Mark Labberton:
Today on Conversing, we have the chance to welcome an exceptional guest, someone whose life has been dramatic, whose work has been dramatic, and who has found himself in circumstances unlike probably any other guest that we’ve ever had on Conversing and I venture to say very different than probably almost anyone listening to this podcast. His name is Earl Smith.
It was many years ago when at 27 years old, having just been shot and on a gurney in a hospital trying to be resuscitated and kept alive, that he felt the spirit of God saying to him, “Earl, you’re not going to die. And secondly, I want you to be a chaplain at San Quentin.” Now, that is a call story. Ever since that time, Earl Smith has been a chaplain eventually in prison settings, San Quentin most substantially and most notably, but many other prisons and jails as well.
He’s also become chaplain to two professional sports teams in the Bay Area, the San Francisco 49ers and the Golden State Warriors. Earl is a man who holds those universes together in one being, because he believes in a God who holds all of those things and all of those individuals together in God’s own heart. In fact, Earl is recognized among his peers as exceptional and that’s the reason that, in 2000, for example, he was given the National Correctional Chaplain of the Year award.
In addition to all of that peer recognition, it’s no wonder that his important book written about his own story titled Death Row Chaplain was released with success in 2015, enough so in fact that it’s now being produced into a documentary, a film that will be available for all of us to see and that we can look forward to. Earl, what a joy it is to have you on Conversing today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Earl Smith:
Thank you for allowing me to be here, Mark. Look forward to this. Can’t believe three years ago we met and the path that we’ve taken since that point where God has really just blessed us, so thank you.
Mark Labberton:
Let’s just jump into that moment since you brought it up. You come to my office because you’re still hungry for continuing to grow, continuing to learn. We’re discussing whether or not a Fuller degree might be someplace that you could be served by. In that time, you’ve actually completed that degree and are on your way to a doctoral study as well, which is just wonderful and amazing. But tell us about that moment. I mean, why in the stage of your career that you were in, where you’d served as a chaplain to San Quentin and you’ve continued to serve the Niners and the Warriors as their team chaplain. Why an education? What drove you to think that would be the thing to do?
Earl Smith:
I have always valued education. My father valued education to the point that when he came home from work, we had to have a report written out, either having reviewed the news or having read the newspaper with a report available to him to verify that we had studied. Education’s always been important and I had to pause my seminary training when I was at Golden Gate due to the execution schedule at San Quentin. I paused it or I didn’t go back, but it was something that I always knew was of value.
My grandchildren, I thought they needed to know the value of education from my perspective and also know that, in the future, they should succeed and do even more than me. It was a lot of different levels of that, but the main one was I wanted to honor the fact that my father instilled in me the value of education. I just wanted to make sure I did my part.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, amen. Well, let’s go back to the sentence you used just a moment ago. As a part of your vocabulary, that’s not part of my vocabulary or part of probably anyone else’s who might be listening to this. The phrase, “I had to stop my education because of the execution schedule at San Quentin.” That’s quite a sentence right there and there’s two parts to your work that I want to explore. The overarching theme is chaplaincy, but you’ve expressed this in two different ways. You’ve done it inside the prison system and you’ve done it inside professional sports. Let’s start with the San Quentin side of the story. We’ll come back to the execution schedule in just a minute, but how did you get into chaplaincy and why prison chaplaincy
Earl Smith:
In October 1975, I was shot six times. While I was on the hospital journey, doctor told me I was going to die. I heard a very clear voice that spoke to me and said, “You’re not going to die. You’re going to be a chaplain at San Quentin Prison.” Didn’t say Folsom, didn’t say any of the prison. I knew San Quentin because I used to listen to executions on the radio, but that was the extent of it. After that point, I switched majors, I changed schools, always in the back of my mind knowing what I was told. Yet, there were so many people that told me, based on my background, working as a chaplain in prison would not work, that I should just probably want to be a pastor or a minister in a church. The churches didn’t work for me. Prisons worked for me because that was my comfort zone.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. It was part of the context of your life. Yeah. Well, I’ve heard lots of call stories, but I’ve never heard one quite like that with six bullet wounds on a gurney and being told that you’re going to become a chaplain in a particular place. That is quite the call to ministry. As you made your way educationally and otherwise to be able to do such a thing, what fed your ongoing interest? It was the comfort zone because of your background, the context you’ve grown up in had been challenging, rough… Stockton, that was where this was all happening.
Earl Smith:
Yes. I think, Mark, the challenge for me in continuing and seeing that as a call… I announced my call in the ministry in 1976 a year later. I was a drama and sociology major at Stanislaus State, switched schools to go to college in Dallas, Bishop College, where they said that’s where you go if you’re a preacher. I went there not really knowing what it meant to go there. I went there because it was a suggested place to attend.
In the process, I learned a lot about what ministry looked like. But what I didn’t see was people like me in chaplaincy or even talking… The people that were at that school, there was a HBCU, historical black college, and they talked about being pastors, but they didn’t talk about chaplaincy. The only thing I had heard clearly from the Lord was chaplaincy. It was a place where you could meet those who were less than, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, as I had come from that background and give them a sense of hope.
For me, that was what drove it. That kept driving me. I was hired to work for the Boy Scouts of America in Dallas Circle Ten Council and they transferred me to San Francisco. Had I not been transferred to San Francisco, I would not have been involved in a service club where I heard about an opening at San Quentin.
Mark Labberton:
Wow, that’s amazing. I mean, Earl, we’ve known one another long enough that I’ve realized that every conversation with you is full of, “Oh, my gosh. Oh, wow. That’s incredible.” I keep saying those words. That’s just my honest response to the ongoing story. Do you remember your first day going into a prison as a chaplain, I mean?
Earl Smith:
Yeah. It was funny because I just walked in. I walked in and, as I walked in, I exited the big door that makes the noise. And as I exited that door, I looked across and saw where the chapel was and I saw two guys making a drug transaction. I thought, “Okay, here I am.”
Mark Labberton:
“I’m home.”
Earl Smith:
Yeah. Yeah. “Here I am.” I just looked at it and later to find out those two guys worked in the chapel. You process things, you see things. It was never that thing where when I walked in and I was alarmed and… I just walked in. I was very comfortable with the thought I was where I was supposed to be. There was an unbelievable comfort level in that context.
Mark Labberton:
When you grew into the role and began to understand its scale more and think about the whole compass of what the prison system is in America, what San Quentin is in particular, what stood out in those early years? How would you have described San Quentin and how would you have described the prison system as you were experiencing it [inaudible 00:10:32]?
Earl Smith:
We used to call San Quentin the Bastille by the Bay. The thing that really stood out for me was the fact that, for 13 of the first 16 months I was there, the prison was locked down. The day I interviewed, two people were killed, so they stopped my interview twice. I understood where I was. I understood the context of confinement. What I also went in there understanding was it was not about rehabilitation, it was about regeneration, and my presence just sitting in an office was not going to work.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Earl Smith:
I knew that from the beginning that I’m not built to sit in an office, so I hit the cell blocks. After they finally started to come off a lockdown, they had an inmate football team. I volunteered to coach. They had racquetball in the gym. I went and got my racquetball and I played. I did a lot of time with guys who were not in the chapel because the chapel didn’t have very many people attending, but once again I was comfortable in that environment because I felt like, to reach people, I had to not be in the chapel.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Earl Smith:
And I believe that’s part of chaplaincy is not to allow the confines of the wall to dictate who you are.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes. But you have to be free in your own being to be able to do that.
Earl Smith:
Yeah, there has to be a sense of liberty that you are not concerned so much about the environment as you are about whose environment it is.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Earl Smith:
I went to work with the full belief that God allowed me to do this. Man could not dream of me having this job, which is to this day still if I was asked, “Okay, what’s the one job that you wish you could have?” I would say, “To be a chaplain again in San Quentin.”
Mark Labberton:
Wow, wow, wow, wow. Where did fear figure in or not figure into any of this?
Earl Smith:
Fear, for me, I wouldn’t say it figured in. There was a sense of reality. There was a sense of reality that it was a dangerous environment and, because it was a dangerous environment, anything could happen. A guy that started working with me, Hal Birchfield, was killed at San Quentin on one of the tears. Had a personal experience with a guy that started the same day I did. He was a sergeant, became a very close friend to me, almost like he was teaching me the ropes of the prison. I understood those things could happen, yet I knew people in the prison. I knew inmates and I also knew that if I was called to do what I said I was called to do, then fear may limit my ability to serve God in the proper manner. I’ll tell you a story about that.
Mark Labberton:
Please.
Earl Smith:
There was a guy who was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He was a leader. He was the guy. In this place where he was housed was like the jail inside the prison, the Adjustment Center. He decided to drop out the gang and the prison called me at home to say, “There’s an emergency. You need to come in.” I just got home. I lived in San Francisco, so that means driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge. The emergency was he was getting out of the gang, but the only one he would talk to was me. He’s an Aryan Brotherhood member.
Now, had fear driven my steps, I would’ve never crossed his path nor would he have seen that, when I went there, I spoke to everyone. I didn’t care what gang they were in, I didn’t care how they were designated. I felt each of those guys had a right for me to see and say, “How are you? Is there anything I can do for you?” And that’s what he said. He said, “The thing that was interesting about you… The reason I called you is because I watched you and you never left until you spoke to everyone that was there.”
Mark Labberton:
Wow. This says a lot about you and about, really, the way that your faith shaped your capacity to be free from fear for the sake of love. Obviously, the Bible says that love casts out fear, but the opposite is also true, that fear can cast out love. For you to be able to love in that way as freely as you did meant that fear, in some way, had been positioned, I guess we could say, placed in its context. It was like a real danger as you say but not one that was going to paralyze your ability and willingness to love. What happened in that story? If you can share a bit more, what happened to that man?
Earl Smith:
He dropped out of the gang. They transferred him to a prison out of state and he’s actually out now. I just emailed him a couple weeks ago. We just communicated and he’s doing some pretty significant things with law enforcement, sharing some understanding for them to have a better grasp on how to communicate with people. His thing was simply he was tired of what he had seen and he needed a vehicle to be able to get out of that. Yet he also needed someone that he could trust to tell the people that he loved that he was getting out of it so that they would be safe when he got out.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Earl Smith:
I was that person. The end results of it is the SSU, the Special Service Unit for the prison system of the state, they called me in to interview me because they wanted to know why would this guy that was an Aryan Brotherhood member want to only speak to me. They wondered if I was compromised or all these other things and I said, “I have no idea.” I said, “I can only tell you what he told me.”
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. He trusted you. Now, you were a chaplain during the seventies, eighties, and nineties when as Michelle Alexander writes about in The New Jim Crow, that the mass incarceration problem that we now have was really literally unfolding all around you. It was happening in culture and society. It was escalating in dramatic terms and so much of what we now face as one of our national crises, which is the problem of mass incarceration. I mean, you literally were in the thickest of the thick of that very season. I wonder if you want to make any comments about that.
Earl Smith:
Yeah, I think if you consider going from 29,000 to 170,000, seeing that growth going from 91 on death row to 750 or somewhere in that area, you’ve seen the growth. But in terms of the prison system, the majority of the people that were getting detained… I tell people all the time, there’s a difference in incarceration and being detained. Many times, detention is a byproduct of your incarceration. Many of the people that became detained were incarcerated by drugs and Michelle Alexander talks about that. She talks in The New Jim Crow about the drug epidemic that hit our inner city, that hit our cities.
And as a result of that, many people coupled with the fact that mental health institutions were being closed down and people were being released back on the street… Some of the crime that was happening was not so much the violent crime as it was the repeat crime and being taken off the street. As I saw the prison system grow, I also saw the type of guys that were coming into the prison system and I realized there was a need to start to connect with the community as soon as possible, because these guys were not going to do life in a day.
They were not going to go back to ex-Conville. They were going to go back to the communities that they were arrested in, and so we needed those communities to be combined with our prison. Our chapel was basically… We started reaching out to churches and the community saying, “How can you help us prepare these guys to come home?”
Mark Labberton:
What would you say was the mindset? Was it just a very different mindset of people coming in that way, being detained as opposed to the long-term resident?
Earl Smith:
Well, yeah. I mean, San Quentin, at that point, was what you would say the end of the line more. Pelican Bay hadn’t been built yet. Yet the mindset was they may be there because they had a life sentence or whatever. There’s a life sentence and there’s life without the possibility of parole. There’s a lot of different deviations between those, yet I believe that whether you’re on condemn role, if you have a life without the possibility of parole or life sentence or whatever it is, my job is still to share the same gospel message no matter where you’re housed. Because if it is in fact the good news that we share, you shouldn’t change the good news because of your circumstances or your settings.
For me, the people that we dealt with, the people that were in the ministry that came around the chapel, I saw them as each of the individual that needed help, but I also saw them as a representative of a family. That’s something in chaplaincy that you really have to take into consideration, that each of the people that are connected to your ministry are also connected to a family. If you’re just working with that individual and don’t take into consideration that family member, that individual may get out, but the family has not been changed. What have you really done in terms of helping that family?
So we started a lot of family-connected ministries at San Quentin to all… We had something called a San Quentin husband and wife group, where first Sunday of every month, I let guys have their wives come in for communion service and part of the church service. Saturday before that first Sunday, we actually had a meal together and did training classes, couple training, because I believed those wives when those guys came home needed to be better.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes. Earl, when you started reaching out to churches and explaining the need for them to be able to receive people as they get out of prison, what response did you get?
Earl Smith:
A lot of times, the response was, “Okay, sure,” and it stopped at sure. I mean, just being realistic, there are a lot of people that think it’s a grand idea to say, “I’m doing prison ministry.” Yet the reality is there’s very few churches in America that has not been affected or touched by crime. Either they have someone in a congregation who has a family member that’s been detained or someone has been a victim of crime in that congregation. That’s just the reality of where we are in society today.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. Yeah. So the apprehension, the stopping at the word sure was made up of their own anxiety, their own history, their own background being ill-equipped or feeling ill-equipped to be able to do anything more.
Earl Smith:
They felt ill-equipped. What I would always tell people that I recruited as volunteers, they say, “Well, I really don’t know. What can I offer?” I said, “You can offer yourself. The worst is present your body as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto the Lord.”
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes.
Earl Smith:
What does that mean? It simply means if you haven’t been to prison, if you haven’t been detained, then there’s a reason why. Share that. But yet the first thing you need to do is almost like the Job principle where his friends showed up and they didn’t do anything but just sat there. Maybe the first thing volunteers that come in prison need to do is learn how to listen, not so much have anything to say but have an ear to listen.
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton. Thanks for listening with me.
I used to go to San Quentin periodically to see people that I knew who were there. Some of them were people that I had known before they were in San Quentin, others were not, they were people that were associates of one kind or another of people that were part of the church that I was serving in Berkeley. Listening, as you say, was one of the things that I was the most aware of, this sense that you didn’t really ever… I never felt like I had very much to offer, but I certainly felt like I could at least just try to listen and try to attend to what it was that they wanted to express.
In the visits there, the intimidation, certainly for an occasional visitor like me who didn’t live in the environment but also was only there periodically, I didn’t feel like I ever really developed the capacities that I would’ve wanted to do if I’d had the job of being a chaplain. But I certainly felt also like I get that knife edge literally that you can feel like you’re on with the tyranny of potential violence at any given moment and all of that.
I was in a couple of times in that visitor’s center where some gesture would occur or some action would be taken and suddenly the whole place felt like it was on lockdown for 20 minutes or something while something happened with one particular prisoner or with the people that were visiting them. It just reminded me again and again how important this listening act is. I can certainly see, because of your own compassion, which I’ve experienced and seen so vividly over the years we’ve known each other, that that creates a space of safety in its own right when you’re there to really just hear. I can imagine the gift of your pastoral care must have really meant a lot, not only to the prisoners but also to the families that you’re saying you were reaching out to.
Earl Smith:
Well, it’s amazing what happens when someone knows that you’re listening, because how many times in a day does someone walk by and say, “Hi, how are you,” and they keep walking? In prison, people have numbers. Yet when you start to learn to listen, you get to know their name. When you get to know a person’s name and you call them not by their last name but by their first name, not only are you listening but they start to get tuned into you and listen to you. It goes both ways. The thing I tell people also, if you look at the Attica Prison Riot situation, because that’s a model that I tell volunteers about, the inmates that were killed were killed as a National Guard stormed, that they were covering the bodies of the volunteers that were in there helping them.
One of the things an inmate does if when someone has value and they’re actually bringing something to them, the one thing they don’t want is something to happen to that person because they know what bad tastes like. So when they finally get a chance to taste something good, they will do whatever it takes to keep tasting that. Someone like you, Mark, that was going in, your safety was not only ensured by the person you were visiting, but as well as the other people around, because there’s a value in people that says, “When I was in prison, you visited me.”
Mark Labberton:
Yeah.
Earl Smith:
“What does that mean? What does it mean? When did I do that?”
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Earl Smith:
“When you done it unto the least of these, you’ve done it to me.” So there’s a value in your presence.
Mark Labberton:
I know quite a few people who have either served as chaplains or served as people who, for example, are instructors in courses. Like for example, Fuller is a seminary along with other seminaries that now offers the chance to study inside prisons where Fuller has students in prisons and where that opportunity occurs. When I talked to them about their experience of being inside regularly is they were… All of them would just say so clearly how much their life was changed for the good by the experience of being inside the prison. Now, I think for a lot of people that feels like it’s an irony that doesn’t really make sense. Can you explain that irony? I think you’re touching on it by what you were saying about…
Earl Smith:
Well, I think the thing that happens is you start to realize when you say, “What can I offer? What can I do?” And then all of a sudden you’re going there because they said you’re coming to help, but you leave full, not empty. And the reason that you’re full is because the expectations and exuberance of the people that you’ve worked with have filled you. They filled you with the excitement of the spirit. They filled you with the excitement of the grasping who Christ is. They filled you with the excitement of what the word meant to them and how that word has expanded and floated.
Many times on the street or in our churches, we don’t get that same feeling. In the church, we stand in a pulpit, we share, we might have little groups, but do we have that same sense of excitement? When people go into prison and they see these guys are studying the word, they’re reading the word, they’re responding in such a way that I know they’re not just mimicking something I’m saying, but there’s a deep thought process there for people that really want to grasp the word, Mark.
It starts to do something different. I still go into prison and teach and people know on Tuesday, “Leave me alone. Don’t bother me. There’s nothing that you can get me to do because I’m going to be somewhere at a certain time.” I like to get there early because I don’t want to have anything on the road stop me or make me late. When I leave… I go there sometimes and I’m tired, and when I leave it’s like, “Yeah, wow, I needed that.”
Mark Labberton:
Well, it’s no wonder when I hear you talk about these things, why you’ve been given the National Prison Chaplain of the Year award. It makes total sense based on what you’re saying and how you’re describing this whole experience. Let’s turn to the other side of your chaplaincy life, which is being the chaplain to the Golden State Warriors and to the San Francisco 49ers.
Now, I do want to say, when I just say that especially in the most recent years, you’ve had a pretty extraordinary contrast in experiences. I mean, there’s similarities. We can come to that in a minute, but to be in San Quentin with all of its glories and then going to be with the guys that are part of the Warriors or the 49ers, that’s got to be a pretty contrasting experience, even though I’m sure, humanly speaking, there’s a lot of continuity as well.
Earl Smith:
Well, I mean, think about this when you speak of contrast. The states that have the largest prison systems are also the states that send the most professional athletes in pro sports.
Mark Labberton:
Wow.
Earl Smith:
So the counties-
Mark Labberton:
Wow. I didn’t know.
Earl Smith:
The counties that feed those prison systems are also the counties that feed professional sports. So if we take that into context and we’re saying they’re very similar people that we’re dealing with, thought process, growth process are similar. Because of that, there may be a contrast. The contrast is in the victor versus the one that was defeated somewhere along the line. Yet the contrast is not as broad as someone may think in terms of, “Oh wow, that guy’s professional athlete,” but they had to come from somewhere. There had to be a background story of where they came from to get to where they are. Those are the stories that we talk about continuously.
Mark Labberton:
Right. When you’re with the Warriors and the 49ers and people are expressing whatever their reflections might be about their own childhood and their own development, which as you say often is directly parallel, even from the same places that many who’ve landed themselves in prison have found themselves. Their backgrounds might be similar in that way. What of the people that have made it, as it were through to the Warriors or through to the Niners, say about their childhood? How do they describe it or they’re getting through it rather than being defeated by it?
Earl Smith:
Well, I think it has a lot to do with mentoring. It has a great deal to do with coaching. If we use the old English term for coaching, which simply means to carry one from one location to another, that’s what a coach is. And if we use that same analogy with a player, someone has poured into their life, lifted them up, and carried them from one location to another to get to a better place. Maybe that other individual was not coached. Maybe the coaching that that individual received was a deterrent rather than a help. Maybe there was something negative in that coaching experience that allowed that individual to get to where they are versus a positive coaching experience.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. That is really quite an amazing use of that metaphor. I had not known that was the background of coaching. I just hadn’t thought about it in that way. It certainly makes the point that we have to be carried by other people and think of the story of the paralytic and his friends carrying him to the feet of Jesus. Now, in this case, they need have been carried to the practice or onto the field or off the field or in the locker room, but, yes, that’s a very, very powerful image of what it takes for all of us, any of us, to do what we’re doing. I’ve only done what I’ve done because other people have carried me just without hesitancy. That’s exactly the story.
Tell me, as you sort out for yourself the experience of being in a heady environment, that being around professional sports is, and you also share an understanding and empathy and a deep understanding of these two similar backgrounds in many cases, what kind of metal transition did you have to make? Or did you just see them as being two different fields? “I’m working one part of the field over here in San Quentin. I’m working another part of the field of human need over here and there’s more continuity than there is discontinuity.” Is that really what you’re saying or was there a greater contrast?
Earl Smith:
No, it actually is. I remember coaching the inmate football team. We had this guy, we called him Slate Rock. Unbelievable guy. He was 6’4, 235. He was a running back. This guy, we played all military teams. Naturally, all of our games were home games. They would come in and we were playing. This guy would just run over people and run over people. Bill Walsh was [inaudible 00:36:21] and I told him. Coach was really ama-… He finally saw this guy and realized, “Man, this guy.” His question was, “I wonder how will he do in a training or learning environment away from here.” He got out and he needed just to go to JC just so he could prove himself in a different environment.
He went home, his family was still involved in what they were involved in, there was a raid, he was arrested, and he never got the chance to go. But yet, what my point is is there are so many guys that are really good athletes that, for some reason, they end up in prison. Coaching for me was just another way that I could reach to see, “What are the talents that you have?” Because if you can start to tell a person and honor them about their talents, that’s also another way for them to start to listen to you, because every man wants someone to acknowledge there’s something positive in what you’re doing. There’s a plus about your life.
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. Let me go back to a comment you made earlier about this migration in a certain way from knowing them as a number to knowing them as a last name to knowing them by their first name and calling them by their first name. In what you’ve just described, it feels to me like what you’re describing is that you’re on a journey with them, you’re discovering who they are, you encounter them through whatever baseline is set first, but then gradually over time, in part, learning to see them as you were committed to doing and are committed to doing, that you get the chance to prove that you can use their first name honestly and genuinely. Am I hearing you right?
Earl Smith:
Yes. Because one of the things I believe… I taught some classes at Angola State Prison in Louisiana. One day, I was going in with a guy named Clifton Jansky, country western singer. As we were going in, on a heel as you go in Angola, you see all these crosses. I said, “Well, can we stop?” When we got to the crosses, there was not a single name on them, but every cross had a number. Clifton got back in the bus with me and he wrote a song. They may know your number but God knows your name.
Mark Labberton:
Wow.
Earl Smith:
That’s always been something in my mind. If you can know a person’s name, that elevates the conversation, that elevate… My goal is to share the gospel with you. How do I get you to do that? How do I do that by getting you to listen? How do I get you to li-… If I say your name, if I call you Mike, and that’s your name, then you know that I’m not talking to Tony. Mike is going to listen to what I have to say next. In prison settings, the one on one is so valuable.
Mark Labberton:
So valuable. I recently had a chance to interview someone named Marilynne Robinson who’s a remarkable writer, and she wrote a book of reflections about the Book of Genesis. One of the things that comes through so strongly in this book is that the wonderment, really, that she expresses and that she finds in the text itself of God’s way of paying attention to us, honoring us as human beings made in God’s image, people who have a name and a family, and a story and an experience of the world, and how vested God is in the pursuit of our being fully human. What you’re describing so beautifully is that very thing played out, whether it’s in prison settings or whether it’s some great, honored, popular, overwhelmingly paid pro athlete. They all need to know that they are human beings, seen, loved, known, named. It’s very powerful, Earl. Very powerful.
Earl Smith:
Well, pro athletes are placed on a pedestal, right? I believe the pastor chaplain for professional athletes’ job is not to acknowledge the pedestal.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, well said.
Earl Smith:
And in not acknowledging the pedestal, in many cases what you’re doing is actually telling the guy, “You’re okay. You’re in a safe environment. There’s no need for pedestal. The only one that really needs to be elevated and lifted up is Christ. Let’s work from that perspective.” Because when they leave the chapel room, when they leave the Bible study, everyone’s waiting to elevate them. Everyone’s waiting to put them back on that pedestal because they’re their heroes, yet they have so many things that they’re dealing with on a daily basis that goes beyond. I mean, you read the back of a guy’s sports card and it has all these stats. I tell guys all the time, “Man, put a stat on there about the day you got saved. Put a stat on there about the day you were baptized. Make that your card. Because if they can learn that and you’re their hero, that may lead them to do the same thing.”
Mark Labberton:
Right. Right. There’s some amazing work that’s being done by someone who used to be part of the faculty at Fuller named Ben Houltberg who works a lot on performance and on the question and issue of how performance and identity get twisted and turned in various ways. I think one of the things that you’re saying is that in a context that is really defined by performance, how do you let it become more defined by simply who you are in Christ, if you’re a Christian, who you are period as a human being, rather than just in your performance, which is such a driver, obviously, for professional sports?
Earl Smith:
Well, I tell the guys, I said, “Who wore your number before you?” Perfect example is Jerry Rice. When you say number 80, Jerry Rice. Who wore number 80 before Jerry Rice? A guy named Eason Ramson. He was a tight end for the 49ers on their first Super Bowl team, but he was also a three-time offender that was in prison afterwards. So understanding the number, understanding that there’s a story in that number. No one wore 80 after Jerry because no one felt like Joe’s number or there are certain numbers that get retired.
Mark Labberton:
Retired, right.
Earl Smith:
Yeah. The reality is do you know the story of the number? Everyone hears about Jerry, but they don’t know that there was this guy that wore number 80 for the first Super Bowl team and he ended up going to prison, and now he has a PhD and is doing unbelievable work in the city of San Francisco. It took him longer to get to where he needed to be and he got there not because of his exploits on the field, but because of the journey off of the field that got him to where he needed to be for God’s sake.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Yes. Earl, when you are working with athletes in either of these teams, the Niners or the Warriors, do quite a number of athletes come from some kind of Christian background?
Earl Smith:
Yes, and the thing I would say is FCA and AIA-
Mark Labberton:
Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes In Action.
Earl Smith:
They do some really great work on the college campuses in terms of reaching out to players. Players are not unfamiliar with the thought process associated with ministry on a team. Many of their families have some kind of background. It’s amazing how many people tell you that their grandma’s been praying for them. My grandma prayed for me, man.
Mark Labberton:
Nice. Nice.
Earl Smith:
She got a lot of static when she mentioned my name. There’s something to that. There’s something to the connectedness of relationship. God is a relational God and this thing that we talk about sports is relational. You don’t do it by yourself and you don’t get there by yourself. I mean, there’s great athletes that never make it to the pros and then there’s people… The story becomes how many first-rounders make it and how many late-rounders make it. What is the difference in the prayer process? And you just say, “Well, I don’t know, but I can tell you that there’s levels of prayer that we know nothing about, that people pray for player success.” Maybe I’m crazy enough to believe that God hears that and he honors that.
Mark Labberton:
Earl, when did chaplaincy in professional sports become a thing? Have we always had that? I don’t know when it was started.
Earl Smith:
Mark, that’s one of the things. I had to take those last two classes to get my degree completed, right?
Mark Labberton:
At Fuller, yeah.
Earl Smith:
Fuller. I had to get it. What was one of the classes, I took chaplaincy and they were like, “Why are you taking a class on chaplaincy?” I took it because I wanted to see what were the young people studying. What was the emphasis? What I realized is there’s been a great emphasis on pastoral ministries. There’s been a great emphasis on localized ministries and outreach and missionary work, yet chaplaincy was somewhere down the road. It wasn’t something that was as viable as being a missionary, but yet you are. There’s so many different avenues that one can take in chaplaincy and everyone is not really gifted to be a pastor in a local congregation. Yet you may have been a sports junkie, now you are in ministry, you love the notion of sports, you love the talk of sports, and somehow or another, you can find a connectedness that you don’t really so much… In sports chaplaincy, I tell guys all the time. I don’t even like basketball, which you already know, Mark, but I love the opportunity to do ministry with basketball players.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. Right. Right.
Earl Smith:
There’s something about loving the fact that you could do that, but it was almost like it just took off as every professional team has a chaplain, different degrees of how they work with their players, their coaches, their administrative staff and ownership, yet they have that. My model for sports chaplaincy was Pat Ritchie. Pat Ritchie was the chaplain for the 49ers, the Giants, and the Sharks, San Jose Sharks. I think there couldn’t be a better model than Pat Ritchie, because Pat and [inaudible 00:48:38] exemplified what it meant to reach beyond the reach.
Mark Labberton:
Earl, I’m sure the class that you took on chaplaincy was probably an overview of chaplaincy, whereas you’re really working in two quite specific areas. The training for chaplaincy for professional sports or for sports versus chaplaincy inside the incarceration system of federal prisons or jails, for example, would be something quite different. I’m just curious, how do we move forward in the way that chaplains are developed? What would really strengthen the hand of that?
Earl Smith:
Well, I think in taking the course, one of the things I realized is there seems to be a gap and understanding the difference between state, local, and county detention facilities, as well as the viability of sports chaplaincy, not just on a professional level, but college level, high school level. There’s all these other things that we can look at. And I believe that one of the things we’re trying to develop at Fuller is this chaplaincy chair where we can start to have students come in and be trained more so in those fields and give them the opportunity to see that there are other viable options. It’s not just a federal system, but there’s so many systems and so many nuances to this thought of chaplaincy that I just want to grab young people and say, “Hey, this is out here.” It’s not for everyone, but I believe that if you share it properly, they can make an intelligent decision as to what they’ll do with it.
Mark Labberton:
That’s so great. One of the exciting things that I know is unfolding as we close is that there’s a documentary being made about your story. I wonder if you could just give us a little anticipatory taste of what’s up. What is that going to be about? How is it going? We know just from listening to you on this podcast that you have surely some of the great stories to be told and your story personally in the midst of that. Give us an update.
Earl Smith:
As you’re aware, I wrote the book Death Row Chaplain.
Mark Labberton:
Yes.
Earl Smith:
From the book, Death Row Chaplain, there’s going to be an adaptation of that story, yet it’s going to start off with a documentary that’s going to be phased in, and the documentary is going to be segments or a series. And within that series, there’s going to be the whole thing on coaching, the whole thing on mentoring. How do you get there? Who were my early coaches and what did that do for my life? Yet the documentary is really a story of transition. It’s a story of not rehabilitation but more regeneration. It’s more of a story of someone. My mom said, “Don’t play with God. He doesn’t use people like you.” When I said I was called into the ministry, she had an awareness of my yesterday, but she had no awareness of my tomorrow. That’s really what the story’s about, some of my yesterday, some of my today, and what I believe to be my tomorrow.
Mark Labberton:
Wow. Well, I can’t wait. Earl, I love every chance we’ve had to be together. And today’s such a great gift
Earl Smith:
Thank you, Mark.
Mark Labberton:
Thank you, thank you, thank you for all that you’re doing and for who you’re being in a context where you are a coach to people in very challenging circumstances. I’ve always loved praying for you, knowing that you’re in those settings and that it’s you and having such high trust and regard for what you bring and love for who you are. Thank you for sharing some of that today with us on Conversing.
Earl Smith:
Well, thank you so much for having me.
