WANTED: A Spiritual Pursuit Through the Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders

Chris Hoke is a Skagit County Jail Chaplin, Gang Pastor and Writer. He has a new book coming out Titled: Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through the Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders, which is set to be released on February 3rd, 2015.

Chris Hoke works with Tierra Nueva in Washington State’s Skagit Valley.  Tierra Nueva Ministries is an ecumenical Christian mission among the most marginalized in central Honduras (since 1981) and in Washington’s Skagit Valley (since 1993).

Prior to writing this article, I didn’t know Tierra Nueva Ministries existed. I was unaware of the work Chris Hoke  had been providing to inmates  in the Skagit County Jail System.  It is very impressive to read through his website as well as the website of Tierra Nueva.  They are  not only trying to bring religion into the Jail system, they are trying to help change these inmates and  “gang members” lives to help them become productive members of society. In addition to the teachings of religion within the jail,  jail visits include many other  things, such as, assisting inmates and gang members  with Tattoo Removal and cover-up options, Legal Advocacy and Accompaniment, Adoption into the Church, Prison Correspondence, Street Shepherding, and running a coffee business through their underground Coffee Project.  Click here to learn more about the Gang Ministry. 

Chris Hokes Book, “Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through the Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders,  chronicles a young man’s spiritual quest from the bright Southern California Suburbs of his youth to the darker side of society in the rainy Northwest, where he finds—as a volunteer chaplain—the jail to be a portal to a world of mystery on the margins. He is not looking for a way to change the world so much as a place to belong, a place to reach out with others and touch (and be changed by) another world within this one. He is driven not by guilt for white privilege but by loneliness, a yearning for communion that hasn’t died even after his frustration in churches and alienation in secular university life. He wants to step into the pages of the gospel accounts where Jesus performs miracles with a band of outcasts outside religious settings. The jail is his portal to this world.

“The opening set-up chapter follows the young, failed hipster of a narrator from his childhood nightlife in the suburbs, through his explorations in music recording and Russian literature in college, to the “night shift” vocation as a jail chaplain among a criminal world that comes out only at night. To his surprise, a growing network of tattooed Mexican gang members in the lush agricultural valley dub him their “pastor.” When he comes to terms with this uncomfortable title—embracing the role of a “shepherd” of “black sheep”—the adventures begin.

“The self-contained chapters that follow take the reader anywhere but a pew for a taste of the sublime: singing with an attempted-suicide in the jail’s isolation cell, discovering friendship with a house thief who has a knack for recruitment and who literally rots to death in prison, fly-fishing salmon rivers with tattooed gangsters, dodging immigration and airport security with migrant farm workers while observing the valley’s migratory swans, painting in abandoned LA buildings, mysticism in solitary confinement, prayer with schizophrenics, hospitality in the Turkish underground, and finally the narrator facing his own need and belovedness on the back of a motorcycle racing through Guatemalan slums.”

For additional information on Chris Hokes please visit his website by clicking here. http://chris-hoke.com

To Pre Purchase a copy of his book visit the publishers website here. http://www.harpercollins.com/9780062321367/wanted

 

Book Information and Photos credit from Chris-Hoke.com