A few weeks ago Zach Hunt over at his The American Jesus blog asked the question: Can You Have A Church Without A Prison Ministry? I'd say, no, you can't. See: Matthew 25.And yet, many churches fall down on the job, especially progressive churches.Last week I was visiting with my friend Richard Goode at Lipscomb University. Richard and those associated with him at Lipscomb have done some amazing things in prisons. For example, check this out As Richard and I were talking about our respective experiences in prison ministry we noted the following: there aren't many progressive Christians or churches engaged in prison ministry.For example, churches send prisons all sorts of print literature. Pamphlets, books, newsletters and magazines. Prisons overflow with this reading material. But the theological quality of this material is generally awful. If the material is not theological kooky it is decidedly fundamentalist.I look through this stuff each week as the inmates pick up things to read on their own and it just kills me. Why aren't progressive churches sending reading materiel to prisons? In my prison there is a whole wall of free reading material and all of it is being sent in from fundamentalist churches.In addition, the people who do prison ministry where I am (and Richard reports the same trend in his context) all come from conservative or fundamentalist churches. To be clear, I'm not lamenting this. I love the volunteers I work alongside. These are guys following the commands of Jesus in visiting the prisoner. So I don't care all that much about if I'd agree with most of the chaplaincy volunteers about God or the atonement or social justice or whatever. The common work is what unites us.My concern is that the theological conversation isn't all that diverse in prisons. Given that progressive Christians have by and large abandoned prison ministries, the theological education provided for the inmates is very narrow. Progressive Christian ideas are almost wholly absent.Why are progressive Christian churches not more involved in prison ministry?Maybe it's a demographics issue. Progressive Christianity tends to be pretty intellectual and formally educated. Prison populations tend to have less formal education. So I wonder if that educational divide is a part of the problem. Can formally educated progressive Christians communicate the faith to more informally educated populations like those in prison?Another thought. Progressive Christians, perhaps because of their formal education and biographies with churches (i.e., getting burned by them), can be pretty cynical. It's one of the things I dislike about progressive Christianity, its temptations toward cynicism. And cynicism doesn't work well in prison. Prison is a pretty depressing place. You need to speak words of hope and do more than rant about penal substitutionary atonement or suggest that the inmates "give up God for Lent."But whatever the reasons--too educated? too hipster? too cynical? too doubt-filled?--as best Richard and I can tell, progressive Christians are failing our prisons.