The LA Times has a feature this week on a Denver pilot who takes “faith leaders from all walks of life” on helicopter rides to help them see their communities in a wider light.
This is not just any helicopter. Christened Prayer One, it lifts monks and rabbis, imams and pastors, and ordinary people of faith up over Denver each Monday morning, up into a new perspective on life and love and God. Or so Hastings’ friends tell him. Several have taken a ride on Prayer One; they’ve called it an amazing spiritual stretch. That seems worth a few clammy moments. Hastings, 47, squeezes into the front seat. Gently, steadily, Prayer One lifts into a sky of the most serene blue.
Prayer One was born two years ago, after amateur stunt pilot Jeff Puckett took the Rev. Tom Melton, a friend, for an aerial spin around Denver. Looking down, Melton felt his vision expand. He’d been so focused on his wealthy suburban congregation, so proud of how his flock had grown. Now he saw, all at once, how insular he’d been.
The multimillion-dollar custom homes in his community of Greenwood Village made barely a ripple on the topography that unfurled below. The grand estates with their vast gardens merged right into blocks of blank apartment buildings and regiments of look-alike suburban homes, each planted on a narrow strip of green.
“Looking at the city from 500 feet, you don’t see walls or neighborhoods. It’s all knit together,” Melton says. “I started wondering, how can we minister to the whole city?”
Days later, he hit upon an answer:
You minister to the city, he decided, by taking the city’s ministers to the air.
Melton, 58, started by inviting a few friends on Puckett’s aerial tour. Word spread quickly, and soon faith leaders from all walks of life began asking for a ride. Some claimed to have visions as they flew. Some wept at the beauty below. Others used the time to pray, bathing the city in blessings from above.
Read the whole thing here.