Prayer One: Praying high from the friendly skies

Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane…no, it’s Prayer One!

Prayer One is a ministry started by pilot Jeff Puckett and Christian pastor Tom Melton of Greenwood Community Church. It all started fourteen years ago, when Jeff Puckett was sitting on a beach in the Bahamas with some buddies, pondering what they could ask God for.

“I came up with question, selfishly, of asking God for a helicopter,” Puckett said.

Now, Puckett uses his helicopter, called Prayer One, to fly people in Christian ministry around the skies of Denver with a few goals in mind: to allow ministry workers to take a breath after a weekend full of giving of themselves at church, to connect churches that wouldn’t necessarily have connected otherwise and to pray over the city of Denver.

On Oct. 25, Puckett was able to fulfill a long time dream of his by landing in the center of the Stations of the Cross at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization in Denver. The sidewalk surrounding the Stations forms an Ichthys, more commonly known as the Jesus fish, and after flying over it for years, he wanted to land the helicopter in the center and get a picture from the top down to use as the new logo for Prayer One.

“I wanted a picture of the helicopter straight down with the fish because that’s what it’s about,” he said.

Throughout the afternoon, Puckett was kind enough to take seminarians, clergy, chancery employees and even Bishop-elect Jorge Rodriguez up into the skies to enjoy a short helicopter ride and pray over the city of Denver.

“It was wonderful,” Bishop-elect Rodriguez said.