TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Highlands Today

A Higher Calling

Kathy Waters/Highlands Today

The Rev. Joe Valentin talks to an inmate after giving a sermon Friday during a weekly visit to the Highlands County Jail on Friday in Sebring.

ADVERTISEMENT

By Douglas  Carman | Highlands Today

Published: May 12, 2008

SEBRING — Church services are held on Fridays for some of the Highlands County Detention Facility inmates, and Joe Valentin is one of their pastors.

The Southern Baptist minister comes to the jail once a week, giving sermons that rarely go beyond 15 minutes but spread a message of hope and faith to those that have "all the time in the world" to consider it, he said.

In a setting where his listeners committed sins of a legal as well as a biblical nature, the former narcotics detective with the New York Police Department said he addresses a specific spiritual need, but delivers the same message to those outside the jail's walls: "It's – and I don't want to sound so spiritual, but it's love."

A Service

He came in at 1 p.m. for his latest sermon the Friday before Mother's Day, so he had a theme in mind for this visit. First, however, a guard handed him a note. One particular inmate's mother called and asked Valentin to personally counsel him.

After being escorted inside the first of two jail blocks he would be preaching in, a guard announced from his desk that the "Hispanic ministry" will begin in the courtyard.

Valentin and the guard see about half the inmates shuffle into the courtyard, backs against the enclosing walls with three of the inmates holding Bibles. The gray-haired Valentin, dressed in a polo shirt and with a Santa Biblia in hand, looked for any newcomers and English-speaking inmates. Three of them called out, and Valentine said in English and Spanish that that he'll have to spend more time since the sermon will be bilingual.

In a session lasting a little more than 20 minutes, he told the 18 inmates sitting there to forgive their mothers and to ask for forgiveness from them.

"Do not underestimate your mother when she becomes old. Do not scorn your mother ... we have a tendency to do that," he told the inmates. "You feel that she may have abandoned you, but you need to forgive her, amen."

They usually kept silent, listening and repeating the amens. Two of them asked for help afterward.

Deputy Mike Gilliam, who has known Valentin for 15 years since they both worked at the Avon Park Correctional Institution, described him as someone who seemed dedicated to what he does for the jail.

"He's very passionate about bringing the ministry to the correctional setting," Gilliam said.

Along with his ministry at the Highlands County Jail, Valentin ministers at the Crown Point assisted living facility in Sun 'n Lake and at the Interdenominational Bible Institute based in Sebring.

Between those three settings and the APCI, Valentin said he has to change his style somewhat. Since the assisted living people are already Christians, he's "discipling," or teaching rather than evangelizing. The same is true for the APCI since most of the inmates are there for a long time.

With the jail, however, people come in and out.

"I have the opportunity to reach a greater number of people," he said. "It's more of a production line."

From Arresting To Evangelizing

He took a long arc in his life from busting narcotic suppliers to evangelizing to dope pushers and to the disabled elderly.

It started when he was only 17, only 5 years after he immigrated to New York's Lower East Side from Puerto Rico. He said his family was dysfunctional and he wanted to get away from them, so he joined the Army's 3rd Infantry Regiment's Fox company and spent two years in Washington, protecting then-president Dwight Eisenhower's plane.

When he returned to New York in 1957, he worked as a classified advertising representative for El Diario La Prensa, but by 1961 he joined the New York Police Department's Tactical Patrol Force. Eventually, he moved up from being a community drug awareness educator to become a narcotics detective.

He said the job satisfied two of his needs at the time.

"I had this social work sort of spirit," he said. And, "it would feed my ego. That's the uniform, that's the badge, that's the power. ... for the most part though, I wanted to make a difference."

That changed after his 13th year in the force, when he said "something else came to my life ... it's simply an encounter in what we Evangelicals call 'being born again.'"

He quit in 1982, visited Jerusalem, and then went to the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., near Philadelphia.

What led him to prison and jail evangelism happened to be his past experience as a cop.

"Given the fact that I spent 21 years with the NYPD, do I know how they think and act? You better believe it," he said.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT