Chaplain On Duty
"A Voice Crying in the Wilderness"

By GREGORY J. RUMMO
THE HERALD NEWS, NOVEMBER 6, 2005

...Soldier as missionary?—A stunning characterization of an enlisted officer’s official duty in the war against terrorism.

            It was earlier this year on May 1 when Army Reservist Captain Kevin Winemiller received the call to go to Afghanistan. “Hello my brother,” He wrote excitedly in an e-mail. “The official call came yesterday at 3:00 p.m. I will be deploying to Afghanistan in mid-July. I will be responsible for 1,900 soldiers, flying around on a Black Hawk helo, holding field services. The government is sending me as a missionary in a Muslim land.”             

Rev. Winemiller leads morning prayer on the flight deck. “I am thankful that many of our soldiers are making good choices and getting right with God,” he said.

           Soldier as missionary?—Certainly, this is a stunning characterization of an enlisted officer’s official duty in the war against terrorism. But not for Reverend Winemiller, who is currently serving as the Task Force Deputy Chaplain for the 53rd Infantry Division.

            I first met Rev. Winemiller 15 years ago when he served on the staff of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church in Paterson, New Jersey as the church’s youth pastor. A rugged outdoorsman who liked adventure, we immediately hit it off. But sprinkled in with that sense of adventure was a touch of wanderlust. Three years later when the Divine call to serve as an evangelist-missionary came, it was simply too strong to resist any longer. He left Paterson and moved south, establishing Contending for the Faith Ministries headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.           

Rev. Winemiller sharing devotional thoughts from the Bible with a group of GIs at a remote, undisclosed forward operating area. “We had a real mountain top experience—at 9,200 feet,” he said. “Halfway up the mountain I gave a brief motivational speech. I told the soldiers there are 3 kinds of people; quitters, campers, and climbers. Quitters look at the mountain and say forget it, it’s too high. Campers go part way and settle in, satisfied with their current surroundings. But the climbers go all the way to the top because they want to see the best view.” Rev. Winemiller was first up the mountain. Arriving at the top he hollered back, “You’re late for church.” “Laughter is great stress relief,” he explains.

             His zeal to share the Gospel has led him to 33 countries; among them, Cambodia, where he visited the Killing Fields during the 25^th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge, Viet Nam, where he spent a day and a night jailed in Kien Gaing, located south of Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City), for smuggling Bibles, and Cuba, where Bibles and other Gospel literature were confiscated at the airport in Havana.

            He’s traveled to Russia several times and during the early years of his ministry, his many visits to Romania led him and his wife, Kim to adopt a 5-year old Romanian boy named Bogdan.

            Despite the adventure traveling the world offered, there was still something missing from his life. “I always wanted to become a part of the military.  The desire never left me,” he said. So at the age of 38, he joined the National Guard as a Chaplain.            

One of the ways to win the war against terrorism is through love—making friends. “If we can love these people and convince them we are there for their good, then some hearts will be turned,” Rev. Winemiller explains. “The apostle Paul said 'I become all things to all men that I may by all means win some.' I want these men to know here is a Christian who is not afraid to sit with them and eat with them and walk a mile in their shoes. There are many suspicions concerning Christians. I have an obvious cross on my uniform. I try to love them like Jesus would, looking into their eyes and befriending them.”

           “Being a Chaplain really fulfills me as a person. I love youth and missions. The song ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ takes on new meaning. Where else can a Gospel preacher reach so many different kinds of people from so many different backgrounds?”          

           Rev. Winemiller is currently stationed at Camp Phoenix in Kabul. He travels each month, visiting soldiers in undisclosed forward operating areas where he conducts services. “Our men are spread out in over 50 locations throughout the country,” he explains. “My goal is to visit each location during this one year deployment.”

            Being responsible to meet the spiritual needs of almost 2,000 men involved in a war is an immense challenge. While the dangers and the stresses of war often make people more open to spiritual needs, sometimes it can have the opposite effect. Just recently, while preparing to deploy to an unnamed forward area to minister to soldiers, word came that one of them had committed suicide. “This is another ugly part of war,” he explains. “It really kills morale. It almost seemed ironic—I was scheduled to go to this remote area to minister to soldiers in a chapel service but now it will be a memorial service.”

            While his wife and three children are used to him being out of the country for weeks at a time on various mission trips, this is different. “We are getting along fine and it helps being able to contact him through e-mail and by telephone, but nothing takes the place of having daddy in the home,” Kim told me. “He tends to be the neighborhood activity supervisor, so all of the neighborhood kids miss him, too.”           

A school in Gardez, (southeast Afghanistan) built by our armed forces. 200 boys attend during the morning; the girls attend in the afternoon. “I was glad to see that girls were being taught as well. Under the Taliban, girls were forbidden to attend school. It was a very sick society,” Rev. Winemiller said. The U.S. continues to be involved in many humanitarian projects including the operation of refugee camps and the building of schools and roads.

           “While I was prepared for the big part of missing him, it is the little things that cause me to miss him the most; like when one of our favorite Andy Griffith episodes is on and he is not here to share the laughs. Or when one of the kids says or does something that is cute and I want him to be able to experience it.”

            Not surprisingly, Rev. Winemiller often gets homesick himself. “I left the most beautiful spot in the universe, North Carolina, to come to a desert where sometimes, out of nowhere, a dust storm will rise and visibility drops to ten feet and you cannot see. The mountains here are barren. There is absolutely no greenery. When I think of the smell of the trees and the flowers back home, the sound of the birds singing and the cool caress of the mountain air, I want to weep and sometimes do. But I know I have an important job to do.”

            The official mission in Afghanistan is to train the ANA (Afghan National Army) to become “an effective fighting force to stabilize this country and prevent a void from forming for extremist groups such as the Taliban to fill,” he explains.

            But he sees his own mission as something different. Like John the Baptist, who traveled through the Judean desert preaching a message of repentance, Rev. Winemiller is a “voice crying in the wilderness,” offering a message of hope and salvation in a land torn by war, to anyone willing to listen.  n