Albert E. Winstanley (1920–2004)

Albert Edward Winstanley was a full-time preacher before the concept was known among churches of Christ in England. Albert Edward Winstanley used to support his ministry by cleaning windows, digging gardens and working as a hospital porter. He helped establish churches throughout the United Kingdom. He also had a hand in training many of the island’s ministers.

In 1947, and worked in the Slammannan district of Scotland before moving to Tunbridge Wells in Kent to help establish a church there. The couple worked with the Tunbridge Wells church until 1965, when they moved to Loughborough, Leicestershire, where Winstanley’s ministry was supported by the Glenwood church, Tyler, Texas. In 1980, when the North Ireland Bible School moved to Corby, England, and become the British Bible School, Winstanley became one of the first full-time teachers in the school for seven years before going into semi-retirement and moving to Ulverston to help the struggling church there. Winstanley established the Christian Worker, a newspaper for churches of Christ in the United Kingdom. He was the newspaper’s origianal editor in 1967. He continued in this role for 20 years until he had a stroke in the summer of 1987, when he handed over the reins for the August edition that year, said Graham Fisher, current editor for the Christian Worker.

In 1991 Winstanley joined the then three-year old project to produce a new hymnbook for the British churches — “Favourite Hymns of the Church” (1995) — as co-editor. “The quality of that book owes much to his encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and their tunes,” Graham A. Fisher said. “He worked tirelessly on the music side of things, in deciding which version of the words to use, and in producing its Scripture and Metric Indexes.” Winstanley also was a staff writer for Truth for Today.