After Ron returned to his hometown Frankfurt precisely on Easter Sunday in April 1987, he was at first not really interested to continue with any prison ministry. He was actually more concerned about a court case that was still hanging over him. While still in Peru, he had learned that a court in Frankfurt had issued an Interpol arrest warrant for him. Fortunately, there was no extradition treaty between Peru and Germany and eventually, it was possible to work out a deal with the court, which even flew all the way out to Lima to interrogate him. Afterwards the warrant was suspended until he would be able to stand trial in Germany.

First, he looked for a new church to attend and quite quickly he was led to join the international, English-speaking “Trinity Lutheran Church”. Even though he’d thought it had been enough now to visit any more prisoners, that church, without knowing anything about his past, had already decided to start an outreach programme to the local jails and chose the high school youth group, which Ron had volunteered to lead meanwhile, to organize a Christmas gift programme for both the male and female prisons that year. After meeting with the chaplains of those prisons and learning that almost 95% of the inmates were foreigners from some 145 countries, Ron decided to continue the “Foreign Prisoners Fellowship” and together with Pastor Al Rider from Trinity and several others, a committee of people from various international churches in the area was formed and began to hold Bible-discussion groups and services in English and Spanish every single week in Frankfurt and several other prisons in the state of Hessen.

The Frankfurt Preungesheim prison was actually a remand jail for people who had just been arrested and were waiting for trial. Ron would often accompany South American and African drug traffickers to their court hearings. There he almost always bumped into the main prosecutor for drug cases, who was also handling his own case and who had been part of the delegation that had come to Peru… At first, the prosecutor found it very suspicious to see Ron in the courthouse all the time and figured that he must be up to something with all those international smugglers! However, after hearing many testimonies from them while in court, how they had found a new life in Jesus, he became more and more convinced that the ministry was genuine and about a year later, Ron received a registered letter from court one day. Believing it was a court summons, he hesitantly opened it, but it was notice that the case and all charges against him had been dropped! Really another miracle, since for the meticulous and rather merciless German justice in drug cases, that was never heard of before.

FPF in Frankfurt developed to a ministry to all the prisons in the state of Hessen. When Ron started to work as first European director for “Prison Fellowship International” in 1989, FPF continued under the leadership of Rose, then with Christina, then with the late John Cox and with Pastor Dorothy, and sister Rosalie, all of them leaders from international churches in and around Frankfurt.