The Story of How One of the Largest Prison Ministries in the World Came To Be

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to listen to the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joe Garman always knew he wanted to go into ministry, but on his own terms. In his words, God had other ideas. He first tried his hand at churches, but they thought he looked too young, so he started a youth revival ministry, and through twists and turns, ended up in South Korea doing mission work with his wife, Linda. Then he was asked to come speak. There’s some incarcerated Americans there. Let’s get into the story.

Well, one day I was in the mission house, minding my own business, I might say, and there was a knock on the door, and it was a military chaplain, and he had just been to that prison in Taeijon, which was a huge prison, and he told me that where he was stationed, it was just too far to have to come to visit that prison on a regular basis. The roads were not all that good. So he asked me, he said, “This Wednesday, I have scheduled a forty-five-minute teaching session with the prisoners. Would you fill in for me?” I said yes, but in my heart I said no. I did not want to. You know, I had thirteen churches to oversee, in a Bible college, and all these youth ministries. What was I going to do going into a prison? I didn’t want to get tied down in a prison work. So I told him yes. But as soon as I shut the front door, I leaned against the door and I said to Linda, “I will go one time, and that’s it.” And Linda has always been more spiritual than me. And she said, “Joe, why don’t you go? You just might like it.” And I said, “I will not like it.” And I mean, I went. I went with the wrong attitude, with the wrong heart, and I spent forty-five minutes with those guys, and not forty-six. I spent forty-five, just like I promised I would. And I was on my way out, and the Korean chaplain, he caught me just before I was going to the last door of the prison, and he said, “Oh, it was so wonderful to have you here. Would you please come back and speak to my Korean prisoners?” Well, I’ve always had a problem in my life, and that is that I just can’t say no to anybody for anything. I might not do it again, but I can’t say no the first time, you know, I’ve got to say yes. So once again, with the wrong attitude, I said yes. And when I went back to that prison, he met me at the front door. We went all the way from one end of the prison to the other. It was a long prison, and when we got to the end, there was the gymnasium. And inside this gymnasium were about, I would guesstimate, there was about four hundred men. I mean, there was not room for anything but just those men. They were setting cross-legged on the ground on the floor, and we were so tight in that little gymnasium that I couldn’t even move to the right or to the left. My interpreter stood beside me, and I preached like a dying man to dying men, you know. I mean, when I saw the hunger that was in their eyes and the opportunity I had here, well, the spirit moved upon me, I can say that. And I just preached my heart out to those guys. And when I was finished, you know, at the Billy Graham crusades, they say, “Come forward.” Well, there’s no way anybody could come forward in that crowded condition. So I said to my interpreter, I said, “Mr. Kilm, if they want to make a decision for Christ, if they want to completely commit themselves to the Lord, have them to stand up.” And the whole room stood like one body. I mean, not just a few here and a few there, the whole room. Just the ground moved. And I turned to Mr. Kim and I said, “They must not have understood. Have them all set down again.” That’s the kind of faith I had, you know, they must have misunderstood. So they all sat down again, and I said, “Now I’m not going to speak any English. I want you just in Korean to speak to them and tell them just exactly what I’ve said.” So he preached for a few minutes, and then he turned to them and he said, “Okay, I finished.” And I said, “Did you tell them everything?” He said, “Yes, I did.” And I said, “Okay, now you tell them, ‘Only those who want to make a commitment to Christ and become Christians and leave all other religions behind, please stand.'” And the whole room stood like one body. I mean, that’s the day that I saw where I needed to be right there. I went home that day and I told Linda, “We’re going to go full-time into prison ministry.”

And you’ve been listening to Joe Garman. Joe Garman told one heck of a story about his experience inside a South Korean prison. He was asked to substitute Bible teach there by a friend and didn’t really want to do it. “Why don’t you go? You just might like it,” his wife said. He went, though, that first time with the wrong heart. Second time, he went still with the wrong heart. But, well, as life can do to us all, he saw something that changed his heart. All those men crammed into a gymnasium, and as he put it, “I preached like a dying man, the dying men.” I preached my heart out to those guys. When we come back, more of Joe Garman’s story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and Joe Garman’s story. When we last left off, Joe had decided to go into prison ministry full-time, something he initially didn’t want to do, but after an astounding moment witnessing what he witnessed in the South Korean prison, well, those prisoners changed his heart, those prisoners changed his life. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Joe Garman.

Korea is not hard to get around in. It’s only the same size as our state of Indiana. So, you can get on the train in one corner of Korea and by the afternoon be in the other corner of Korea, and then you can come back the same night, you know. So, I mean, we all over South Korea, every little prison, every little reformatory we went to. Well, after a year of that, I received a letter from Cecil Todd. Do you remember Cecil Todd of Revival of Arts? See, this was before Chuck Cousten came along. He said, “We don’t have a prison ministry. Why don’t you come here to Americas? Do hear what you did in Korea?” So we came back here to America. Well, how are you going to do this? I went to several Red Cross Salvation Armies and asking them, “How do you do your prison ministry nationwide?” Well, the Salvation Army doesn’t have a nationwide prison ministry. They have certain towns and cities where they have a prison ministry, but as far as an organized prison in ministry, they don’t have it, or they didn’t in that day. And I went to this person in that person; nobody could help me. So I just bought a one-way plane ticket to Washington, D.C. Can you imagine that? I mean, I did not know anybody in Washington, but I heard that we had a Chief of Chaplains over the federal system in Washington. He was located in the Pentagon. I mean, this little Missouri boy, I’d never even been to the Pentagon before, you know, went in there and found his office number, and everything went up in the elevator to his floor. And when I walked through the front door, there was a lady sitting behind a big round desk, and I introduced her as who I was and what I’d come to do, and she said, “Do you have an appointment?” And I said no, and she said, “Okay, give me a minute.” Within five minutes, I was setting down at the desk with him. And I learned that day that that’s exactly where I should have gone. Because, you see, there is what is called the trickle-down theory in the prison ministry. New rehabilitation programs start on the federal level because they have more money to work. If they’re successful, they trickle down into the state, and then into the county, and then into the city jails. That’s how it works. So if I would have gone to a state prison, I would probably have just been in a state prison. But because I started on the federal level, and all of this was by God’s design, I still get shivers just thinking about it. Because I started on the federal level. What happened is he said, “I’m going to give you a letter that you can use to get into any federal prison in America.” And he said, “I’m going to send a letter to all of my chaplains asking them to cooperate.” I mean, this is the first time I ever met the man. You know, it was just like God was pulling all the strings because he was. And so that’s my story. And I started on the federal level and started trickling down into the state and into the county. And today we’re in all fifty states, plus all five of the territories, and we are in many nations overseas. We by faith believe that we have been able to help people get over whatever the problem was that took them to prison in the first place. We know that for a fact. We’ve had him tell us and write us and all this stuff. So perhaps the greatest story that happened to us was the baptism of Emaguel Noriega, the dictator of Panama. I was privileged to be a part of his, uh, conversion story. And we, pro, we also build baptistries here for our prisons. We have a baptistry shop out back. So we provided a baptistry for him, and he was baptized into Christ. And when he got out of prison, of course, he was, uh, extradited back to Panama, and he lived with his daughter until he died. And the people in Panama have told us that he was faithful to Christ all the way. Of course, his daughter was nothing to be a shit shamed of. She was an awesome Christian. She made sure that he kept his walk with the Lord God. She actually served as my interpreter when I would witness to… Can you imagine sitting there talking to your daughter, and your daughter talking to you about sin? “Here need to be freed from your sin.” I mean, this is coming from your daughter. So yes, that, that is probably the greatest. Of course. Oh, they’re all great, you know, from the least to the most. In Korea, several of the prisons I went to, the correctional officers would say, “Did you bring us any Bibles today?” And I say, “Yes, I did.” “Oh, we’ll help you bring them in.” So they go out to the jeep and we’d unload them and they bring them in. But we learned later in some of these prisons that they were using them for toilet tissue. They didn’t have toilet tissue for the prisoners. I was so angry, so angry because that was our money, you know, we had been buying those out of our money. I went straight to the prison. The warden was a friend of mine. I said, “Is this true?” And he said, “Yes, it’s true.” And I vowed I would not put another Bible in a prison for this reason. See, I just, out of anger, I just did that. And then it came about that I got a letter from Chinese man in there who had been going.

to the restroom and started reading the toilet tissue, and he read, he read the first chapter of First John, and it convinced it was all about the Lord being love, you know.

And he had never heard anything like this before, that the Lord was love. He had always heard that the Lord was angry and punished people. And he said, “Brother Joe, would you please—this is all, this is all the paper I have—would you please bring me a Bible?” And I thought, “Well, I’ll do it.” So I took him a Bible. And that man, when he was released, can you believe this? He had been a prisoner, and they made him the night security guard on a Bible college campus. That was his story. He gave his whole life to the Lord, and he was just one of the best night-time watchmen that they had ever had. That’s why it’s important, because they need to realize that in God’s eyes, there’s somebody.

And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Joe Garman for sharing his story. He’s the founder of American Rehabilitation Ministries, otherwise known as ARM or ARM, and you can find out more about them at ARM.org, ArmMan.org. They domestically ministered a one point eight million people who were incarcerated in America’s over fifteen hundred state and federal prisons. And that story of that Chinese man, an American bringing the Bible to a Chinese man who was using it as toilet paper. Read that one piece of paper. From there came to God. The story of Joe Garman, the story of how God moved him to serve the least of these. Here on Our American Stories.