Sarah Winbow is a bible teacher and serial disciple-maker with an evangelist’s heart to reach the un-churched. Sarah has spent her whole life living and working in rural areas and alongside village churches, largely in Gloucestershire and Cumbria. In 1987 she married Trevor. They have two sons, Matthew & Eddie, daughter-in-law Kayleigh and three grandchildren; all of whom love and serve the Lord.
Having been brought up under the influence of the occult world Sarah was personally set free from years of occultic oppression in 1991. As a result of this life-changing encounter Sarah has worked ever since to see God’s Kingdom restored in individuals through the application of Christian discipleship and healing principles. For seven years (2001-2008) Sarah worked with Freedom in Christ Ministries (UK), a discipleship counselling ministry, as an itinerant member of their national teaching team.
In 1993 Sarah & Trevor joined The Fellowship for Evangelising Britain’s Villages (now re-named Village Hope) working in Gloucestershire. In 1998, after training at Bristol Baptist College they took up the challenge to work as missionaries in the Eden Valley area of Cumbria.
Initially the Winbows planted HOPE Community Church; a church for the un-churched in Brough, Upper Eden. The work was blessed but after two years all those involved moved out of the area one-by-one. Sarah & Trevor were faced with either starting over again or doing something completely different.
At that time the Lord spoke to Sarah and gave a choice either:
- To go on building in the same way, which would be blessed and see a certain level of fruitfulness or
- To go on a journey with Him which, provided they were obedient, would mean that ultimately they would see a whole different level of fruitfulness.
So they went on the journey…
In 1999 a small group of twelve people dedicated themselves to praying for God’s Kingdom to come & His will to be done in the Upper Eden Valley. This core group became a faithful obedient band of disciples of Jesus who were willing to seek healing for their own previously unresolved personal issues. In 2001 this group became the backbone of a Prayer House ministry team where Father God taught them together about the ways of His Kingdom: holiness, righteousness, justice, prayer, worship and obedience. The team learned to listen to God’s voice corporately and implement His strategy for prayer: day by day, week by week, year by year together in community. This involved applying freedom principles to a whole region through the intercessory work of the Prayer House for more than a decade. These principles are recorded in Sarah’s book Restoring Eden and in the companion manual Steps to Setting your Community Free.
By September 2008 the group had been together for nine years and had matured into a team who were not afraid to live counter to the prevailing culture. God had brought a tangible level of spiritual freedom in the Eden Valley. It was at this point that the Lord spoke to Sarah again and said two things: 1) ‘The Word must go out’ and 2) ‘It’s time to build’. The Origins page gives the background to the rest of this story out of which New Beginnings, a wine skin to disciple God’s people in the simple and uncomplicated ways of His Kingdom, has grown and developed.
New Beginnings Discipleship 