Part 3 of a 4 part interview with Winkie Pratney

Winkie Pratney
Winkie Pratney

Winkie Pratney is a legend! He has been reaching young people for well over 40 years and is recognised as a worldwide leader in the church. At a recent summit of European leaders Jonathan Bellamy was privileged to spend a couple hours with him. Here's the results...

Jonathan: I would like to ask you a couple of questions about some of the things that you were teaching today in different sessions. In one of them you shared how you discovered how there are over 35 major vocations given by God that are rooted in his nature and character. What do you mean by that?

Winkie: Well I didn't know what that meant two years ago but following my recovery, I had a whole year I didn't move, I couldn't move, I couldn't travel. I still had a big hole in my stomach and they were waiting for the swelling to go down. I spent an entire year going to bed around nine or ten, waking up about twelve or one and then I just read scripture; for a year. I'm working on a second book of a volume called The Second Nature of God. It's a three part work. Each work's about six - eight hundred pages and in the course of reading that I thought, I wonder what God does on Mondays when he's not doing religious things? What does God do that's isn't specifically a religious thing? Because when you think of God you think well he's the religious one. But when you actually read the Bible and you see what the Bible portrays God as, 90% of what he does is not religious at all. For instance one of the things that I found first. You know he's a designer. Anybody who can make a world and a universe like ours has to be a meticulous designer and you know he's an artist because we love nature, we see the beauty of it. People constantly get out of the cities where we make the art, to go to see this constantly renewing refreshing fractal art that God's put in nature all around us.

The first thing that God does after he finishes the world and the universe is he plants a garden. Now why didn't he just create a garden, he just spoke and things came, why didn't he just speak? He plants, that's a job, so he works the soil; he designed seeds and all those things; why is he planting a garden? That makes him the first gardener. So if you're a gardener and we used to live next door to a gardener to the Royals in New Zealand. The Dad was a gardener to the Royals. We don't want to mention which Royals they were, but he was an incredible gardener. He knew all kinds of things if you want to find out as a gardener something to do your job better, you should go to somebody who's a really good gardener who can teach you. What if the God who makes the world is the gardener. You don't have to ask him about religious things, you can ask him about your job and how to do it better.

He not only is a gardener, he puts mankind in it and he says take care of this and he shows them how to do it. So as I began to read I thought well yes yes; I wonder if there's a few verses on God's involvement with gardening. Then you read the Bible like a gardener would read the Bible and there's all of these farming, gardening, landscaping analogies. Planting, sowing, reaping, the harvest. The greatest parable in the whole Bible is the parable of the sower and the soils. It's a gardening analogy. Why a seed doesn't make it. There is more given to that parable than all the other parables in the Bible put together. Jesus said if you don't understand this one how will you understand any of them? So it's the most important parable in the Bible and it's a gardening parable. So now if you read it through the eyes of God the gardener, the Bible is a gardening book. It's about him planting nations and doing all that stuff. So what if I'm a gardener that is my calling, I have something that's not religious but it is sacred.

Martin Luther discovered that you do not have to be a professional religious person to love God and that was a huge breakthrough for them. They thought you had to go to a monastery and become a special order of religious people in order to really know God and talk to him and learn from him; but he made this huge discovery, I don't have to do that in order to know God. We count that as one of the huge reformations in history. Well what if you don't have to be a religious person you don't have to be a pastor in order to ask God about your job. He doesn't just look at Pastors and go, yes I can help you with that. He is that. I found 35 major vocations that are rooted in his nature and character. I can mention a ton of them, he's a lawyer, obviously, he's a judge too, he is a coach, these are some of the strange ones. He's an entrepreneur, he's a risk taker, he is an entertainer. So what you're doing now Jonathan, actually, is a sacred calling. There's over a hundred pages of stuff on it. I thought there might be two or three verses, but when you start reading the Bible through in terms, lets say entertainment, this is a huge thing.

John Wesley mentioned earlier in the seventeenth century; if you want to understand a nation, study its entertainment. It's the one thing people will pay money for, but they don't have to have, like food, shelter or anything else. So Wesley every week took note of the plays and songs. He and Charles wrote thirteen volumes of poetry and songs and in it's point two type was about four to five hundred pages. I've got a full set in my library in New Zealand. So I get these songwriters who say yes I've written about a hundred songs, we're still singing O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing that were written three centuries ago. So Wesley not only did a commentary on the whole Bible and at least 236 plus books including one of the first text books on electricity and a book called Primitive Physics, home healthy remedies that was in use for two hundred years. He built electrical machines to help the Methodists. He also carried on correspondence with up to a thousand people a week with a quill pen and he had the same time we did. He slept for eight hours he worked for eight hours and then he preached and wrote and did all these other things for the other eight. So, when you look at a culture through the eyes of the lens of entertainment, you have to ask questions, what is entertainment? What does it actually mean. When you go to the scriptures it is the giving and having, receiving pleasure and enjoyment and it's tied in with a whole host of things. It's tied in with music and with food and arrangements of celebration and it's tied in with dance. You know there's a whole bunch of things. You say let's have a party; what would you think, who's going to be there, you have gifts, see that? When you read the Bible now through the light of entertainment, why did God even make us? The angels around the throne tell us that you are worthy, they say, for you have created all these things and for your pleasure they are and were created. That the entire universe is done to bring joy to God's heart and for him to give us something of that to bring joy to ours. So God is really an entertainer.

So now when you read it, he sets up the first booze and stuff; he's the host, he takes care of the garden; he's shows them the trees that are good for this and that, almost all other celebrations he has in Israel are parties. They're like - this is a time to rejoice and sing. The word joy; Jesus appears with great joy which will come to all people and for the first time it's real, it's not fake joy; it's not manufactured. It's the real thing. I think in Bruce Springsteen's early Dancing in the Dark; with the black and white; where he reaches into the audience and pulls out a girl who later becomes very famous. That's what every kid dreams of. Just watching the party but you're not in it. CS Lewis said, isn't it a sad thing, you know you're looking at this beautiful thing; like a sunset: then the sun goes down and the play ends, and you walk home alone and you miss something and he called it the weight of glory. What is that thing that we're after? The greatest joy and the greatest pleasure, the greatest sense of goodness and reality and worth, is in that feeling. He is an entertainer and the best there is. When he's making the world, the angels are watching and it's like a huge part. He goes wooooooooooor, and they go wooow, isn't that cool.

Jonathan: It's fascinating. Obviously a lot of people's impression of relating to God is that religious thing. What's the implication for modern day church to have a God, a vocational God, who understands and you can relate to him in your vocation?

Winkie: You can go direct, you don't have to go to some religious guru and ask him. Look, how can I get an audience with God, because I want to ask him some questions and there're not all religious. You can go yourself. You know this, if the thing he put in your heart is what has driven your whole life, he doesn't want to undo that; he wants to make sure you maximise it. So part of the discoveries in reading this day after day for a solid year, was that, if he really created that thing, then what he says about it - he says, I will teach you this. Then endless instructions, reams of material of how to do your job better. I don't have to go to some spiritual guru and ask him what does God say; I can go myself. So the implications are; I don't need to go to a set of spiritual professionals and ask them, what do you think God would say about this? Why don't you go and ask him yourself? He's a gardener. He's an artist. So what I believe would happen out of this...first of all people will realise God is not this entirely religious being. He is life, he's all of the things that make life worth living. So not only would I be able to have a trustworthy apprenticeship under him, you're not going to be trainee, take my money and run, you know that thing. He's trustworthy. He is the expert: He doesn't ever have to go, oh shoot I shouldn't have done that, I was stupid. He doesn't ever have to say that. So we can come back again and ask him again and again. We don't have to do an end run through a religious professional. He will speak to us in the vocational language we understand. The implications of that are tremendous; because 90% of people, even if they don't go to church or even if they do, they don't feel like church has got anything to say to my situation. They're talking about good religious things - how many animals did Noah take into the ark, but I want to know if my business is about to falter. I need a word from God as to what kind of investment to make, you know that thing. He is one of those things. He's an accountant. My surprise was to find literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff detailing, I call them now, sacred vocations. They're holy because they are rooted in God. Not even, I like this kind of thing I'll help you with it, but I did it first. Ask me. CR

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