The Church Outside Serving the Church Inside

To understand Paul’s letter to the Philippians, it helps to start in prison.

After all, that’s where Paul was when he wrote it. “In chains for Christ,” as he puts it, longing to be reunited with his faithful friends in Philippi (Phil. 1:8, 13). Reading Philippians as the letter of a prisoner puts flesh on Paul’s theology, a theology rooted in his rich experience of Christ amid degradation and suffering.

It also brings the story behind the letter to life—Paul’s story, yes, but also the story of the Philippian believers who showed up to support their incarcerated apostle. Today, the American church lives amid an epidemic of incarceration, and the story of Paul and the Philippians is an invitation to build relationships of solidarity across prison walls.

With his letter from prison, Paul stands at the beginning of a long line of famous incarcerated letter writers, from second-century Christian leader Ignatius to 20th-century prophet Martin Luther King Jr. But ordinary prisoners wrote letters too, in Paul’s world just as today, and some of these ancient prison letters still survive.

At first glance, they look a lot like the oldest surviving copies of Philippians—just scraps of papyrus, worn with age. But when we look more closely, they offer remarkable glimpses into the precarious circumstances from which prisoners like Paul wrote.

Take, for example, the short letter written by an otherwise forgotten man named Phaneisis. A migrant laborer in the bustling city of Alexandria, Egypt, Phaneisis had landed in serious trouble and been sent to prison by an important finance official. Whatever his offense, he found himself in jail, helpless and far from home. After three long days, he began to get desperate.

“Do not forget me, wasting away in prison.” The line runs through ancient prison letters like a desperate refrain. Prison is difficult to endure in any context. In the Greco-Roman world, it could be deadly. Ancient sources spoke of unbearable heat or bitter cold, darkness, filth, disease, and stench. And—above all—hunger.

For if the meals provided to incarcerated people today are seldom very appetizing or nutritious, ancient prisoners received the barest of rations—or no food at all. This left them utterly dependent on family and friends to provide for their needs while incarcerated.

Phaneisis had tried to get word to his family. But they lived way up the Nile. Who knew how long it would take them to send help? So he wrote a letter to his boss, somehow finding a messenger willing to carry it.

“Would you be so kind as to send someone to me,” he writes, “since I have no one in the city, and send me a cloak or some money—whatever you please—to get me through until one of my folks sails down?” (translation mine).

Money would buy food. But why a cloak? For many prisoners, a cloak served not only as clothing but as their only cover and comfort as they slept on the hard ground. Paul also requested a cloak while in prison, likely for the same reason (2 Tim. 4:13).

Paul, like Phaneisis, found himself dependent on others to meet his basic needs. He too had to wait on distant loved ones, never certain when or even if help would come (Phil. 4:10). A gift of food or money, an encouraging visit, a cloak to keep him warm—these could make the difference between life and death, hope and despair, giving up or getting by.

In Philippians, Paul has a name for the lifeline his fellow believers provide for him while in prison. He calls it their “partnership in the gospel” (1:5). The Greek term Paul uses here for partnership, koinonia, appears in various forms throughout his short letter. The word implies sharing, partnership, fellowship, and commitment.

More specifically, it names the Philippians’ Christ-shaped solidarity with him in the face of suffering and hardship. Bound in a relationship of mutual sharing and care, Paul and the Philippians offer each other emotional support, spiritual encouragement, and concrete, material aid.

This relationship of mutuality, this giving and receiving of gifts in the Lord—this, I believe, is God’s invitation for the church in our age. To accept it means to leave behind fear, hatred, and even pity and embrace those in prison as beloved siblings in Christ.

We can piece together the story from clues in Paul’s letter. When the Philippians had last seen Paul, he was headed west for Thessalonica, leaving behind in Philippi a newly founded group of believers (Phil. 4:15). He was also fleeing intense opposition. As he later reminded the believers in Thessalonica, he had arrived there still bruised from the violent mistreatment he had suffered in Philippi (1 Thess. 2:2).

The Philippians could easily have turned their backs on Paul, keeping their distance to avoid risking trouble themselves. Instead, they took an offering. They were not at all wealthy. In fact, they were struggling to get by themselves (2 Cor. 8:1–5). But from their scant resources, the Philippian church gathered what they could and sent a delegation to Thessalonica to help Paul establish himself in a new city.

A few months later, they did it again (Phil. 4:16). And then, when Paul moved on from Thessalonica to Corinth, they sent him help once more (2 Cor. 11:9).

“I thank my God every time I remember you,” Paul begins his letter, “constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing [koinonia] in the gospel from the first day until now” (Phil. 1:3–5, NRSV throughout). With their acts of generous support, the Philippians became not only recipients of God’s good news but committed partners in it. Praying for them raised Paul’s spirits.

And then Paul landed in prison. We do not know what city he was in. Older Christian tradition places him in Rome. More recently, scholars have suggested a location closer to Philippi—Ephesus, perhaps, or Corinth. Either way, like Phaneisis, he found himself locked up and far from home, dependent upon the support of others for his survival.

The classroom where I learn the most these days is in the education wing of a state prison. Like a number of seminary professors across the country, I’ve been teaching a course in prison to a mixed group of students—some who get to go home after class and some who don’t. Our conversations together have me thinking in new ways about the Philippians’ partnership with Paul in the work of the gospel, their solidarity with him in the midst of injustice and hardship. They have me thinking again about what Paul meant by koinonia.

For many of my students, isolation from family and friends is one of the most painful things about being in prison. Families gather for the holidays, children have birthdays, nieces or nephews graduate from high school—and in prison, it’s just one more day of the same old routine. It’s not easy to feel connected. Like most American prisons, the one where I teach was built in a rural area. This makes it difficult for family members to visit, especially those dependent on public transit. Not all of their relationships survive.

Paul, too, found his isolation in prison painful. He was not entirely alone. Timothy was there, either locked up with him or, more likely, visiting him frequently (Phil. 1:1; 2:19–22). Other believers came by when they could (4:21–22).

Unlike modern prisons, Roman jails were built on a city’s main square, with walls that often featured small openings allowing visitors to communicate with those inside or pass food down into their underground cells.

So Paul was not completely isolated. Still, he missed his friends in Philippi. “For God is my witness, how I long for all of you,” he writes (Phil. 1:8). He was itching to hear fresh news from them (2:19). If he got out of prison, he wanted to go and visit them (1:26; 2:24).

Imagine the joy that swept over him when he looked up to see the familiar face of Epaphroditus, his dear friend from Philippi, whom the Philippians had sent to support him. And imagine Paul’s astonishment when, knowing how poor they were, he saw the gift Epaphroditus had brought (4:10, 15–18).

His faithful friends in Philippi had done it again! Using twice more a form of the term koinonia, Paul writes that they had become partners in his chains by sharing in his distress (1:7; 4:14).

“Remember those who are in prison,” urges the writer of Hebrews, “as though you were in prison with them” (13:3). With their acts of costly solidarity, Epaphroditus and the Philippians model how to fulfill this deeply challenging mandate. Sharing in Paul’s love and longing, his sorrow and his joy, they supplied comfort and companionship along with concrete material aid.

With nearly two million people now incarcerated in the United States—a warehousing of human bodies on unprecedented scale—the Philippians’ example has never been more relevant. What might it mean for the church outside prison walls to join in solidarity with those inside, partnering together in the work of a gospel that sets the captive free?

In the final weeks of our seminary course, students worked in groups to analyze an ancient text and present to the class what it revealed about justice then and now. One group chose to work on a speech by Libanius of Antioch, a renowned fourth-century teacher and intellectual.

Libanius had never been in prison. But he had witnessed a close friend’s imprisonment after falling out of favor with the Roman governor. The torture and degradation this friend endured seem to have made a lasting impression on Libanius. More than two decades later, he penned a blistering speech addressed to the Roman emperor Theodosius that described in vivid detail the cruelty and injustice suffered by those in Antioch’s prison.

Unlike Libanius’s friend, most of these prisoners were people of little worldly status. He writes:

This is the fate of the penniless at the hands of wealthy and how ordinary, blue-collar workers get treated by the political class. Would you like me to mention gang members too? Sure, there are some who are guilty. But then, everyone they’ve ever hung around with gets arrested too, even those who don’t know anything about the crime. While all these people live in chains, the powerful enjoy their lives and forget all about them. (translation mine)

It didn’t take my students long to begin making connections between the criminal justice system in Libanius’s world and the one in ours. As the incarcerated students could see just by looking around the prison, today, too, it is mostly the poor and the marginalized who end up in jail or prison—especially underresourced people of color. With the prevalence of cash bail, overworked public defenders, and coercive tactics that pressure defendants to accept plea deals, it often feels like the system is rigged.

The presentation these students offered was a remarkable collaboration—a hip-hop adaptation of an ancient Greek oration. Here were my students, Black and white, men and women, rhyming together on justice and equality while one of them laid down the beat. It was playful but also deadly serious—an expression of joyful creativity that was also an earnest, prophetic denunciation of a criminal justice system too often indifferent to the sacredness of human life.

Visiting those in prison is often depicted as a form of charity. But this was something richer. As I watched what these students had created, I was reminded again of the Philippians’ koinonia with Paul, their solidarity in his suffering and sharing in his joy.

By listening with care to the stories of their incarcerated classmates, my nonincarcerated students witnessed with fresh eyes the liberating message of the gospel. They had become, in a small but meaningful way, partners in their incarcerated classmates’ suffering, expressing together their grief and their pain. And yet the room burst with laughter and joy as they imagined a world where all God’s people are free.

Philippians is a letter about a generous and committed church that goes to great lengths to care for an imprisoned friend. It is also a letter about an imprisoned man who shares with the church outside what he is learning about the gospel while in chains.

In a passage that forms the theological crux of Paul’s letter, possibly an early Christian hymn that he adapted, Paul recounts Jesus’ incarnation, crucifixion, and then glorification by God (2:1–11).

Paul emphasizes that rather than guarding his divine nature, Jesus joined in solidarity with humans by sharing in our deepest, most painful vulnerability. He took on human form and “became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” Like Paul and countless others in our own prisons, Jesus suffered the degradation of violent, state-sanctioned punishment. He knows what it feels like.

Paul’s letter from prison is an invitation for the church today to cultivate relationships of risky solidarity that bridge those inside and outside prison. It invites believers on the outside to work together with God’s incarcerated children to dismantle the walls our fear has built, and to humbly receive their gifts of faith and insight. In doing so, we follow the example not only of Epaphroditus and the Philippians, but also of Jesus himself.

Ryan Schellenberg is associate professor of New Testament at Methodist Theological School in Ohio and author of Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do.