Words Leaping Off The Page

New Crossroads Australia Director Knows Anyone Can Change

. . . Because He Did

Aaron Mueller
Crossroads Prison Ministries



Mike Eastman doesn’t remember much about his first few days in prison. He was in a fog while detoxing from drugs.  But he does remember one thing – he prayed.

“I hadn’t done that since my childhood. But I prayed that if God was there, He would get me out of this situation,” Mike said.  God didn’t remove him from prison but he did something even better. “He drew me to Himself and never let me go.”

Now released, Mike is a new man. He is active in his church, studying theology at Christ College and he recently was named the new director of Crossroads Prison Ministries Australia. But it has been a long, twisting journey to where he is now.  A journey through abuse, ridicule, rapid success, collapse, addiction, incarceration and ultimately redemption.

Mike was born and raised in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. He grew up with Christian parents, attending an Anglican church. He had a happy childhood up until age 11 when he began suffering abuse at the hands of an extended family member.

The Underclass

Self-Propagating Violence

The underclass is alive, growing, and powerful.  It is self-perpetuating.  And here's the thing about the underclass--no matter how prosperous or how sophisticated the house in which we were raised, anyone can fall right down to the lowest of the low within months, if not days.  All it takes is a little P, and hey presto, a life of theft, blackmail, violence--even murder--awaits.

Once in the underclass, sexual liaisons occur.  Children are born.  Most are raised consistently within the underclass's culture.  Violence in the underclass is a way of life.  It is the normal way to live.  Once that happens, the Underclass becomes permanent; like a bacterial disease it self-perpetuates and multiplies.

Author Alan Duff understands this.

Bad Behaviour All About Race, Class and Culture

Alan Duff
NZ Herald

Seems I'm lumped again with stating the obvious: the dairy robbers, the brawling schoolgirls, the bank robber, the bungling non-alcohol wine thieves, are all brown. If we're open about this then everyone can start addressing the problem knowing what we're dealing with.

I'll next say what should be said, that not a Maori or Pacific Islander I know behaves like these lowlifes. This is as much a class as race issue. Just we have to be honest about it. It's also about education - not the formal kind so much as home education. It's about culture.

Celebrating the Prison Ministry of Crossroads Bible Institute

A Prisoner For Every Church

Chris Hoke

I was telling a room full of retired volunteers about mystical experiences that my friend Neaners had when he was in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison. I told how he and I—a Mexican gang member and a dorky white church guy of about the same age—had exchanged weekly handwritten letters for nearly seven years, and how it had changed both of us.

It turned me into a jail chaplain, and gang pastor.

In that isolation cell my friend Neaners had his own visions of becoming a pastor and ministering to other gang members and lost youth in our hometown when he got out. He wrote raw, tender descriptions of a mysterious love that would sometimes wash through his veins. It led him to nights of sweet and unstoppable tears as he lay alone in the bathroom-sized cell, where he existed 23 hours a day with no natural light.

I told the small audience how dozens of my friends and family members began exchanging letters with Neaners, and how those letters changed him, ignited his faith, and prepared him for life on the outside. And of how the exchange affected my friends and family. They confessed things to Neaners that he says he’ll take to the grave.

Standing in front of this gathering, I suggested that prayerful, personal letters sent to inmates like Neaners can be a subversive act, moving deep inside the human disposal system that is the prison system.