A different path
A Black Hawk helicopter pilot from Broken Arrow recently decided to become a military chaplain.
Broken Arrow native Jay Henderson, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot with 450 combat flight hours in Iraq, was commissioned a chaplain and promoted to captain in the Oklahoma Army National Guard in a recent ceremony at Asbury United Methodist Church.
The January ceremony cemented a decision he made years ago to give up his love of flying to pursue the ministry.
Henderson wanted to be a helicopter pilot since he was a boy, he said recently, surrounded by helicopter photos and models in his office at Asbury, where he is a pastor.
That desire turned into a passion when a cousin, Lawrence Shane Colton, was killed while piloting an Apache helicopter on a rescue mission in Iraq on Easter Sunday 2004. “He was like a brother to me,” Henderson said of Colton, who successfully completed the mission before a rocket destroyed his Apache. He was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
“Following in his footsteps became my passion. It wasn’t just a matter of something I wanted to do. It was something I needed to do,” said Henderson, who was serving as an intelligence sergeant in Iraq with the 120th Engineer Battalion of the Oklahoma Army National Guard when he heard the news.
And something else was growing in him as he watched his friends fight and die on foreign soil.
He began to ask himself the big questions, he said, questions that over the next few years would lead to a decision that meant he would never pilot another Army helicopter.
After Henderson’s first tour of duty in Iraq, he married Jamye, his high school sweetheart, and enrolled in flight school to be a helicopter pilot with the National Guard.
While he was in flight school, he said, he wrestled with a growing sense that he was called to the ministry. The decision did not come easily. He worried that he was not good enough to be an example to others.
But he got the boost he needed at a chapel service.
An older woman, a close friend of the family, told him before the service, “I was praying to the Lord, and he told me you are going to be a preacher.”
He dismissed it politely, but later, during the service, the minister stopped in the middle of his message and said, “I have to stop, because the Holy Spirit is telling me one of you is called to the ministry, and you’re trying to run from it. You need to submit to the Lord.”
Henderson said he was “freaking out.”
But he still had his second tour of duty before him.
By then, he and Jamye had two young children.
The day he left Tulsa, he learned that Jamye was pregnant with identical twin girls.
For the next year, he shuttled soldiers in and out of hot spots in Iraq.
As he landed from one mission, his commander rushed him from the helicopter. “The rotor was still turning,” he said.
By Skype, he joined Jamye as she gave birth to the twins. “I’d like to give a shout-out to my family,” he said. “They’ve just been amazing. My wife’s Superwoman. She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
Chaplaincy
Back in Oklahoma, Henderson completed his bachelor’s degree at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, graduating summa cum laude, and then moved his family to Dallas to attend Perkins Theological Seminary at Southern Methodist University.
He began work on his master of divinity degree and was assigned to be the pastor of three rural churches near Dallas.
On his second Sunday at a church in Celeste, Texas, 50 members of his National Guard unit surprised him by showing up. They had arranged a training mission to fly to Texas on six Blackhawk helicopters.
He pastored those three churches for all four of his years in seminary.
“I loved it,” he said. After graduating from seminary, he returned to Oklahoma and was assigned a full-time position at Asbury United Methodist Church.
He is once again a member of the 120th Engineer Battalion of the Oklahoma Army National Guard.
And he will still go to war with the unit if they are called up. But he will go holding a Bible, not the flight controls of a Black Hawk helicopter.
And he thinks he is uniquely qualified to connect with soldiers.
“I know what it is to struggle with the loss of comrades and the stress of deployments,” he said.
The chaplaincy, he said, “is my mission work. This is me getting outside of the four walls of the church.”
“For me, serving as a chaplain is a matter of integrity, because I’m doing nothing less than I ask my congregation to do, which is, in addition to your day job, go out and serve the world in the name of Jesus Christ.”
Will he ever fly again? “I had to give that up to pursue the chaplaincy.” Will he miss flying? “Of course,” Henderson said. “I wrestled with this calling. But I’m sold out to following God wherever the adventure’s at.
“This is the only thing worth investing in, sharing the good news.”