken, and true freedom to those who are bound.
"It isn't a magic genie that is going to make everything disappear...the difference is that from this moment forward that no matter what you face there is a God that loves you," Bodine told inmates. "There is a God that is with you...It doesn't matter what the world says we are. It matters who He says we are."
