When Tammey Edkin began serving as the chaplain at the Lycoming County Prison, she certainly didn’t envision a time when she would be named “Outstanding Chaplain” by the Prison Fellowship and in fact she admits that she did not even want to be a prison chaplain.

“It’s something I never wanted to do,” Tammey admitted.

She shared that part of her family history included a brother who had been incarcerated when he was 20 years old.

“So my brother was in prison, and I know my personality and I absolutely did not want to get involved in prison ministry at all, because I’m the one that’s like, they’re innocent. I believe the story they tell. I’m going to be picketing on the sidewalk for their release. They didn’t do it. They told me they didn’t do it. Let them out. They’re wrongly accused,” she said.

“I knew that my personality could be manipulated in the prison, at least that’s what I thought,” she added.

When she became a pastor in 2017 at First Church of Christ Disciples — where she still serves — there was a man who came to church with his mother who was a member. He came to church to spend time with her. Tammey soon learned that the man was involved with prison ministry.

“Just a month prior to that I had participated in a United Churches event that Marty McCormick had put on about welcoming returning citizens into your church community,” Tammey said.

“The whole time I’m like digging my heels in, protesting like, God, why are you putting these things in my path, because you know that that is not where I want to go. Send me to all these other places, but certainly do not send me into the prison,” she said.

She had also met Tony, who would later become her husband.

“I knew when I met him that God put him in my life for a reason. At the time, I did not know why, so I said to him, ‘No, prison ministry is not for me, it’s not my personality.’ I’ll go into the nursing home and do services, you know, I’ll serve in the soup kitchen, do whatever you need me to do, but the prison’s not for me,” she said.

At about this time, the county’s Pre-Release Center requested female pastors to work with the women there.

Tammey, who admitted that she has a hard time saying no, volunteered to do it. From that, she was asked to do a church service at the prison, but she asked if she could shadow someone first, which she did one time.

When she was supposed to do her second job shadowing at the prison, she was asked to do the sermon with no notes, no preparation, not even her Bible.

“I was not prepared for this, but again, I have a hard time saying no, so sure, yeah, absolutely. Let me do it. So I lead the sermon, if you will, the message, and I remember talking about the legacy that we leave and how often we search for lost things harder than we search for lost people, and that the way we live our life is a legacy for those that are looking to us, whether that be your children, whether it be your coworkers,” she said.

“Finished my message. Amen. A man in the front raises his hand and, because I had been in once previously, and knew the order of worship, I thought he had a hymn that he wanted to sing. So I said, Do you have a song picked out? He says, No. He says, ‘I want to share my story with you,'” she said.

“And so he starts sharing his story, and then another man shares his story, and then another man shares his,” she shared.

When she left the prison that day, she remembered it was a beautiful spring day. The sun was shining, it was gorgeous out, she recalled.

She called Tony to tell him what had happened.

“(I) got his answering machine and said you will not believe this. This was the most amazing experience I have ever had. I cannot wait to go back in.,” she said.

“My next time that I was scheduled to go back in and it was going to be by myself, was Easter of that year. That was Easter of 2020, so my last words at the end of the last time I was in prison was, ‘I cannot wait to go back in,'” she said.

The next time she would go back to the prison turned out to be in the summer of 2022 and it would be as chaplain at the prison, something she never could have imagined would have happened.

Edkin was nominated for the award by the prison community she serves, those who are incarcerated. The award is given to chaplains who “provide exceptional service to people in correctional facilities.”

Edlin admitted that she does not engage with any media because she doesn’t want to know why any of the inmates she works with are in prison. Obviously they have broken man’s laws or they wouldn’t be in prison, but Edkin wants people to see their humanity, not their arrest record.

“They are my brothers and sisters in Christ. They are not what they did. That is what they did. That is not who they are,” she said.

“When you meet someone and you give yourself a chance to get to know them, you love them. It doesn’t matter what their worst sin is, because my sin is what separates me from God. When it comes time to answer for my sin, I have to answer for mine. I don’t have to answer for yours, I don’t have to answer for John’s, Joe’s or Susie’s. I have to answer for mine,” she said.

“A lot of times, we have a tendency to rank sin based on man’s law and not God’s law. When I sit in the middle of a room of 30 men that are willing to be vulnerable and honest and admit that they’re broken, that, to me, is powerful. We admit that we are broken and a sinner when we accept Christ in our life, but then once we accept Christ in our life, we do our best to pretend we don’t sin again. We come in and we put on this happy face in church. We pretend like we’ve got it all together, that things are good in our life,” she continued.

“I sit in a room full of people whose sin has made the front page news. They are broken, and they have tried to live life on their own, and it’s not getting them anywhere. And they’re willing to say, ‘God, I submit my life to you, and I am ready to try something different.’ It’s beautiful,” she said.

She shared that the group of men she works with supports and encourages each other.

“This is a community…I have two men who are in rival gangs and would kill each other, but I get to see them pray for each other and to tell each other they love each other-to share their weaknesses. In a place where vulnerability can be used against you, they know that is a safe space,” she said.

One man actually asked Edkin if the guys in the group could all live in one unit because it was such an encouragement for him.

She said that she reminded him that he and the others were now called to go out and make disciples.

“I tell them that this is like the halftime we come in. This is our halftime. This is our pep talk. What worked for you this week? What didn’t work for you this week? Where’s your blind side? Where do we need to come alongside and protect you,” she said.

“Then once we encourage each other, figure that out, and we have a game plan to win the second half, we now go back out and try to win that second half. Then we come back in again, and regroup. What worked, what didn’t work. Where do we need to come alongside each other? So that’s what we do. We gather, we encourage each other, and then we go back out and share. And then we have to come back,” Edkin said.

Usually twice a year she is able to serve communion to the inmates. Because of the pandemic, the elements of communion can be purchased pre-packaged directly from the distributor to the prison which follows the rule of no outside food being brought in.

She also makes sure the inmates know that the administration at the prison did not have to allow this and other requests she’s made to happen.

When she wanted to show a video, a request for a television and dvd player was honored and she wanted the inmates to be thankful.

“I make sure they know that they could have said no to this. There’s nothing saying that they have to allow this to happen, but they allow this so we need to be thankful for that,” she said she tells her group. “To share with them how to show appreciation.”

“Some of them have grown up in families where you didn’t say thank you. You didn’t say I’m sorry. You didn’t say will you forgive me. You didn’t think of someone else’s needs over your own or even appreciate small little things,” she said.

Edkin has also performed baptisms at the prison-five people in the fall and five people at New Year’s Eve. She admitted that it took a lot of work on the part of the staff to make it happen.

“The very first baptism we had on Sept. 24, when you walked in there was an air of excitement with all the staff…the one counselor sat through the whole thing,” she said.

To accomplish the baptism, Edkin had borrowed big stainless steel mixing bowls from the cafeteria and then used a pitcher of water. The laundry had given her towels for each person being baptized. Pastors from churches supportive of prison ministry were asked to attend.

“So the men come in, they gather. I call them up one by one. We baptize them. We talk about what baptism is. Some of them, it’s their first Bible study they’ve been to. Maybe they just came in last week and they’ve never even been to one of our Bible studies. And the first one they come to is they’re seeing five men being baptized, and maybe they have no church background,” she said.

“So we talk about baptism, and then we have our baptism ceremony, and we pour water over their head, we give them a baptism certificate that they’re able to keep,” she said.

Between her time at the prison and the Pre-Release Center, Edkin spends about three days a week in the Prison Ministry either all or part of the days. She is still a full-time pastor and also a member of a prison and jails ministry cohort through the National Benevolent Association that meets monthly online and once a year in person. She applied for that never thinking that she’d be chosen from all the applicants across the country. She did it because she wanted to learn more about re-entry for inmates-“how can we prepare our men and women to re-enter society and really remove some of the barriers that they face when they leave.”

“That’s what was on my heart,” she said.

She shared how she tells her adult children that the one thing she wants them to remember when she is gone is that she loved them with all her heart and that she would have sacrificed her life for them.

“I believe that the men and women that I serve at the prison also know that I am their advocate and that I truly love them,” she said.