Why would anyone want to be a missionary pilot? (Part 1)

I was involved in this area of aviation basically for 17 years.  Three in training at Moody Aviation (at that time in Elizabethton, TN, now in Spokane, WA), and 14 with Mission Aviation Fellowship (8 as pilot/mechanic and 6 as a stateside recruiter).  All that to say, this is based on my own experiences as well having talked with hundreds, I don’t know…maybe thousands of people over the years.

This posts title is one question that I heard a lot, maybe not always vocalized quite that literally, but you could hear it in the tone of other questions or statements like:

“How much do they pay you to do this?”
“Must be exciting, but isn’t your wife scared you’ll get killed?”
“What do your kids do for school?”
“Don’t your kids miss their friends here?”
“Aren’t there a lot of snakes?  I hate snakes.”
“Must be hard on your parents, you being so far away and all, them not being able to see their grandkids.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll crash in the jungle?”
“How do you communicate with those people down there?”
“Well you can always come back home and fly for the airlines couldn’t you?”
“How long do you think you do this before coming home?”

….they go on and on.  You get the idea.

First, my story.  How I got into this.

People are surprised to learn I was not in the military or an ex-airline pilot first of all.  That’s a popular misconception a lot of people have about this type flying.

I was actually a businessman in Atlanta, Georgia, doing fairly well. We lived in a nice swim& tennis subdivision in suburban Atlanta.

I was in my early thirties and had come to know Jesus Christ as Savior in my late twenties (aka “became a Christian”).  Then for the next several years I began to study what the Bible actually had to say about life and how to live it versus what I thought I knew. Simply put, I began to realize that we are not put here for our own pleasures.

We are put here for many reasons, and while self fulfillment of your God given abilities is not wrong, it’s at best only one of a myriad of reasons.  Others are: help people, learn to love the unlovely, go out of your way for others as a way of life and not for a pat on the back, and so on.  What I discovered that my specific area of abilities were more in the area of service to others.  Some are better at teaching, others and giving of their resources, others are very insightful, others encouragers.  But my gifts fell into the area of serving mainly.

So at the age of 32 or so I began searching for ways to serve people possibly as a way of life.  But let me be clear, it wasn’t a call to be in ministry or let alone be a missionary.  No I was just looking to get involved with a company, or organization where I could put my serving skills to work  as a layman or maybe even full-time in Atlanta.

“What about talents?” you may ask.  That’s different.  Talents (artist, speaker, mechanic, athlete, etc.) are useful in the area you are gifted in (serving, teaching, giving, etc).  Don’t confuse the two.

My talents were in the creative and speaking realm.  My college degree was in Communications with a minor in graphic arts.  That about says it all.

So I began looking into a lot of exciting opportunities.  One was with a Christian film maker in Atlanta, another with the Walk Through the Bible folks, another was just working with a successful Christian owned business. But they and many others all fell through over a period of two years.

Having actually given up on that concept I decided to just be a witness where I worked and that’s be that.

Then one day I was making marketing calls to potential clients and called Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.  You see at the time I worked for a company that brokered jet fuel and avgas (and I wasn’t even a pilot then).  I had seen their flight school (Moody Aviation) listed, that they had a number of aircraft  and wanted to sell them fuel for their fleet.  Logical thought.

One thing led to another. That was in 1989.  In 1990 our family found ourselves in Elizabethton, TN enrolled at Moody Aviation. I was there for the next three years (1990-93) getting my commercial pilots license, instrument rating and the airframe & powerplant mechanics license.  I graduated in 1993 and joined Mission Aviation Fellowship (aka MAF) that same year. One year after that (1994) we were in San Jose, Costa Rica studying Spanish for one year before eventually arriving to our base of operations, Shell, Ecuador in 1995.  I was forty.

I hope I captured the speed at which this all happened.  It was a whirlwind indeed.

Training to be a missionary pilot is more than stick & rudder

Doors opened to Moody Aviation almost effortlessly it appears to many.  However the training was hard and we had our days there when we asked ourselves “What have we gotten ourselves into?” .  God knew we needed training in more ways than one: Learning that God is faithful and to trust Him completely even when it hurts a little, maybe even a lot.  Examples?  My mother died while at Moody after a month in ICU.  My sister became terminally ill during that time. My wife had a miscarriage.

But while these situations were heart wrenching, we also saw God work so many incredible miracles.  Let me give one example.

The first winter there was brutal to a southern boy like me.  We were cold most of the time it seemed with only a small wooden stove for heat.

I had decided we would use a credit card and buy a nicer, bigger wood stove.  They ran about $500.

Then one day a I got a call from a recent Moody Aviation grad who said someone had told him I was looking for a bigger wood stove and that he had an older one that just needed a little work.  So I went to look at it and was surprised at what good shape it was in.  The guy just gave it to me saying someone had given it to him (Paying it forward before paying it forward was cool).  But here’s the really cool part.  Read on…

So I bring the stove home after making a few repairs in the shop at Moody, set it up, and realize, now I need a lot of wood.

The next day while I am at Moody Aviation, my wife gets a knock on the door.  It was a tree trimming foreman working with a crew on our street.  The city was cutting down all of the old Maples and Oaks on our street.  He asked if he could use our phone.

Noticing the stove he asked, “You all need wood for that stove?”

“Yes!” Trish said.

The next thing she knew he had measured the firebox and said, “I’ll have my crew cut all these trees on your street up the right size for your stove”.

That was eight cords of wood neatly stacked in front of my house and that supply lasted us nearly the next two years.

Total cost for the new wood stove and two years of wood: ZERO!

That’s how I’ve seen God work in the lives of others as well.

But when you experience this first hand, it should cause a chill to run down your back on the one hand and smile come on your face on the other.

God is perfect.  His plans are perfect.  Sometimes we just tend to want to do it our own way and frankly…. we just slow things down.

Training to be a missionary pilot is more than stick & rudder.  It is a family affair and everyone has to be on board and God will use the flight and maintenance curriculum yes to prepare you technically, but as importantly, as a backdrop for His greater training in faithfulness and for His greater purpose.

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In Part 2: Discussing the role of the missionary pilot.  If you want to be a missionary pilot just because you like to fly and want to use your skills for God, please think again.

Do Short-Term Missions Make a Difference

This article is taken from Christianity Today and is based on a recent study by Dr. Kurt Ver Beek of Calvin College.  His findings are surprising I’m sure to most rank and file Christians.  However I’m not so sure those of us who spent years on mission assignments are shocked.

Each year in Shell, Ecuador, we as mission community (4-5 mission agencies) hosted hundreds of people who came with genuine, good, heart-felt reasons no doubt.  However in the end you have to ask: What was the actual financial cost and would it be better stewardship of time (of both missionaries and the work teams) and of those resources to have just supported the work of the mssionaries directly and more substantially with those finances?

Read on…

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Missionaries don’t keep giving after they return; hosts prefer money to guests, Calvin sociologist finds.

Short-term mission trips to foreign countries are the biggest trend to hit the evangelical Christian outreach scene since vacation Bible school. Between 1 million and 4 million North American Christians reportedly participated in STMs in 2003, and the number keeps rising.

Praises and critiques of the trend tend to be proportionately extreme, touting STMs either as miraculous recruiters of long-term missionaries or insidious sowers of third-world dependency.

But a new study, to which I contributed the literature review, suggests both sides are off the mark.

According to Kurt Ver Beek, professor of sociology and third-world development at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, traditional STMs don’t do much at all.

That conclusion might sound odd to those familiar with any of the with the 50-odd dissertations written on the subject in the last 15 years, or with Roger Peterson’s well-known studies in the subject. Most of these papers conclude that STMs significantly increase participants’ spirituality, financial giving to missions, prayer for missions, likelihood to become career missionaries, and so on.

But in his survey of 127 North American short-termers and 78 Hondurans for whom they built new homes after 1998’s devastating Hurricane Mitch, Ver Beek found that neither group had experienced notable life changes.

Why such different conclusions? Ver Beek ascribes the difference, in part, to methodology. Many previous studies involved small sample sizes, interviewed short-termers soon after their trips—while they were still on a missions “high”—or failed to take into account social desirability bias, the human tendency to exaggerate one’s goodness in surveys and interviews, he writes.

Few checked reports of increased giving against other sources, such as church giving records, and almost none solicited opinions from people in the third world who received STM groups, he says.

Ver Beek’s study is unusual in that it does both. The results, therefore, are also unusual.

While 52 percent of respondents claimed to have increased their giving to the sending organization after the trip, according to the organization’s records 70 percent of the participants in their STM trips to Honduras didn’t send in a single direct donation in the three years after the trip.

Collection-plate giving from the congregations involved did go up by an average of $2,600 a year, but Ver Beek says that’s nothing worth shouting about.

And when he interviewed the Hondurans whose homes the missionaries rebuilt, he found that if given the choice, they’d prefer short-termers stayed home and just sent down money, “thereby using less resources on their own travel expenses and more on the people they intend to help.”

“The truth is that they don’t have to come here to build homes. … If they come, they should come for the friendships, for the cultural exchange,” says one Honduran NGO worker quoted in the study.

Unfortunately, Ver Beek found that few lasting friendships were built. While 92 percent of the North Americans said they had meaningful contact with Hondurans for at least part of every day of their trip, less than a quarter stayed in touch with their Honduran friends after they returned home.

“While we were there, you know, you have notions of maintaining contact with them, but we never have,” says one short-termer quoted in the study.

“This study shows that short-term missions as done now are not having the impact that people think or want, even if done to levels of excellence,” says Ver Beek. “If that’s true, it requires a whole rethinking of whether or not we’re going to do this, and if so, how.”

His proposal: It’s not enough to stress the importance of orientation and debriefing as ways of augmenting the short-term mission experience—something you’ll hear from any STM expert worth her salt. Instead, the STM needs to be treated as one small module that augments a much longer and more intense course of learning.

Peterson, for his part, applauds Ver Beek’s attempts to verify giving reports and fill in the third-world side of the equation, but questions some of his calculations. “The data appears to be manipulated with a strong bias,” he says.

Ver Beek freely admits that others could interpret his data differently. “It’s true, there was a small increase in giving. But after all the time and effort and money spent on these trips, is an increase of a few dollars success?”

For Ver Beek, who has lived in Honduras for most of the last 20 years and worked closely with community development organizations, the answer is no.

Peterson, president of STM sending agency STEM Ministries, also questions the assumption that the money raised for STMs would be available for direct donation to third world organizations. Most people are simply less willing to aid a distant cause than to help a friend or coworker go on a trip, he says.

“What I would do would be to increase fees to hire Honduran workers to work side by side with the volunteers,” says Peterson. That way, the money would be sure to be raised, third world workers would be given work, and North Americans could still participate in valuable cultural and spiritual sharing.”

Ver Beek is directing a follow-up study involving more than 1,000 STM participants and third world beneficiaries in Honduras, Haiti, Kenya, and Thailand.

He plans develop orientation curriculums for both North American STM groups and for the third world communities they visit. Until now, orientation for third-world beneficiaries has usually amounted to, “They’re showing up next week! Clear out the church, and here’s the mattresses!” says Ver Beek.

Abram Huyser Honig is a freelance writer and photographer living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

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