Terry’s Story
Terry Solley was fourteen years old when his father put a pistol in his hand and they began doing armed robberies together in Southern Louisiana.
Eventually, they were arrested and at eighteen Terry went to prison for multiple armed robberies for the next eleven years. He got out at twenty-nine and stayed out for just fifteen months. Then he and his father were arrested robbing a Wells Fargo bank and they both went back to prison this time in Texas.
Terry spent another seventeen years in prison, for a total of twenty-eight years of his life.
He became a prison gang member in his first time in prison, he rose in seniority in the gang and spent eight and half years in solitary confinement for being a threat to the order and security of the prison. He was alone, locked in his cell, twenty-three hours a day.
Between the ages of eight and fourteen, Terry went to church with his mom and stepfather, but that ended around the time he began robbing banks with his father. He knew the gospel. He would even have said, “Jesus is my Savior.”
But in jail a second time, in solitary confinement, awaiting trial with his father God got his attention. People came into the unit and shared the gospel with him. Terry realized he didn’t just need a Savior, he needed a Lord. He surrendered his life to Christ, Savior and Lord.
You don’t get free from solitary just because you become a Christian. There’s a process. It would be another two and a half years before he was released from solitary.
Freed from solitary, Terry enrolled in the prison’s seminary. Prisoners with long sentences could go to the seminary, receive a bachelor's degree in Biblical studies and be sent out as a missionary to another prison.
That’s how Terry met Don Waybright. Don was going into the prison to train the seminary students in sharing the gospel, making disciples and forming discipleship clusters that functioned as churches. (Regulations prohibit calling them churches.) Terry dived right in. Soon there were Bible studies in every day room in the prison.
Terry and the team Don trained weren’t just doing the work, they were training the disciples to share their stories and the gospel story and form groups for discipleship. As the movement grew it expanded into other Texas prisons.
Terry became a pastor to prisoners on death row. He was with the men up to their execution.
One prisoner named Anibal knew Terry from twenty years before when they were both gang members but from opposing gangs. He has been on death row for twenty-three years because he murdered a prisoner.
He was stunned by what God had done in Terry’s life. The other prisoners respected Anibal and listened to him. As he surrendered his life to Christ, he became a “man of peace” (Luke 10) through whom the gospel spread. Death row is made up of sections where fourteen men live together. Now churches are meeting in six sections of death row. They study the Scriptures and worship every day. Men like Anibal have surrendered to the Lord and are making disciples. Death row is being transformed by Christ in them, the hope of glory.
Terry Solley (right)
Terry explains, “Throughout the prison, church looks like a group of four or five men sitting around the table, studying the word of God, worshiping together, taking communion together, holding each other accountable, modeling what Christianity looks like for each other.”
“The churches are effective because the men are doing it themselves. They are sharpening each other, discipling and mentoring each other. It’s spreading from prison to prison across the Texas prison system. There are 104 prisons in Texas. We have disciples in 42 of those prisons.”
Terry says, “We know that if a man comes to Christ, his whole relational world is affected. You know, prison gives you a concept of what it means to be a man, but the Bible, the word of God, gives you a whole different concept. So I began living my life as a man of God inside of prison.”
“When I went to that seminary program at Darrington Unit, my father was there. And he began watching me. He began seeing a different son than the one he raised. He gave his life to the Lord because he saw the change that the Lord had done in me. He was 63 years old. A couple of months later, he died of stage four lung cancer.”
“We have men who surrender their life to the Lord in prison, and their children see the difference, and their wives see the difference. They come to the Lord, and they join the Christian community on the outside.”
“But a lot of men do come out of prison and they fall because they don't have accountability and support. That’s why we’re building a five-acre community called Restoration Harbor where men, long-term offenders, can come out of prison, can have a place to stay for a year to get intense discipleship training.”
“We want to build these men up to go back into the prisons with the gospel, to go to the streets with the gospel, to become generational changers through the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“I broke my wife's heart, I left her alone with our five-month-old daughter and knowing that there are other men in prison who if they don't change, if the gospel doesn't penetrate their hearts, they'll get out of prison, make all these promises to their family and then commit crimes and go right back to prison and leave another wife heartbroken, leave another child alone to be raised without a father.”
“So when I look back on my life and I see how the Lord has changed me, how he has reconciled my family, how he has built and strengthened my relationship with my daughter, every time I wake up and look at her, it motivates me to do what I do because I don't want another wife heartbroken. I don't want another child to have to be raised without their father.”
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