Memories of Jack winter

Part 4 – Jack’s Childlike Simplicity

Jack had the same approach to preaching as he did to finance. Jack never had a big intercession thing about him before speaking; he just stepped into it. This was one of the most incredible things about him. The first time I noticed this, I was a young Christian, and I was sitting beside Jack as he was about to speak to maybe 5000 people at a meeting. He just turned to me and said, “Would you pray for me?” I thought, “What effect are my prayers going to have?” but Jack trusted God to use my prayers, even though I was an immature Christian. I saw him, on a number of different occasions, just turning to a teenager or a person who had no real clout in ministry, and asking them to pray for him, then humbly bowing his head while they laid hands on him and prayed for anointing for his preaching.

Jack’s simplicity was extraordinary. He had no concept of people being of greater or lesser significance in the Body of Christ. He treated everyone with the same honour; the most junior, or the most broken person with the same respect and honour as he would give to some of the ‘big names.’ Those who had a high profile in ministry meant nothing more to Jack than the difficult, broken or problematic people.

Jack Winter never had any small talk. He wasn’t interested in talking about the weather or about fashion (maybe a bit about sport). Whenever he would meet someone he saw them as needing to know the Father’s love so he would dive straight into talking to them about the need for love. He never thought that anyone was a waste of his time or attention. For the last 25 years of his life, Jack lived, ate, slept, and breathed for ministering the love of the Father to people.

If you met Jack, you could walk right past him and not think that he was of any significance at all. You really needed to have ears to hear what Jack was saying, because he didn’t have any flamboyance or charisma about his personality. He wasn’t a particularly encouraging or positive person to be around. Jack was misunderstood; some people didn’t quite know what to make of him. He was accused of being somewhat manipulative. You could certainly look at some things at surface level and assume that he was, but that would be a wrong conclusion to arrive at. The truth is, Jack had a tremendously strong sense of the hand of God upon his life. He was constantly conscious of what God was doing at that moment. When he would walk into a room his constant thought was,

“What is God doing here now, in this room, with these people?”

If you were sitting there talking about the weather and Jack came in, you couldn’t talk about the weather any more. What God was doing became the focus. There was an amazing intensity about Jack’s presence. He had an extraordinary awareness of God’s hand upon his life.

More coming soon!