Introduction
For years people have been telling me that I should write an account of my life. I’m sure that is the case for everybody as we all have a tale to tell. At last I have started on the task my desire is that those who read this book will find it both entertaining and instructive. I confess that I have had a very wonderful life and most especially since my conversion to Christ in June 1982. Before that time, in many ways my life was also wonderful but I lacked true peace and real purpose for living. I was obsessed with the pursuit of personal happiness without regard to what that might cost others who stood in the way of my goal.
The apostle John at the end of his gospel said it like this, “if all the things which Jesus did were written down, I guess that there is not enough room in the world to contain all the books”.
In some ways I feel hypocritical writing this book because it has been my contention for years that if Christians really want to walk in the presence and power of God, then all they really need is to understand the Bible. My intention for writing is therefore not primarily to share my doctrinal understanding, but to document my experience as a ‘person of the book’, and the transforming effect the Bible has had not just on my life, but on those who God has touched through me.
It’s very easy when discussing yourself to try and present your best side, but when we read the descriptions of people in the Bible both in the old and new Testaments we see that God inspired the writers to tell their stories, warts and all, and so it is my desire that others benefit from where I went wrong, rather than having to repeat some of the things which I have done and have caused both myself and others pain.
Chapter 1.
“Lord, give me courage!” That was what came out of my mouth, though it certainly did not come out of my mind. “How strange” I thought; I would have expected to pray, “Lord keep me safe during my take-off, flight and landing, but where did that come from?” I then started the engine, ran down the hill and within seconds was airborne for the very first time whilst hanging in a canvas harness with a heavy two-stroke engine screaming away on my back and watching the ground disappearing beneath me at about 500 ft a minute. At this point, I offered up a quick prayer to heaven in the form of a question. “Now what do I do?”
Perhaps we should back up a little at this point to explain how this unusual situation occurred in the first place. About six months earlier I had been watching television at home when I saw for the first time in my life a paramotor, a personal form of aviation which required the pilot to strap an engine to his back and fly under a paraglider. The engine provided the thrust and the paraglider the lift; ingenious in its simplicity and portability, but to what good use could it be put? My immediate thought was “Wow! What a great tool for preaching the gospel over people’s heads.”
A couple of days passed and I found myself driving to work in Winchester when I picked up a hitchhiker to aid him not only on his journey to his earthly destination but with the motivation of sharing the good news of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ with him to help him find an eternal home in Heaven. I started the conversation by asking him what he did for a living? His answer astonished me; he told me that he taught people to fly paramotors, so I asked him how many people in Britain did what he did, to which he replied that there were four of them. Four people out of sixty five million, now that is no coincidence considering I had never even heard of a paramotor until two days earlier.
For the remainder of the journey I asked him lots of questions about paramotoring and he provided me with the answers. When I dropped him off at the airfield at Chilbolton, he asked me to hang on whilst he went into his office to collect a VHS video which he gave to me and told me it would explain everything I needed to know about paramotoring. I then proceeded to my office in Winchester where later that day I had a meeting with the UK Managing Director, Ges Brown. During the meeting, I asked him the question, “How about the company sponsoring me to preach the gospel from the air?” His response was, “What are you talking about John?” To which I replied, “Watch this video and you’ll understand.”
It’s worth explaining at this point, that at the time I worked as the UK Sales Director for IQ Software, a NASDAQ listed company whose European headquarters were in Winchester. Ges Brown reported to the board in Atlanta, and I was responsible to him for the UK OEM sales target.
Two days later Ges offered me a deal. He said that if I could achieve sales of £480,000 within the next two months, the company would buy me all the necessary equipment and training to fly the paramotor. My response to this offer was to pray – “Lord, if you want me to preach the gospel from the air I need £480,000 worth of sales within the next two months.” Two months later sales of £481,000 had come in – just in time. Ges Brown was true to his word but later admitted that he never expected to have to pay out. O ye of little faith.
During the next couple of months the equipment and training were purchased from a company called Sky Systems located near Brighton on the south coast of England. At the time Sky Systems was one of the leading providers of paraglider and paramotor equipment and training in Britain. Though they were inconveniently situated with me living in Salisbury, this inconvenience became an important factor in what was to transpire some months later.
Impatient to take to the skies, I arranged with Sky Systems that one Saturday I would undergo a day’s training; however after driving for two and a half hours to the site near Brighton (aptly named Devil’s Dyke), I was told that the weather was unsuitable for ab-initio flying and that training that day was cancelled. The following week exactly the same thing happened. Over two weekends I had driven ten hours with nothing to show for it, very frustrating – especially as I was fairly impulsive at the time.
To my surprise and delight I then discovered that it there is no legal requirement to have training for either paragliding or paramotoring. Armed with this new found knowledge I decided to take matters into my own hands and teach myself to fly, (don’t try this at home), so I went ahead and purchased all the books and videos I could find on the subject and eagerly digested their contents.
It seemed to me that the most difficult part of flying a paramotor was taking off. The trick was to be exactly lined up into wind and then with the engine producing full power to run as fast as possible until the lift from the paraglider carried you up into the air. So with the help of friends, and especially my good friend Mark Stokes, I spent the next couple of months trying to get airborne. During the process I broke several propellers, sections of the cage protecting the propeller and I even managed to slice through one of the supporting lines which attached the harness to the paraglider. However, despite these setbacks I remained resolute that I would eventually fly.
It was now August 8th 1997 and whilst driving back home to Salisbury from my office in Winchester the Holy Spirit spoke into my heart and said, “You are going to fly this evening.” Armed with this prophetic word I called several of my friends and asked them to meet me at Hudson’s Field on the outskirts of Salisbury and I explained to them that the Lord had told me I would surely fly that evening. Once everyone arrived, we prepared the equipment and prior to making the first take-off attempt I suggested that we should pray, which leads me back to where I began this chapter.
So what happened next, you may ask? Well the flight went according to the word the Lord had spoken to me earlier that day, here I was airborne for the first time. However, after ten to fifteen minutes of flying around the immediate area from which I had taken off, experimenting with the simple controls of direction and varying the height by increasing or decreasing the thrust from the engine, I made a fundamental mistake.
I had descended to just a few feet over the field from which I’d taken off from but was being driven towards a main road by the wind which I estimate gave me a ground speed of about 30 mph. I then saw that in front of me was a line of trees and I applied full power in order to clear them, to do so I had to lift my feet up and just skimmed the top of the canopy. Then suddenly, to my horror, I saw that in front of me was a row of houses and that at the rate I was ascending I would not clear the roofs.
You may remember me mentioning earlier how that when I prayed prior to take-off, I was surprised to hear myself petitioning the Lord for courage. Well this was when my prayer was answered. I immediately realised that my only hope of survival was to fly through a gap between the houses rather than be splattered like a bug against the walls. I was climbing, but only at the same rate as the houses which were built on a steep hill going upwards so my height above the ground remained constant at about four feet.
Apparently, there was a lady washing her dishes when I flew straight past her kitchen window. During the next minute or so I navigated between the houses, just clearing the fences and bird tables and eventually ended up overhead a pig field to the east of the Paulsdene housing estate; shaken but unscathed.
Having regained my composure I then flew to the ancient site of Old Sarum Castle and from this vantage point prayed over the city of Salisbury for God to bring revival to the city before returning to land in the field from which I had taken off. Mission accomplished!
Within minutes of landing the police arrived in response to seven emergency calls they had received from people living on the housing estate. Once it was ascertained that nobody had been injured and no property had been damaged, the Police took my details and left.
That might have been the end of the matter except that one of the houses I had flown close to belonged to an air traffic controller from Bournemouth Airport. Though the police were unaware that any offence had been committed, this man knew that I had infringed the Air Navigation Order on at least three counts. Likewise, the manager of Old Sarum Airfield, Lesley Maynard had observed the proceedings and together with the air traffic controller they reported me to the Civil Aviation Authority, (CAA).
Some weeks later, I was contacted by the CAA who told me that they wished to interview me under caution. In my naiveté I initially thought that they were there to help me, but soon realised that a prosecution for low-flying, and flying too close to an airfield was looming. Paramotoring in Britain is unregulated, similar to cycling you do not need a licence to ride a bicycle, however, you are still required to observe the rules of the road. Flying through people’s gardens and near to the final approach path of an airfield is not acceptable as I was shortly to find out when I was arrayed before Salisbury Magistrates Court for doing so. Before I went to court, word of my impending prosecution got out to the paramotoring community who were less than happy at the prospect of the negative publicity which my case brought to the sport, possibly resulting in restrictions being placed on their hobby. I assured them that I would take full responsibility for my actions by pleading guilty to all the charges.
I started this chapter by explaining how God had prompted me to pray for courage prior to my first flight with the paramotor; and also how He had told me whilst driving back to Salisbury that I would definitely fly that evening, despite months of failing to get airborne. The seemingly negative outcome of being brought to court was not the highlight of the year, but I drew encouragement from Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome where he wrote that “God works all things together for good, to those who love Him and are called to fulfil His purposes”1 My motivation for wanting to fly the paramotor was to preach the good news of salvation through faith in Christ, the duty of every Christian believer. I was therefore confident that God’s hand was on this venture. What transpired as a result of the prosecution brought by the CAA, clearly showed me that “His ways are higher than ours.”2
The court took a dim view of me endangering myself and the lives/property of others and fined me with costs a total of £1300. As I was leaving the court building, a reporter came up to speak to me from the Salisbury Journal, and said to me something like, “so what were you playing at?” I discovered later that this journalist had only come under sufferance because one of the court ushers had called the newspaper to tell them that there was an interesting case in court that day. I got the impression that he really didn’t want to be there and was keen to get the story and go home for the night. When I started to explain to him that the reason I had acquired the paramotor in the first place was so that I could preach the good news of Jesus Christ to people from in the air, and how my company had bought it as a reward for achieving a very high level of sales, I noticed that his interest piqued and he was furiously writing down every detail that I gave him.
After the meeting had concluded I flew to Israel on a business trip and came close to being martyred at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but that’s for another time.
I returned to the UK the following week and on the Thursday the front page of the Salisbury Journal was dedicated to the story of the “Flying Preacher”. They had a picture of me with the paramotor engine attached to my back with the story described in all its glorious detail. What happened next though was truly amazing. For the next few days I received dozens of telephone calls from newspapers, TV networks and radio stations all asking me for interviews, many of which promised to be live. One journalist from the Times newspaper drove from London to Winchester in order to take me for lunch so that she could get a scoop on the story. I was invited by Channel 4 and ITV to take part on the Richard and Judy Show and GMTV’s breakfast show with Eamon Holmes. Meridian TV featured the story on their Meridian Tonight news programme with Fred Dinenage as the host. Also, many radio stations did live interviews with me for their audiences in the UK and abroad. The obvious advantage of live TV and radio is that it provided excellent opportunities for me to share the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as there was little they could do to prevent me once I started. You can find several of these interviews online at my YouTube channel, the link is provided at the end of this book.
Finally on this story, a German terrestrial TV network started to show an interest in this eccentric British preacher. Initially, they sent a team over to conduct a short magazine style interview, but the director, a British expat living in Germany called James Pastouna, told me that he would like to do a documentary about me for German television. Some months later James contacted me and said “You must have been praying hard, because they have given me the budget to do a documentary about you.” In reality, I hadn’t prayed at all.
James and his crew came over to the UK and spent 10 days filming for the documentary which they called ‘The Flying Preacher’, ‘Der Fliegende Prediger’ in German, which I believe was transmitted a total of 19 times across Germany during the following two years and was the most successful documentary Pastouna had made in his film making career.
Shortly after all this took place, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said “you asked Me for the opportunity to preach the gospel from the air, but I have given you the airwaves.” What I had intended was to preach to a few people above their houses and yet through this apparent crisis and resulting prosecution, millions had heard the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, all for the measly sum of £1300 which coincidentally had almost exactly been covered by the sale of the video of my flight to the media networks for use in their news programs, it would appear that even if crime doesn’t pay, it at least – covers the costs.
That favourite preacher of mine, the Apostle Paul, wrote to the Church in Ephesus – To Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.3 I had thought to preach to a few, but God had bigger ideas. One plants, another waters but God gives the increase.4