unwilling or unable to change.” And, to be honest, in a small number of cases, this is justified. Those cases require appropriate intervention to gradually give the person an opportunity to integrate into the congregation. Response and professional intervention. Given these attitudes and working assumptions about justice, and the needy and risky nature of people leaving prison, here’s where our minds often instinctively go next. We often think along the following lines: Since justice saw fit to remove them from society, and since they are deeply needy and perhaps dangerously broken, interacting with them now will require both filling their myriad acute needs and fixing their underlying brokenness, all while minimizing risk. The internal logic of this line of thinking pushes us to the conclusion that the only appropriate and adequate response is that of a therapeutic social service agency. Our men- tal model shapes us to think that where returning citizens deserve to be and probably belong is with a holistic, professional, monitored, social service or- ganization—say, a halfway house. Response and all or nothing. Most ordinary congregations have a heart and can clearly see needs. But when it comes to returning citizens, it just feels overwhelming to think about simultaneously meeting multiple deep-seated needs, fixing pathologies, and maintaining safety and security. It feels as if the path forward to effective reentry ministry is blocked. We feel reluctant and embarrassed to offer what we have—like we’re offering a bandage to someone in need of major surgery. And so we fall for an “all or nothing” fallacy: We’re ordinary, we’re unprofessional, and we clearly can’t do it all, so it’s better to do nothing. We feel guilty, but we secretly wish that they’d just keep walking, going somewhere else down the road and hopefully finding what they need there. Clearly this quick sketch of our dominant paradigm about returning citizens and reentry ministry is overdrawn and overly pointed. And, clearly, most churches do see mercy and a fresh start are central to the Christian faith. The problem is that we don’t know how to integrate these convictions with the dominant paradigm about how justice functions, what returning citizens are like, and how to respond to them. We’re stuck in our mental models. What we want to do here is to invite you to shake up those mental models and think differently so that you can begin to minister differently and better. A New “GRAND” Paradigm We may feel stuck, but we don’t need to stay there. We’re going to revisit each of the attitudes and working assumptions of the dominant paradigm and look at them through the lenses of both the broader biblical witness and recent criminological research on desistance from crime. In the process, we’ll be ad-
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