08/31/2026
PLEASE READ UPDATE ON “MAKING ROOM” A Family’s Journey of Faith, Autism, and Grace at Home and in the Church”! BELOW:
Thank you all for the comments and enthusiastic responses to our family’s book, “Making Room - A Family’s Journey of Faith, Autism, and Grace at Home and in the Church”! Unfortunately… there was a glaring omission, which will be corrected by sometime tomorrow.
Our long-time friend and mentor, Pastor Lance Ralston, wrote a beautiful, humbling “Foreword” to the book, which was inadvertently omitted at printing. Lance took the time to review the book; please take a moment to read this:
Foreword
by Lance Ralston
I have known Jack and Julie Winkle for a while. Let’s just say it’s been long enough to know if someone’s theology is going to hold or crack. The Winkles’ holds. Time and weight have proven that.
When Jack told me he and Julie were going to tell their story, I knew it would be good. I didn’t know it would be this good. They have plenty of material to draw from, as you are about to see. If there was any surprise they’d tell their take, it was because Jack and Julie tend to spend their energy living the story rather than telling it. They are, in the best sense, practitioners first and authors second. The book you are holding exists because the ministry it describes is real, tested, and already bearing fruit in the lives of families who had nearly stopped looking for a church that meant what it said.
You ought to know this before you start reading. What you will encounter in these pages is not an inspirational tale constructed after the fact to make suffering look tidy. The Winkles entered one of the most demanding assignments a family can have – a child whose needs do not diminish, whose challenges do not resolve neatly – and they walked into it without a map. What they carried instead was a stubborn commitment to each other, a deepening trust in Scripture, and a community of faith that, imperfectly and incrementally, held them up.
I have sat with Jack in conversations that ranged from theology to the practical logistics of pastoral ministry. He thinks carefully before he speaks and means what he says. So, when Jack tells you that Noah reshaped his understanding of shepherding, believe him. When he says that autism dismantled his pride and clarified what actually matters in the work of pastoral ministry, that is not the words of someone who found a silver lining after a hard year. That’s the language of someone who has been formed by decades of faithful, and at times, exhausting obedience.
Julie came to faith as an adult, without the cushion of a Christian childhood. She didn’t inherit a vocabulary for grace. She encountered it. There’s a quality in believers like her clarity about the gospel. Those raised in a church can sometimes lose that clarity in the comfortable familiarity of a thousand Sunday mornings. So, when Julie says Jesus “did that for me,” she’s not mouthing a platitude. She remembers the moment that light came on. That remembrance shapes what she writes. It will do something rich in you – if you let it.
I have had the privilege of seeing Jack and Julie live out what they share in these pages. Not just in their interactions with Noah, but in the larger sphere of a life intimately tied to the complexity autism brings. Noah is “there” even when he isn’t in the room. The patience Jack carries is unlimited. Julie’s no-nonsense strength is something to behold. Watching them is like a living object lesson for the love the Apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13.
What they have built in their special needs ministry is not the result of strategic innovation. It is the result of necessity, compassion, and the refusal to let the gap between what the church professes and what it practices go unaddressed. They made room because they needed it, and discovered how many other families had been quietly waiting for someone to open that door. That is how genuine ministry almost always begins, not with a ministry proposal or a conference presentation, but with a family that needed help and a pastor willing to say, "Come in. Sit down. You are not a problem we have to manage. You are the reason we are here."
We’ve all heard of “megachurches.” They are called that because of the number of people who attend. I do not think heaven refers to any local church as a “megachurch.” If it did, I doubt it would be due to how many seats the sanctuary holds. It might be for the cost of ministry and who those the church didn’t just “put up with” but centered itself around. By that criteria, the Winkles' is a megachurch.
I believe this book will find its way into the hands of parents who are reading it in the tired quiet after a long day, as Jack and Julie say in their introduction. Those parents need to know that what is written here is not aspirational fiction. Jack and Julie are not writing from the far side of a completed journey. They are writing from within it, with the particular authority of people who have not arrived but who have refused to stop moving forward.
They will also need this book. Pastors need this book. Congregations that are serious about becoming what they claim to be need this book.
It is not a manual, though it contains practical and applicable wisdom. It is not a memoir, though it is full of story. It is, at its core, a theological argument made in the language of real life – that the image of God is present in every person who enters your building, and that the church becomes more fully the Body of Christ when it learns to see that image even, especially, where it does not conform to comfortable expectations.
Jack and Julie Winkle live that. For years, before anyone was watching, before there was a book with their names on it, they simply showed up. Week after week. Faithfully. Steadily. Making room. That is who they are. And that is what this book is about.
Read it. Then go make room.
Lance Ralston is a pastor with over forty years of ministry experience in the Calvary Chapel tradition. He serves as a police chaplain for the Oxnard Police Department and as Pastor-at-Large with Enduring Word.
It’s here! In print or e-book, go ahead to Amazon now and type in “Making Room“, Jack and Julie Winkle. Praying you enjoy. Thank you to all who worked on, with, and for the glory of God in this book!! 😇♥️📖🙏🏻😇
