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Decades-long hobby keeps Paola pastor flying high

By: Erin Wisdom, ewisdom@miconews.com

Jerry Peck and his wife, Arlene, travel in style in a plane Peck built himself. Peck, the pastor of First Lutheran Church in Paola, has been building and flying planes for more than 30 years.

Long before he planned to pastor a church, Jerry Peck wanted to work with planes.

Now, he does both.

Peck is the pastor of First Lutheran Church in Paola and has spent more than 30 years flying and building airplanes. Although this hobby might not seem to go hand-in-hand with his career, Peck can clearly see the reason they're both in his life.

“God's really blessed me,” he said. “He worked it out so I could do both.”

The story leading up to Peck taking flight began in a storm. When he was a year and a half old, he was caught with his family in a blizzard that blew the roof off their Nebraska home and left them stranded in snow for hours. They were saved, miraculously, by a plane that lifted them out of the storm — and let Peck experience flying for the first time.

Frostbite he suffered from being in the blizzard caused swelling in Peck's hands and led to him losing several fingers. When he was older, doctors told his parents that working with his hands would be good physical therapy, and it was then Peck began to build model airplanes.

The interest he developed in this stuck — so much that he applied and was accepted to two aeronautical engineering programs after high school.

Even after he decided to become a pastor instead, Peck continued his hobby of engineering planes on a smaller scale. And when his dad pointed out that he could probably make the “real thing” for about the amount he was spending on his models, he decided to give it a try.

Today, Peck flies a Long EZ airplane — white with red and gray stripes on the sides — that he built between 1984 and 1994, without the help of a kit. Its designation as “experimental” made his wife, Arlene, uneasy when she first went up with him on their second date, but all “experimental” means in regard to a plane is that it was home-built, Peck said.

Arlene has long since gotten over any uneasiness she initially felt toward the plane, and now, she co-pilots it when she and Peck fly to visit family who live out of state. Trips that would take them 12 hours by car take only four by plane, and the ability it gives them to travel long distances is one of Peck's favorite parts of flying.

Another is the unique opportunity the hobby gives him to talk to people about Christ. This sometimes happens, he said, when people stop to admire his plane and are surprised to hear he's a pastor.

And when it does, it's evident that all those model planes Peck built growing up were part of a bigger purpose.

“I can see God at work in the whole process,” he said.

August 3, 2007