Blake Williams
A Convicted Bank Robber Opened a Bible in Prison. What Happened Next Changed Don Wood’s Life.
Meet Blake Williams and follow why his prison Bible study became one of the manuscript’s central living exhibits.
Not the Expected Teacher
Blake Williams enters the story as a prisoner, not a theologian.
The power of Blake Williams’s role in the manuscript comes partly from how unlikely he appears as a central figure.
He was not introduced as a bishop, professor, denominational founder, or professionally trained minister.
He was a convicted bank robber inside the federal prison system.
Yet Don L. Wood eventually makes Blake’s story one of the book’s most important practical exhibits because of what happened when prisoners began studying Scripture without relying on inherited religious systems.
The First Study
The question became whether reading the text would force a response.
The manuscript describes a group of prisoners working through Scripture together.
When they reached passages such as Acts 2:38, baptism stopped being an abstract doctrinal controversy.
Fifteen men were ready to respond, and Blake joined them.
The book describes sixteen men being baptized in a child’s swimming pool on a cold concrete prison floor.
The passage became central to the prisoners’ understanding of repentance, baptism, and forgiveness.
El Reno
Then Blake tried the experiment again.
In March 1981, after transfer to the Federal Correctional Institution at El Reno, Oklahoma, Blake joined Rick Watson, Alan Bullard, and Bud Godwin in another intensive study.
The manuscript says they adopted the same basic agreement: no clergy, no tracts, and no imported system directing the conclusions.
Rick Watson’s account, as reported in the book, describes extraordinary amounts of time spent studying alongside prison work.
Blake’s role was unusual because the manuscript says he often remained quiet, watching to see whether Scripture would lead the others where the earlier study had led.
A Congregation Emerges
Blake did not merely win an argument. A community took shape.
The El Reno group baptized men who came to share their convictions.
By December 1983, the manuscript reports eighty-six baptisms.
The prisoners eventually received chapel space for Sunday worship and Thursday Bible study.
Their assembly included teaching, prayer, Scripture reading, the Lord’s Supper, and singing.
Blake disliked the nickname 'Blakeites' because, in the book’s telling, he did not want the group centered on himself.
The Search for Others
The prisoners eventually asked a dangerous question: are we the only ones?
If their conclusions really came from the New Testament, they reasoned that other Christians might already be following the same pattern.
Rick Watson sent questions to churches asking them to answer from Scripture.
The manuscript describes correspondence with the Ridgewood congregation in Beaumont, Texas, as a turning point.
That contact mattered because the prison group believed it showed they had not invented something unique to Blake.
Don Wood Arrives
The prisoner eventually examined the preacher.
Don L. Wood later entered El Reno as a trained preacher expecting to teach.
The manuscript says the prisoners challenged elements of what he preached by taking him back through the biblical text.
Instead of ending the encounter with an argument, Blake reportedly asked Don whether he wanted to study.
Don writes that the resulting investigation forced him to reconsider beliefs he had previously taught with confidence.
January 1986
The story eventually turned the author himself into a participant.
According to Don’s account, the study culminated in his own decision to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins in January 1986.
That is one reason Blake Williams occupies such an unusual place in Who Changed the Church?.
He is not merely a character Don researched later. Blake belongs to the chain of events Don says changed the direction of his own life and ministry.
In the manuscript, Blake Williams is important not because he founded a movement, but because he kept pointing people back to the text.
Why It Matters
Blake Williams was a prisoner, a convicted bank robber, and an unlikely catalyst for the story Don L. Wood eventually told. The manuscript does not present him as an inspired teacher or religious founder. It presents him as a man who asked whether Scripture could be allowed to speak without being filtered through inherited systems. The congregations, baptisms, debates, and Don’s own conversion story that followed are why Blake becomes one of the book’s central living witnesses.