Ministry from on high in a Helicopter

Scott Hastings so does not want to do this.

His face looks pale as he trudges through gusts of grit to the helicopter.

In 11 seasons as a pro basketball player — and in his current job as a TV analyst for the Denver Nuggets — Hastings has grown accustomed to travel. Travel, that is, by big, solid plane. This helicopter looks too small to hold all 6-feet-10, 280 pounds of him, not to mention the pilot and four other passengers.

He’s man enough to say he’s terrified.

Then again, 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?”

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