Faith and money build a Kansas prison chapel

God, faith and inmates are building a chapel at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility.

So the prison resembles a construction zone these days.

“Our prison chapels remind us we are working on God’s time,” said Steve Dechant, board chair of the Hutchinson Spiritual Life Center. “… And sometimes we kind of wish God would speed things up a bit.”

The project is being funded with private donations and may take a few more years to complete. It already has taken six years to get to this point.

The correctional facilities in Ellsworth, El Dorado and Oswego have all built and opened new chapels within the past decade. Six years ago, Hutchinson prison officials recognized the need for an expanded chapel.

Prison staff showed media the construction area this week and the plans for the future.

Past towering limestone walls, fences, locked doors and barred windows, the seeds of faith are beginning to take shape.

More than 22 religions are recognized by 1,000 inmates within the prison walls, according to Chaplain Oscar Gomez. Those faiths include Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Islam, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Assembly of Yahweh and Asatru, a pre-Christian Nordic religion.

The new chapel is being created from a nearly century-old gymnasium and auditorium in the Hutch Central portion of the prison, where maximum security is enforced.

It may seem an unlikely location. It was not handicap accessible, there were no bathrooms and the windows had been covered for more than half a century.

All expenses are being covered by private donations. As much work as possible is done by inmates, Dechant said.

The new chapel space will include bathrooms, an elevator, areas for offices and storage, and a sound system.

“We have expended between $300,000 and $350,000 so far” in demolition and steel framing, Dechant said. “The things we have coming up – the electrical, heating and air conditioning, the plumbing, painting – will run in excess of $400,000.

“We are not going to borrow money. We do it only as we have the money, and we are doing it by private donation.”

The prison’s Spiritual Life Center is meant to be a place of hope.

“Seeds of faith need time to germinate, and the Spiritual Life Center is a place for the seeds of faith to germinate,” Dechant said. “It will be a place for opportunity and a place for prayer and learning.”

Faith does change people, said Hutchinson Warden Don Schnurr. The Spiritual Life Center at Ellsworth is in the center of that prison’s campus, he said.

Inmates there told him “that it changed the culture of the institution,” Schnurr said. “It lifted it and made it brighter and turned the focus from negative behavior to positive.

“We can’t build a new building in the center of our main buildings but hopefully it will become the focus.”

This story was originally published August 24, 2016 at 10:48 AM with the headline "Faith and money build a Kansas prison chapel."