There are a lot of stereotypes and caricatures that attach themselves to Pentecostal and Charismatic forms of Christianity. Preeminent among them is the jet-setting, charismatic preacher who needs his personal jet for the work of the Lord. It is a metonym for the broad critique of the prosperity gospel, but it has far too many historical examples to treat it as a simple caricature. Pentecostals ministers need their airplanes.
To be fair to Pentecostals, however, lots of evangelical ministries need their planes today. From the famous Mission Aviation Fellowship, to Operation Blessing’s flying hospital, or Samaritan’s Purse’s use of airplanes for crisis relief, evangelicals have embraced the utility and necessity of airplanes.
Yet, if any Christian group has a claim on airplanes, it’s Pentecostals. And that is not a recent claim. Pentecostals got their first.
The Sky Pilot, The First Gospel Airplane
In 1919, the Apostolic Faith Mission of Portland, Oregon (AFMP) purchased an orange and canary yellow, three-passenger Curtiss Oriole airplane for “the express purpose of carrying the Gospel.” They claim—and I’ve yet to find evidence to disprove the claim— that it was the first aircraft ever purchased expressly for this purpose. They named the plane the “Sky Pilot,” a playful homage to Frank E. Higgins, the famous minister who began serving the dispersed communities of lumberjacks in Minnesota in 1895. Arriving on a dogsled and preaching a way to heaven, Higgins was quickly dubbed the “sky pilot” by the loggers. The nickname quickly became a generalized term for ministers working in hardscrabble, disconnected communities.
The AFMP’s Sky Pilot was more than a play on words, however. The name was also an attempt to capture the well-known evangelist’s desire to take the Gospel to the furthest and hardest-to-reach places. As the AFMP explained, “Gospel Machines” have always been essential to their dedication to the “rapid spread of the Gospel.” Starting with Gospel Wagons, the mission bought Gospel Automobiles, a Gospel Airplane, and even a Gospel Steamship to “carry the Gospel to those that would possibly never enter a church or place of worship.”
The AFMP was convinced the airplane, however, was the most efficient means of spreading the Gospel to hard-to-reach places. In truth, it was nothing but the fulfillment of end-times prophecy. As the mission’s paper explained,
“Now in the last days, according to Daniel’s prophecy, knowledge has increased, God has provided these airplanes, and we believe that they will be able to cross the country and drop papers down into the little villages and remote places, where the Gospel Auto could never reach, on account of insufficient auto roads.”
The quote likely refers to Daniel 12:4, which reads “Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.” It was a go-to citation to explain how society’s increasingly rapid pace of life and eye-watering speed of invention signaled the end. The airplane featured prominently in these texts. Using passages like Isaiah 35:1 and 60:8, Pentecostals saw signs of the end everywhere. The British planes used to capture Jerusalem in 1917 were Isaiah’s “birds flying,” and those that “fly as the cloud” were Jewish people returning to Palestine, ostensibly on planes. The airplane was a sign and signifier of the rapidly approaching end.
With the end looming, the AFMP attempted to go where no sky pilot could before. Not only did they drop papers on villages and rural homesteads, they also raided penitentiaries, reform schools, and “other places where unfortunates are confined.” The papers they dropped were either small gospels of John or a specially printed bulletin—also named “The Sky Pilot.” The bulletin provided a brief description of the airplane’s work, an invitation to the mission, testimonials, and some admonitions to repentance and Christian living.
On these long-range evangelistic strafing missions, the plane would sometimes touch down and serve as a preaching platform for the pilot, Raymond Crawford, the son of the AFMP’s founder, Florence Crawford. Crowds were easy to come by as the Sky Pilot was often the first plane to ever touch down in any given town. When closer to home, the plane served more practical purposes, moving ministers back and forth quickly between cities, ensuring they would never miss a revival service.
The Sky Pilot’s aerial brand of evangelism, however, did face headwinds—real and metaphorical. Raymond Crawford barely survived a crash from 400-feet during a training flight in Tulsa. During its initial flight from Tulsa to Portland, the Sky Pilot faced “unfavorable” weather and had to turn back on more than one occasion. Ultimately, however, it was legislation that ended the airplane’s short evangelistic campaign. Sometime around 1922, local regulations banned the dropping of any objects from the air. Unable to fulfill its mission, the plane was sold. When the Department of Commerce issued the first federal regulations on aircraft, the ban was nationalized, and the future of air evangelism seemed dead.
By 1930, however, the blanket ban was lifted, and the airplane was enthusiastically re-embraced. The AFMP bought a new plane, “Wings of the Morning,” and resumed their work. Around the same time, other ministries began embracing the airplane. Aimee Semple McPherson’s Church of the Foursquare Gospel—always on the edge of innovation—was one such ministry. In 1928, McPherson called the Foursquare Gospel an “airplane religion” where love raises people above the “fences and high walls” of denominational divisions. Every Foursquarer got the memo. The Dayton, Ohio branch of the Foursquare proclaimed that it was an airplane that,
“means ever to croon and soar over this city and country circling about, spreading its Four wide wings in Four directions, to invade every camp of the enemy, to hoist the victorious, Foursquare, blood-stained banner high, until the great Pilot comes swooping down to take us in His Heavenly Airplane to the beautiful city of Gold.”
That same year, Foursquare musical groups traveled by airplane, a flight beacon was installed on Angelus temple, and two ministry students were married in flight to be closer to heaven. Finally joining in on the craze in 1929, McPherson took her first ministry trip via airplane and was proclaimed a “Real Sky Pilot.” To ensure that even the children were included, that year’s Vacation Bible School was airplane-themed.
The Pentecostal love affair with airplanes was back in full swing, and it has yet to let up.
Modern, Technological “Primal” Religion
The most basic interpretation of the Apostolic Faith Mission’s and other groups’ desires for airplanes would see it as a straightforward expression of evangelical utilitarianism. Airplanes allow for a quicker and more complete dissemination of evangelical literature, and thus, they must be utilized. This is, in fact, how early adopters justified the expense of airplanes, for did not “the value of a soul outweigh the wealth of the whole round world? ”
This is a good interpretation, but to leave the discussion at this point would fail to explain the extent to which technologies were instrumental in the ongoing formation and spread of new religious movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. Building on a host of others, Dan Woods notes that technological innovation often (1) creates new and wider flows of religious ideas and people and (2) reshapes the religious imagination by enabling new metaphors and fresh ways of imaging the relationship between the spiritual and material. There is a real difference between saying, “God is our Shepherd” and saying, “God is the great Pilot who will swoop down and save us in his Heavenly Airplane.”
Reflecting on the role of media in the birth of Mormonism, Mason Kamana Allred argues that, “there is no Mormonism before media, and there is no message of Mormonism without media. These technologies don’t just disseminate Mormonism; they equally construct it.” The same could be, no should be, said of Pentecostalism. Technologies like printing presses, steam engines, electricity, radio, automobiles, and airplanes were intertwined with the birth of Pentecostalism.
New religious movements in the 19th and 20th centuries—be it Mormonism or Pentecostalism—were quick to embrace and preach the virtues and dangers of technological innovation. To borrow from Foucault, you might say that these new discourses—the religious and the technological—were entangled. In the same way, this technological entanglement tied these groups to the unfolding process of modernity itself. Rather than fade into the droll sunset of a rationalized secularity, these movements revealed the way technologies can become “enchanted” and help believers “aim at ‘modernity,’” to borrow Talal Assad’s phrase.
Said another way, these technological toolsets provide entry points for people to engage and renegotiate modernity itself; they are a way to be modern. This points towards the contentious and multivalent nature of modernity itself, and it is also exactly how Birgit Meyer described the appeal of the Pentecostal message in Africa; Pentecostalism allowed the “primal” world of pre-modern belief to find expression in acceptably Western, modern categories. As I think about the intertwined stories of early aviation and early Pentecostalism, I think Meyer’s thesis may be just as useful in the Western context.
If any of the above is correct, perhaps it means that Pentecostals need airplanes because, for better or worse, they can’t really be Pentecostal without them.
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