Logging some 150,000+ miles a year and often speaking with over half-a-million young people annually, Winkie has wide experience in youth work. His technical background in both science and the popular music culture has given him a unique insight to the particular needs of a media-dominated technological society, and his constant monitoring of youth trends combined with continual feedback from young people themselves has helped him interpret these for those with a vital interest in the welfare of the young.
Besides annual leadership training seminars he has for three decades helped challenge and inspire young people to holy and happy living. Winkie is involved with helping and training young people of all ages and works with many leading international youth movements including Campus Life, Champions For Christ, Operation Mobilization, Masters Commission, Youth With A Mission, Young Life, Youth Alive, and Teen Challenge. He conducts yearly leadership training for youth workers in Europe, North America and the Pacific, and has been involved as an advisory and consultant to church, civic, educational, government and social welfare leaders on the needs and problems of modern teenagers. He occasionally speaks in churches, but his primary call is to students.
A frequent featured speaker and guest on national television talk shows, his audio and video-tape lectures are carried by many effective outreach ministries as part of their training. Winkie has authored more than twelve books including youth manuals like the best-selling Youth Aflame!, Handbook For Followers Of Jesus, books on contemporary and historical issues like Devil Take The Youngest, Revival - Twenty Centuries Of Vision and Visitation, Dealing With Doubt and evangelistic and apologetic works like the contemporary devotional theology The Nature And Character Of God.
He and his son Bill's newest training work for GenXers The Daniel Files and other training materials are available free on-line via the Internet.* His "scholarship on fire" approach has resulted in the conversion of multiplied thousands of teenagers, the creation of powerful new ministries and the continual encouragement of multitudes of young believers and their leadership.
Winkie is a New Zealander and maintains a low organizational profile; no staff or mailing-list. He does not stock his own books, videos or tapes so as to encourage Christian bookstores and other ministries that do carry his materials. He is sometimes known to reply to mail, (especially from teenagers) but his frequent travels discourage lengthy correspondence and he leaves personal counseling to pastors and churches. He with his gracious wife Faeona and awesome son Billy live sometimes in New Zealand and visit often Australia, Canada, Europe and the USA.
