February Member Spotlight: The Wintons

A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in January 2010 gave Randy Winton the strength to walk into a new ministry—and carry the rest of his family with him.

Randy and his sons, Cody and Jesse, are The Wintons, a Gospel bluegrass trio that travels the nation and has recorded two CDs. Randy’s wife, Lisa, contributed by playing bass early in the life of the band, but now that she is busy with their two little daughters she aids the ministry through extensive behind-the-scenes support jobs. When the Wintons are on one of their motor home tours, young daughters, Anna and Heidi, are along for the ride as well.

But the Wintons have gone beyond music. This month, Rescued, their first film, will be released on DVD. The hour-long movie’s aim is to get Christians thinking about their “Biblical role to care for orphans,” Randy says.

“It’s not a Biblical mandate that we adopt, but it’s a Biblical mandate that we care for orphans.”

The act of adoption hits close to home for the Wintons. They adopted both of their daughters. Anna, now 5, was adopted in 2008 and Heidi Joy, 3, was adopted in 2009.

Randy sees events like adoption and an MS diagnosis as signs of God’s providence, which is what has kept the band and family going for two years.

The bluegrass group was already performing before Randy’s MS diagnosis, but was only playing a few gigs a month in the family’s native north-central California, typically at convalescent homes. At the time, Randy was a landscaping contractor. He had left the vocational ministry in 2004 after 16 years of serving first as a youth pastor and then as music pastor. Those jobs, though, weren’t allowing him to spend as much time as he wanted to with his sons. First he decided to go to work with Highlands Ministries in Virginia as an assistant to R.C. Sproul Jr. He left after six months there to return to California when his aging parents’ health began to decline rapidly. Once back in California, he started the landscape construction company using skills he had gained when he had to support himself in college.

“I was trying to find something I could do that would allow me to keep my sons by my side,” Randy says.

As a landscaping contractor, he could take the boys with him to work at the 40-plus sites they maintained, as well as construction sites. The homeschoolers were even able to take school work along with them to do during trips between jobs, as well as listen to teaching CDs and audio books, enabling them and their father to discuss theology and doctrine and life. Most importantly, though, as they accompanied their father on the job, they learned how to work.

“I was influencing their lives,” Randy says. “They got to watch me deal with clients—good and bad clients. They got to watch me admit to my clients when I was wrong and fix my mistakes at my cost. But those are great things to teach my children, especially knowing my sons were going to be their own men someday and have their own families.”

In the meantime, Cody and Jesse had started developing their own musical talents. They already knew piano and basic rhythm guitar and had an interest in bluegrass music. When an illness and an injury kept them both out of sports for a summer, they asked to learn the fiddle.

“I’m thinking, ‘Fiddle? What in the world do you want to play fiddle for? But, OK, you want to play fiddle,’” Randy says.

He lined them up with a fiddler teacher named Sam Sloan, who turned out to be a national fiddle champion for the 60-69 age group.

Their interest in bluegrass instruments and music expanded rapidly. Two months after beginning fiddle, Jesse purchased a mandolin and started teaching himself. Cody decided to take up the banjo and soon beat his teacher in a local picking competition. They self-taught everything else they learned. For Cody, that’s dobro, stand-up bass, and “a little rhythm guitar.” Jesse learned mandolin, lead guitar, and stand-up bass. The latter is a three-time California state picking champion, while Cody won the honor once.

“They have some talent that they work hard at,” Randy says. “They practice and practice and practice.”

The Wintons decided to try bluegrass after seeing the Franklin Springs film The Peasall Sisters: Family Harmony, featuring a more folksy rendering of the genre.

“We watched that and went, ‘Wow, I think we can do that,’” Randy recalls.

So they did, and God began to use them. They volunteered to perform at a local retirement home where an older couple who were formerly landscape clients of theirs had just moved. A local pastor visiting his elderly aunt that day came up afterward and asked if they would come play at his church’s men’s breakfast. Word about The Wintons spread from that performance, and the phone began ringing.

The genre, with its large Gospel content and musical bent, lent itself to what Cody and Jesse already had a talent for. The Wintons opted for a more traditional bluegrass sound and started putting together cover material and creating original songs. But they’ve been careful about what they choose to communicate through their music.

“We’re selective about what we play,” Randy says. “Just because it’s Gospel bluegrass doesn’t mean it’s good. We have a Reformed bent in our theology so we want music that’s going to accurately portray that.”

He said that two songs that best represent the Wintons’ theology are “Be Assured,” on the new CD (2011) of the same name, and “I’m Asking You,” released on This World Is Not My Home, their first CD (2009).

In “Be Assured,” the group sings that “I’m asking for your help Lord to be all you’d have me be/With a humble voice I cry out from a world filled with pain/Please help me see the sunshine and look beyond the rain.”

“Be Assured” does just that for the listener, with lyrics like “I can be assured that my home is up on high/I found it in the Word of the One Who never lies.”

Jesse Winton is the main songwriter for the group.

“The songs he writes are truly a reflection of his heart for the Lord,” Randy says. “They have good doctrine and are meaty. They’re not ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ songs. Our goal isn’t to get up and proclaim a philosophy to people. We preach Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, the Cross alone.”

The Wintons had a chance to test that faith with Randy’s MS diagnosis. The first thing his doctor told him was to stay out of the heat and limit physical labor—which would be difficult for a landscaper. He had to sell his now-booming business.

“We were praying on what to do and the Lord opened the door to go full-time in Gospel bluegrass music,” Randy says.

That wasn’t without challenges, though.

Trips of more than a few hours turned out to be difficult for their daughter Anna, who is autistic and has difficulty being strapped into her car seat for that long. Like all autistic people, Randy says, Anna needs consistency and familiarity. Staying in hotels or different people’s homes was difficult for her. A motor home was needed, but the family was in the process of selling “everything we owned” to pay off debt. A motor home they found was selling for $12,500, but they didn’t have enough for it.

Then a host at a concert at a Christian camp shared what they were trying to do, and that they needed the money for the motor home. That night, a $12,051 check landed on their product table—just what they needed to buy the vehicle. The $51 apparently was for some CDs the donor also bought.

They bought the motor home and are now able to travel as a family with less stress, but not stress free.

“We’re a family that’s pressing on toward the goal that Christ has set before us,” Randy says. “We just happen to do it via a motor home.”

He quoted the son of fellow Samaritan member and musician, Nathan Clark George, as saying that a motor home is an “incubator for sanctification.”

“You either get sanctified in that motor home or you just drop kick everybody out of it,” Randy says. “You live with what God gives you and you learn to be content in whatever circumstances.”

Sometimes, those circumstances include the lack of a paycheck. Instead, the Wintons rely on donations and sale of CDs. They daily beseech the Lord for provision, something they hadn’t done before. He has more than provided in His timing.

One example is a trip to Silver Dollar City in 2010. When they arrived for a bluegrass contest there, Randy and his family had a small amount of groceries and a little gas in the RV, but no cash. They had to somehow get to the Creation Museum in Kentucky the next day to play for Ken Ham and his Answers in Genesis staff.

Winning $400 by placing in the contest buoyed them until they received a “vinyl check” on stage and were told that they’d receive the money in the mail.

“Cody was putting his banjo away behind the stage when this man who we had just met came up to Cody,” Randy says. “He didn’t know any of our financial issues. He said, ‘God just impressed on my heart to give you this.’ And it was $200—just enough gas money to get from Branson, Missouri, to Petersburg, Kentucky. We showed up to Petersburg still with no cash, but we got there.”

After two years of full-time music, the Wintons have two national tours under their collective belt. And as for his MS, Randy has good days and bad days.

“I treat it with diet right now, which is sometimes successful when you’re on the road,” he says. “It’s very hard to maintain a normalcy then. Most of the time, though, the normal days outweigh the bad days.”

But the Wintons haven’t missed a concert because of Randy’s condition.

“My boys are ready,” he says. “They could put on a whole concert by themselves. But I’m grateful to the Lord that I’ve been able to stay up, sing, play my guitar—and I have to play really, really fast sometimes to keep up with those guys. I get done and I still have the strength to talk with people and to give more, which we love to do.

“It’s not a chore, but when we’re done, there are nights I go back into the motor home after we clean everything up, and I lay on the bed, and I pray to God, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to get up the next day and do this again.’ And the sun rises, and God gets me out of bed with all the strength I need. He does remind me that when I am weak, He is strong.

“So I don’t wake up every day and say, ‘God, You owe me a good day.’ But I do wake up every day and say, ‘God, would You please by Your grace and Your mercies that are new for me every day, would You give me the strength to carry on this day and to be the leader that I need to be for my home, and to be the father to my children and the husband to my wife that I need to be.’ And, by His grace, at least at this point, He has said, ‘Absolutely. I will give you everything you need.’ So I guess I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

“We know what it is to live with a lot, and we know what it is to live with almost nothing, but Paul said, ‘I have learned to be content with whatever circumstance I find myself in’ (Philippians 4:11-12). I would paraphrase that in our life and say, ‘We are learning to be content with whatever circumstance we find ourselves in.’ And that is God’s goal for us, and my desire is to conform my will to His and to take my family along with me.”