Life in Prison
It was the spring of 1997, and Scott Lessing had just graduated from Ohio University. As he prepared to begin a dream job with the Boston Red Sox organization, he felt haunted by the scarring specter of grief and tragedy. A former girlfriend died falling out of a fourth-story window after smoking marijuana laced with PCP.
Scott was traumatized by her death. “It was a time in my life that I just started questioning who God was and what He was,” he recalls. “I went through years of depression and suicidal thoughts and attempted suicide twice.”
After graduating, Scott was about to assume a sports medicine position with one of the minor league teams for the Red Sox. “I was absolutely miserable,” he says. “I thought, if God is real, somebody must be teaching the Bible on the radio. I started searching for somebody teaching the Bible, and the first person I heard was Tony Evans on Moody Radio. I was like, ‘Wow, this guy is awesome!’
“About a week before I went to work with the Boston Red Sox, I said ‘Yes!’ to Jesus.”
New calling
Through the years, Scott began to sense a longing for something different, something focused on caring for the soul. Out of the blue, he received a call that a position in children’s ministry had opened up at his home church in Middleburg Heights, Ohio.
“Seventeen years into my career, I made a switch,” Scott says. He started taking online Bible classes and eventually moved from children’s ministry to men’s ministry. Six years later, he began to hear a new call.
Church inside a prison
In 2019, Scott asked Mike Swiger from True Freedom Ministries to speak at a men’s conference. Mike was a good friend and former inmate who ran a ministry to incarcerated men. Afterwards, Scott couldn’t stop thinking about reaching inmates with the life-saving message of Jesus Christ through a unique, prison-based church.
Mike later called Scott with extraordinary news. Jennifer Gillece Black, the warden at Lorain Correctional Institution, invited his home church to plant a campus inside her prison. Within months, Scott and his team of 40 volunteers from his church established a dedicated office at Lorain Correctional, located in Grafton, Ohio. They serve at the facility for church services, Bible studies, group sessions, and times of prayer with the inmates.
“We have 17 different programs. Fifteen of them are going on at the prison, and we have two programs that go on outside the prison,” Scott says.
Sundays are set aside to work with a small group of inmates who are growing and maturing in their walk with Christ. Those 26 men represent a total of 500 years of prison sentences. “But,” Scott notes, “all of those men love Jesus fervently, and they are truly transformed from the inside out.”
Mondays at Lorain Correctional feature two church services. On Tuesdays, inmates can attend a morning character development class or an evening Bible study. Wednesday’s options include sessions for men being introduced to the basics of the Christian faith and new believers taking their first steps as followers of Christ.
Thursdays offer a release and re-entry program that addresses housing and jobs needs, two of the major reasons that men commit crimes and return to jail. Fridays feature a Christian drug and alcohol recovery program. Outside the prison, Scott's church offers support for female family members, girlfriends, and wives of inmates.
Reaching the least reached
The team from Scott's church also ministers to two other prison populations largely ignored and despised by society: the men in the mental health block and the men in segregation in the highest level of security, a place called “The Hole.”
“Four of us go down and we pray with every single person in those cells that only get an hour of release time a day,” Scott explains. “Their doors are locked. It's a steel door with a glass window, so you can't really hear them. You have to put your ear up to the crack in the door, and you talk through that crack. They're so grateful that we come to talk to them and to pray with them. Sometimes, they're really broken and they're crying. We pray healing over them.”
‘Moody Radio still plays a huge part in my life’
Moody Radio continues to be a source of encouragement for Scott more than 30 years after he received Christ while listening to a Moody Radio program. Scott has been a guest on Moody Radio Cleveland’s morning show several times, even co-hosting with morning host Brian Dahlen.
“Moody Radio still plays a huge part in my life,” he says. “I listen almost every morning to Brian, and I listen throughout the week. JD Greer and others are really impactful for me.”