Sin is more than a Sunday school concept for Brian Funderburk.
His view in every direction passes through bars, row after row of chain link fencing and tangles of gleaming razor wire.
Funderburk, 33, is serving a life sentence at Phillips State Prison near Buford for murder, arson and burglary.
He did advanced field work in sin, not thinking much about it.
Now, with a lifetime of prison time on his hands, he is doing class work in it. He and 22 others were the first to graduate Tuesday with associate’s degrees in Christian ministry from a program run by Southern Baptists. This time next year, they will finish accredited bachelor’s degrees.
Funderburk is not trying to make up for his past.
“I don’t think I could ever do that,” he said, casting his eyes toward the concrete floor beneath his polished, state-issued black shoes.
He looked up and said, “I’m just trying to use this gift God has given me and help people.”
The gift he refers to is the full fledged seminary program.
New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, which sponsors and teaches the program, started a similar one at Louisiana’s infamous State Penitentiary at Angola, and another one at Mississippi’s Parchman maximum security prison. The graduates can go on to be chaplains assistants sent out to other prisons across the systems, or they can use the skills and knowledge they pick up where they are.
Funderburk states the obvious. He was not a Christian before being sentenced in 2002. After being sent to Autry State Prison in southwest Georgia, he tried Hinduism. He tried meditation. A pen pal encouraged him continually to try the Christian faith. One Wednesday in 2006, he gave in and went to a prison Bible study class.
“I think God had been working on me for a while,” he said.
It has been fast-forward since that experience, something that earned him the ire of some.
“You don’t get a lot of respect from other convicts,” for taking the religious road, he said.
And respect is the coin of the realm when one is inside looking out.
He was still in Autry last year when a prison acquaintance wrote him and told him about the new seminary program. There were three seats left. He got one of them.
Danny Horne, the director of chaplaincy services at the Georgia Department of Corrections, visited Angola, which holds 5,000 of Louisiana’s worst criminals on an 18,000-acre maximum security work farm and prison. Inmates are paid pennies an hour to do chores such as pick cotton by hand. He said the seminary program there has made a positive difference in the atmosphere of the prison and others, and Georgia officials were hoping to do something similar here. Baptists pay for the program, its books and teachers.
The classes offered are the same as those offered on the campus of the seminary, basics such as math and specialty classes in the Bible, interpretation of texts, counseling and theology.
The men are being trained to find a useful life again, or maybe for a first time, Horne said. And it can help bolster the prison chaplain program, which is suffering from the same budget and staffing cuts as every other state agency.
The men even pushed Horne to make the program tougher. They insisted on learning Koine Greek, the ancient language of the New Testament.
Funderburk told the family members and prison officials who came to the graduation ceremony, “Who would have thought that I would have been able to read and understand the New Testament in the original language?”
Certainly not his mother, Margaret Funderburk of Clayton.
Like any parent, she was heartbroken when her son was convicted of murder. But she is hopeful after seeing her son, for a first time in his life, walk across a stage in a gown and mortarboard.
“We saw him change and do different things and go in a different way,” she said. “It changed us and made us very happy and it is something we had been praying for. And God answered our prayers.”
Brian Funderburk said he surprised himself by earning “any degree other than the third degree.”
Fellow student Jerome Glover, 60, was a preacher on the outside, plagued by an off and on drug problem he picked up in the Marines. It is not his first time in prison. He’s hoping this 20-year sentence for robbery is nearing an end, with potential parole looming.
Though no stranger to the pulpit, this is the first time he’s had formal theological training. If and when he gets out, he hopes to work in his brother’s church, ministering to those with drug problems or those who find themselves on the wrong side of the razor wire.
“If I ever come back to prison, it’s going to be for prison ministry,” Glover said.
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