Part 1 of a 4 part interview with 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: Now Winkie, it's a real privilege to talk to you. You come from New Zealand I believe. But not only that, you're from Maori royalty.

Winkie: Yes. My father was a Maori prince, and my name is a weird name; I'm not a purple telly-tubby. But my surname, Pratney is actually a Maori name - Paratane. But the European foster family that my Dad was brought up in didn't know what he was saying. He said Wiremu Paratane, and they thought he said William Pratney. So our name is unique. As far as I know there's only three of us left in the world.

Jonathan: Well that's fascinating. Now your Dad was also a competitive cycler and he was cycling competitively up until his eighties I believe. But yourself, you've also spent more than forty years of your life looking to engage with younger generations. So both your Dad and yourself are very tenacious in that sense of just keeping going with something. Is that part of your inheritance?

Winkie: My father was a legendary cyclist and cycling's like running. You have your speed people and then you have your marathon like your tour de France type thing. It's hard being a child of a legend because you never measure up against them. There's only three professional cyclists that cover the entire hundred year history of professional cycling. The first two are 25 years each. The last one Dad beat and the next 50 years it's him. So he's in a museum, not stuffed, but his life's story is in a permanent exhibition in MOTAT in Auckland, which is the Motor and Transport Technology. Including the race that got him into the Masters Games at 86. He was not allowed to win because he was too old, but they let him compete. If he had been allowed to win he would have taken home two gold's and a bronze. George Bernard Shaw saw him when Shaw was in his last few years, he saw Dad compete, he called him one of the two greatest natural athletes in the world. So when you come from a family like that - the original word iron man was first applied to my father, because he made bikes of iron. So I did inherit from my Dad the legacy he left me with because I'd watch him win these races and I'd say Dad how in the world do you do that? It's like Chariots of Fire at the end. And he'd say, son it's not how you start the race it's how you finish that counts. So he gave me - I couldn't get his cycling from him - I became a tennis player instead, but he did leave me with a willingness to work hard; to see something come to be and to stick at it. So it finished well.

Jonathan: Now I'm sure you've got many years to go, but in this latter part of your life, that sense of what your Dad said, its how you finish, how are you bringing that into this season of your life?

Winkie: History's filled with people who started wonderfully but ended terribly and then you've got people who come from very poor circumstances, really a bad situation who finish wonderfully. Dad was like that because he was orphaned. His mother died giving birth to him; his granny brought him up and then she died when he was twelve. Some passing missionary was going through this forest and heard a kid crying and he was there with the body of his grandmother abandoned and alone. So the hut that had all his records, all the land deeds of his royalty, it all got burned. So he had no money, no heritage, no family, not even language. I think part of that gave him the drive to do things wonderfully. So I've seen marvellous things. I've seen kids who really nobody would ever think would accomplish anything. I believe we all need help. There's a law in physics, probably the most well established one called the second law of thermo dynamics and it says everything runs down left to itself...and the only way you can change a system like that is to have something bigger than the system with more organising intelligence and more energy to invest into that system. Then you can change it. So my life was changed by the Lord and he invested his life and power in me and we've had a great life.

Jonathan: Why do you spend so much of your life investing into young people?

Winkie: You know there's that famous thing - the ten thousand hours. If you're going to be world class at anything you need to invest at least ten thousand hours of time because the brain structures itself depending on the focus of what you've got. The automated things that enable people to shine, whether it's sports, or singing; or those things you don't have to think about. Takes that time. That's three hours a day, twenty hours a week for ten years at least. So whether you're gong to be the world's greatest crook or the world's greatest cook, you're still going to need that time. When I was seven I believed what I wanted to do most in my life was to be a chemist and not just be a chemist, I wanted to find something to help the world; find a cure for cancer or something like that. When you're in the teenage years, they're quite critical years, because the forming of your whole life takes place at that time. My life was transformed and my whole family, my father, my mother, my sister and I, all met the Lord over a period of time. We saw the massive changes he made in our lives and the end of it is that I gave my career to him and I'm still in the business of transformation.

In chemistry you take something - remember the old proverb you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear. You can, if you're a chemist. You take that protein, you break it down, you turn it into artificial silk and then you spin a purse out of it. You can also put a camel through the eye of a needle. It's difficult but you can do it. You take a camel, you kill him with chemicals of some sort then you dissolve him down; then you take a hypodermic syringe and a cc at a time you squirt it through a needle. It takes a long time but you can do it. So what hasn't changed for me is what I originally felt I was supposed to do. To try and find out the bottom line on things. That's what CSI, Into Infinity, Miami; they're all about the discovery of the reality that tells you the truth about the situation. That's what I wanted to do. I probably never would have got onto CSI because I don't like blood and guts things, but in chemistry you try to find the bottom line, what really is this and also trying to find out how could I make this from this.

I still have a lab, now I'm sixty four, I've still got a lab behind a wall of the office there that I had when I was a kid. For me what I learned was an epistemology of things. The how to approach things. I don't think God wastes anything. So what you most wanted to do in life, I think buried in that is something you can serve people with and help them in a lot of ways that you never dreamt of. Because your own picture is usually too small. Even with the gifts you've been given. So I'm not really doing something different, I'm just doing it for a different boss. Instead of me it's him; and a much wider audience.

Jonathan: In all of the hours you've spent investing into young people, what would you say is one of the key issues or needs for the younger generation to grasp hold of?

Winkie: There are many things that always stay the same. Kids always hurting. I'd say either the needs or the sins of a generation the bad things they can get up too. The blaming that adults will put on, 'because we had a wonderful country until this generation came along.' That whole thing. You can find that long haired freaky, they listened to crazy music and this was an analysis in the sixties. But the statement wasn't from the sixties it was the Bouzingo in the fifteen hundreds. A French revolutionary youth movement. So kids have the same problems. But the needs that we have, the unique ones, of this kind of digital flatland world we have: for this generation they've got the best tools any generation's ever seen. So we assume that they'd be the smartest generation of all time. The actual data that comes up is they are an Adonis generation. They've got wonderful tools but they are unable to focus on anything. Everything is very transitory. They're really really good at telling people who I am and what I'm doing right now, but the power of what they could be with the culture they come from and their own potential could be so much higher. What I like to do is to encourage them in the strengths they have, but to say there is something that has to happen in your life, or you will never ever see what you want most. You have a lot of friends, now you need God. You don't have a friend in him and he is the best friend you could ever have.

I have lived long enough now to see five generations of teenagers and work with them. The differences are actually quite small in them, but the hungers and the needs are the same; it's only the uniqueness of the particular technology that shapes the times that draw out the special needs and the special focuses of kids. One of the things we have is an orphan generation of kids. Their own families, very often the father, is absent, missing either physically or mentally or somewhere else. A lot of walk-out families. They don't have fathers. One of the things that I've been able to do is to connect them to fathers in history; trustworthy people they can learn from in the past. To put them in touch with a lineage gives them strength and a community, with the history of what's gone before them. I call it taking the DNA of the past and sewing it into the present to help create a new future for them. I have seen five generations of kids and I think this is the most potentially wonderful generation of young people the world has ever seen. But something has to change right at the core. They can't be talking about themselves. They have to, like Jesus said, if you want to save your life, you need to lose it. To lay your life down for him and for others and you watch what happens to your world.