Jason Nightingale visited our church about 2 1/2 years ago for one of our Thanksgiving celebrations. On that Saturday evening, he took about an hour to “tell” to us the Book of Revelation from Scripture. The next morning he “told” us more of Scripture, from 1 John, and spent some time applying it to our lives.
As a young man, Jason served in Viet Nam as a medic. He came home at the age of 24, and joined a traveling drama team called Covenant Players. He was not a believer at this point, but he started reading the Bible in order to better understand some of the plays that the troupe was performing. It was through his immersion in the Scriptures that he came to faith in Christ.
Jason believed that God was calling him to a ministry of Scripture-telling - of presenting Scripture to crowds of people in dramatic fashion, from memory. He thought it would take place on a stage, but, as it turned out, it was most often in local churches, like ours. His first project was to memorize the Book of Revelation. He completed that memory project in one month. He went on to memorize First Peter, and then sixteen other books of the Bible.
This immersion in Scripture - studying, memorizing, reviewing, and telling - produced many effects in his life. One of these was to feed a dynamic faith. One feature of this faith was that he expected results to issue forth from God and from His Word, not from the clever wielding of techniques with which the modern church seems to taken. Another feature of his faith was that the Bible was not just to be talked about, but to be obeyed. And so, later in his ministry, 27 years after first beginning Wordsower Ministries, Wordsower International came into being.
Wordsower International is a faith-based ministry seeking to help national pastors and churches minister to the overwhelming need of widows and orphans in Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and India. More recently, Wordsower has also gotten involved in Nepal, with a targeted goal to hinder the heinous practice of child-trafficking.
This winter, Jason was ordered by doctors to curtail his extensive traveling/telling ministry due to a severe heart condition. He died on April 19, at 68 years old. But he had one of the strongest hearts that I’ve seen in my Christian experience - a heart for God’s Word - a heart for Jesus - a heart for ministry - a heart of compassion. I pray that his influence will continue to be felt, and that the ministry will continue.
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