Kathy Vosburg shares that her missional community is people coming out of incarceration.
“Every day, five days a week, at the Midtown Greyhound bus terminal, 50-90 individuals, both men and women, are coming off the bus from the Huntsville “Walls Unit,” having been released. And all they have is $50-$100 in their pocket. Everything that they can carry is in a bag on their backs, and if there is not family or friends or an advocate or somebody from the body of Christ to walk alongside them, what are they going to do? Especially when many of them may have gone in as a 19, 20, 21-year old, and they get out at 46.”
Kathy is Executive Director of CrossWalk Center, an organization that welcomes and serves returning citizens and their families in a safe hub, offering social services and faith-based ministry, giving them hope and a future. Among other resources, CrossWalk Center offers re-etry coaching and a Transformational Discipleship Home program for formerly incarcerated individuals who are part of their 40-week reentry discipleship journey that begins while they are still in prison. “There is no re-entry without relationships. We need to walk alongside them.”
When Kathy and her husband were sponsored for a Faithwalking retreat back in 2010, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. There they were confronted with the question, “What’s stopping you from stepping into who God intended you to be?” Kathy found herself mulling over what was stopping her and what it looked like to be radically obedient. That was the beginning of a journey that led her to leave the security of her 10-year business behind to step into a wilderness of risks and unknowns, choosing to be bold and courageous in seeking to radically change the reentry system. Kathy shares that not one of the men who has graduated from CrossWalk Center’s Transformational Discipleship Homes has been re-arrested or gone back to prison.
Kathy reflects on the role Faithwalking has played in taking on this missional community: “For me, Faithwalking is transformative. Even if you have been a Christian and have been part of the body of Christ all your life or just for a few years, if you will allow yourself and open yourself up to what is shared and taught and imparted, you just won’t be the same person.”
“With everything I had learned in Faithwalking and this thing that the Lord had deposited, I ‘knew that I knew that I knew” that the Lord was in it. A lot of that boldness and being radically obedient and stepping into places I never ever ever even saw coming came through Faithwalking.” -Kathy Vosburg
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