Chuck Colson, the late Prison Fellowship founder, will be buried privately at Quantico National Cemetery in Virginia in the coming days, but the public is invited to attend a memorial service that will be held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on May 16.

The memorial service to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Colson will be held at 10 a.m., according to the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, one of the two ministries the evangelical leader founded.

Seating will be limited and reserved for those who respond to formal invitations, the Colson Center said. Others will be seated on a first-come, first-served basis. The event will also be streamed live at nationalcathedral.org.

The 80-year-old Southern Baptist, who served as an aide to former President Richard Nixon and was convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal in 1974, died April 21 after struggling with an intracerebral hemorrhage.

Colson became a committed Christian while the Watergate charges were still pending against him and after a friend gave him a copy of the C.S. Lewis book Mere Christianity. His conversion led him to plead guilty to obstruction of justice while a judge was considering dismissing the case against him. He served seven months of a one- to three-year prison sentence.

The Colson family has requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Charles Colson Legacy Fund to “further Chuck’s work, bringing God’s light into a dark world, making – as Chuck always says – ‘the invisible Kingdom visible’ to God’s great glory.”

Colson founded Prison Fellowship in 1976 and it now operates in 113 countries around the globe. Colson personally visited 600 prisons in the U.S. and 40 other countries over the last four decades of his life. The Colson Center, meanwhile, helps Christians to embrace and live out a Christian worldview.

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