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69 Inmates Just Got Baptized Inside a Florida County Jail

A volunteer pastor and two local churches turned a Walton County booking room into a baptism line, and by the time the water dried nearly 150 inmates across three facilities had gone under.

August 10, 2026 · 3 min read · Kingdom Kutz Media Newsroom

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Sixty nine inmates walked into the water at the Walton County Jail in DeFuniak Springs, Florida, this summer. Forty eight men. Twenty one women. More than seventy had asked to be baptized that day, and the jail could not physically get to all of them before time ran out.

This did not happen because a famous evangelist rolled through town. It happened because a bivocational pastor has been showing up to a 596 bed jail week after week for years, mostly unnoticed, until the numbers got too big to ignore.

How a County Jail Became a Baptism Line

Rev. Jonathan King is the senior pastor of First Apostolic Church in DeFuniak Springs. He is also a volunteer chaplain at the Walton County Jail, which holds an average daily population of around 500 people. King has spent years leading Bible studies and one on one conversations inside the facility, the kind of ministry that does not make headlines until a single day produces 69 baptisms at once.

Corey Dobridnia, the Walton County Sheriff's Office public information officer, described the department's approach to what happens next for those inmates in five words: "recovery, not recidivism." That is not just a slogan the department repeats for cameras. It shapes what the jail actually lets churches do inside its walls.

It Did Not Stop With the Men

The wave at Walton County's main jail was only part of it. A separate women's jail in the county saw 58 more baptisms across two different events. Fifteen boys were baptized at the county's Juvenile Detention Center. Add it up and roughly 142 people, men, women and teenagers, all incarcerated in the same county, went under the water inside the span of a single season.

That is not one isolated altar call. That is a jail system where multiple facilities, multiple age groups and multiple churches all saw the same thing happening at once, independently of each other, in the same few weeks.

There is a reason Jesus told a story about a servant who was forgiven an impossible debt and then turned around and grabbed a fellow servant by the throat over a few dollars. It is the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, and in it the ungrateful servant ends up back in prison, this time of his own making. Kingdom Kutz Media walked through that exact parable in God's Warning About Unforgiveness, which lays out why the mercy God extends to us was never meant to stop at our own front door. The inmates at Walton County heard a version of that same message, delivered by men who kept choosing to walk back into a jail for free, week after week, because somebody once walked in for them.

What Happens After the Water

A baptism inside a jail raises an obvious question. What happens to that person the day they walk out the gate with nowhere established to go and no job waiting?

Amanda Merritt, executive assistant to Pastor Shawn Baker at New Life Church of Santa Rosa Beach, said her congregation and its partners are building an answer around that exact gap. Newly released inmates connected to the ministry are being offered transportation, temporary housing, parenting classes and a route into Celebrate Recovery groups, along with links to outside reentry organizations like Path of Grace and Freedom Life Compass.

None of that is required by the jail. It is churches choosing to stay involved long after the water has dried, which is usually the harder and less photographed part of a story like this.

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;Isaiah 61:1 (KJV)

Key Takeaways

• 69 inmates were baptized in one push at the Walton County Jail in DeFuniak Springs, Florida, 48 men and 21 women.
• Across the county's jail system, roughly 142 men, women and teens were baptized this summer, including 58 women at a separate facility and 15 boys at the Juvenile Detention Center.
• Rev. Jonathan King has served as a volunteer jail chaplain for years, and the sheriff's office frames its approach around recovery rather than punishment alone.
• Local churches are backing the baptisms with real reentry support, including housing, transportation, parenting classes and Celebrate Recovery groups.
• The story is a reminder that some of the most significant moves of God right now are happening in places most people never think to look.

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