Grace Place is more than a place now. The United Methodist ‘mission’ to the Mark H. Luttrell Correctional Center — the state female prison — is now a full-fledged United Methodist Church.

That makes Grace Place UMC the first prison-based mission congregation in the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church and the second in the country, after Women at the Well UMC in Iowa Correctional Institution for Women in Mitchellville, Iowa.

Lane Gardner Camp, UMC communications director, has a story about last month’s ‘service for organizing a new congregation’ — a service that included inmates, Memphis area lay and clergy, a number of inmates, and Rev. Diane Harrison, the church’s founding pastor.