Faith in Flight
From Moody Spokane to the Congo, David and Ashley Petersen commit their lives to sharing the love of Christ through mission aviation
When David Petersen was eight years old, he wrote an essay about what he wanted to be when he grew up: a missionary pilot.
“I’ve wanted to be a pilot for as long as I can remember,” David said. “My own mother doesn't even know why, but I wanted to do mission aviation since my first ability to write. My mother said the first little essay that I wrote was about wanting to do exactly this.”
In 2006, David went to Moody Bible Institute’s Spokane, Washington, campus to major in aviation. “I selected Moody after a lot of research that I had done in high school that showed Moody was the best training for the path of missions I was trying to go on,” he said.
While the Moody Aviation program strives to give its graduates the most advanced mechanical and technical training, Spokane Campus Dean Jim Conrad says that a Christ-centered, biblically based focus is always central to the curriculum.
“Our passion is to train missionaries who use the tools of aviation to advance the cause of Christ to the ends of the earth,” Jim said. “We begin with the end in mind, knowing that it is the truth of the gospel that our graduates represent to a watching world that desperately needs Christ. Bible and theology courses are interwoven throughout our five-year curriculum.”