Interview with Gary Bishop,

President and CEO of MAF

One of the disadvantages of being so sporadic in the updating of one’s website is that much of what is posted is no longer current. The following interview took place in June 2003 with Gary Bishop, then CEO and president of Mission Aviation Fellowship.

 

Mission Aviation Fellowship, or MAF, has existed for 58 years. Its primary focus has been making use of aircraft to provide a bridge from civilization to remote areas.

Marco Klaue: Maybe you could start by telling us what MAF sees as its primary purpose.

Gary Bishop: MAF has always been about reaching the people of the world with God’s good news – people that are almost unreachable by any other source of transportation or communication. We find ourselves, at this point in God’s utility of this ministry, to be in 15 different countries around the world, providing largely transport access into very remote and difficult places to get to. We also help provide communications infrastructure for those who are primarily involved in either national missions or evangelism work within their country, or expatriates involved in very remote locations that extend beyond the infrastructure of communications (in other words, telephone lines, radio networks and that sort of thing).

Those are the primary things. If you look out on the horizon just a little bit, what you would find us beginning to work in is distance education, because we believe that that is a technology that puts resources into the hands and into the hearts and minds of believers in very remote locations. These resources mature them as Christians and mentor them by providing access to materials, to networks they don’t have otherwise, but also brings alongside them a personality that can mentor them and help them. Largely, this is for the use of lay pastors or lay church workers in very remote locations that are developing in their spiritual walk with the Lord. We see in the next 20 years MAF will continue to provide transport services, communications, and we’ll continue to expand the distance education technology that we’re coming into today.

MK: So given the nature of the mission – as something focusing primarily on reaching remote locations primarily in developing nations – what is the role of MAF in the United States, where there are no people groups that are cut off from communication with others?

GB: It’s very much like the church. If you look into Scripture, God has commissioned his church to be about His glory, and all of the duty of the church is to bring glory to God. So our role in terms of our ministry emanating largely from North America is that we would in fact use the resources, that God has entrusted to the church here to reach people in those other locations. So our involvement here is recruiting, funding, sending,… so that those resources are available in those very critically needed places in other parts of the world. I’ve worked over the last five years or so to try to develop a very quick way for people to understand what MAF is doing and be able to remember that. I’ve coined two words that I believe that most typify what MAF is about in kingdom work. Those two words are “barriers” and “access”. In other words, for missions to be accomplished, there are barriers that exist in the world today that separate people. They can be topographical barriers, they can be jungles without roads through them, they can be deserts that are impassable, they can be war zones in which it is unsafe or impossible to transit. There’s all kinds of barriers out there. MAF sees it as its role to be about identifying those barriers, and then to provide a solution that gives access. So two words: barriers and access. If you can remember those to words, you basically know what MAF is about.

MK: You mentioned that MAF works in 15 different countries. How would you describe the relationship between MAF and the governments and authorities of these countries? Is there ever any reluctance to allow the missions work to be done?

GB: Well I think you would certainly have to answer that with a “yes”, especially in countries that are dominated by either a religious ideology or a political agenda that is in conflict with either Christian values or Western sociopolitical ideology. Like it or not, we are labeled as “Western”. And we don’t believe we are Western, we believe that we are Christian and Christian does not in any way imply “Western”; that just happens to be where God raised up this ministry from. But from our standpoint those two factors always bring us into potential conflict. Some governments are very accomodating in that they want the services that come with MAF. They don’t necessarily want Christian ideology or Christian philosophy, but they certainly want the services that come with that, so they’re tolerant. We run into other governments who are intolerant but accomodating. And that means that if you go into an Islamic government or an islamically dominated culture, you may find that the government officials would hold significant opposition even to the point of hostile activity, so you determine in those locations whether you confront that or find a strategy that allows you to be there in what would be termed their accomodating roles, which are: if you don’t wear the Christian banner as the primary appearance or primary manifestation. We do that in places where we operate not as MAF but under another name, but it’s the MAF ministry or mission that’s going on there. It’s the full range of that to governments on the other extreme that are extremely pleased to have us there, and do everything – including passing new laws – that make it possible for us to operate in those locations. So in today’s world it runs the full spectrum from hostile to very very favorable relationships.

MK: MAF is a mission that is built almost exclusively around airplanes. What is the job distribution of the employees and missionaries working with MAF?

GB: We do remain primarily aviation in terms of the concentration of our people. There’s about 170 pilots in the organization. Most of those are also pilot mechanics. Then we have maintenance specialists also, that are concentrating on keeping the airplanes in good flyable condition. There are far fewer of those – only about 10% of our force is maintenance only. But then we do have another significant category, and that’s information technology folks who do everything from taking care of software that runs on hardware systems, computer systems, networking systems. So that is a significant component. There are about forty people worldwide who are dedicated exclusively to that part of our work. Then we also have people that are focused on distance education. We have about ten of those people today. Around the world there are about 340 MAF “missionaries”, there are about 120 staff that support the missionary effort, and then there are – and this varies from time to time and from country to country – anywhere from a hundred to five hundred national workers that are also either employed by or support the mission work of MAF. So alltogether the total number of people usually runs somewhere around just over a thousand people.

MK: Missions that have been primarily “jungle pilot missions” have worked with other missions: with evangelists and Bible translators and education and medicinal help. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the missions that MAF collaborates with, or how much of this type of work is done by MAF missionaries themselves.

GB: We view ourselves largely as a servant to the servants. We are – in most cases – the middle man. We do not have terminal ministry as a focus or as a prime function of MAF. We’re not into teaching ministries as a whole, we’re not church planters, we’re not medical missionaries. We’re enabling all those things to take place. What we do require is that all of our people who are going to the field have at least one year of Bible training because they are called to share their faith. As a primary function they share their faith through what they do: transport, communications work, distance education. But almost all of our people have additional ministry in the community in which they live. We have people that are seminary graduates, we have people that have been pastors of churches or deacons or elders or Sunday school teachers, for years and years before they come to MAF. So most of our people are very adept at sharing their faith, at teaching, but that is not the primary functional purpose of MAF people being in the field. Rather, it is to enable church planting, evangelism, medical missions, relief and development and those sorts of things to happen by other people. We serve over three hundred organizations today in enabling them to carry out their mission as well.

MK: You mentioned distance education as one of the goals here. Would that be something that MAF would do themselves or that they would partner on with other missions?

GB: In distance education we are once again the facilitator of this technology being utilized in kingdom work. The prime way to explain that would be that you have a creator of courseware information – could be a course in anything from Biblical survey to marriage and family relations to leadership training. Someone is preparing coursework from one end. There is then on the other end of the spectrum a user of that courseware. What it takes is a bridging of the technology, both in hardware and software. You have to be aware of what the user’s capabilities are. Today I think everybody in North America is aware of the fact that you can do college courses all the way up to degree programs virtually on the internet. Well, that is a great technology. However, if you’re talking about a person that is sitting in Siberia and has to travel for several days to get to an internet café and all they get there is eMail, then you don’t want to create a course that is rich in full internet accessibility – with visuals and with high bitrate content – because they can’t receive it and can’t use it. So what MAF does is it steps in and, through the knowledge of the user on the one end and helping the course preparer on the other end, bridges the gap between what’s the appropriate technology, and how can the training or education be packaged best so that the user can make use of that. So that’s what we do, we’re the bridge between the courseware creator and the user, for both hardware and software.

MK: Maybe you could talk about the beginnings of MAF.

GB: Well there were about five people that are credited with having the idea. All five of them were people that were introduced to aviation as a result of World War II. Several of them were military pilots. Betty Green was trained in the war, and she was our first pilot – most people don’t realize it but the first MAF pilot actually was a woman, not a man. And what happened is that these people met at a mission conference, had all been exposed to aviation as a product of war, but realized what a difference aviation could make in getting people to remote locations that otherwise either would be impossible or else would take extensive travel time to get there. And so they understood that God had provided a technology that not only was being used for warfare and transport but could be used for mission too. And so it was their idea to adapt this new technology they had been introduced to to the world of missions. That was really the start of it. From there people have, through the decades, seen more and more occasions where aviation can make the difference. Anything from getting a missionary to a very remote or isolated location, to bringing relief and development to people that are either starving, hungry, plagued by disease, or other human catastrophe. And so, as time has moved along it has been people having a vision of how to adapt the technology to meet God’s eternal purposes of bringing His good news and His love and care to people throughout the world.

MK: How about you personally? How did you come to MAF?

GB: Well it really occurred at the largest air show in the world, which is conducted in Oshkosh, WI each year. It’s a place where nearly everybody that’s interested in aviation either has attended, or wants to. And I went there in another role, quite different to this. I was the head of the college that was training people in aviation carreers, and I bumped into the people at the MAF booth there, was introduced to how they were using aviation, and thought, “wow, I would have done this my whole life if I had known about it.” So God introduced me to MAF fairly late in my life, I was in my late forties when I had that encounter. Initially I thought, well, I would just go become an MAF pilot. But most MAF pilots are leaving the flying part of the ministry by the time they get to be fifty years old. Well, I was only a year or so away from that when I heard of MAF, and so collectively wisdom took over and we decided that trying to start a flying career at this point wasn’t the most realistic probability for me. I kind of went away from that first encounter and didn’t know what I was gonna do about this new introduction that had been made to me, but God very quickly orchestrated an encounter with a man that was trying to help MAF obtain airplanes, in an era when the prime airplane that MAF used – the Cessna 206 – was out of production. The school that I was leading had a portion of it dedicated to rebuilding airplanes. So they came to us and said, “would you help us rebuild some of our old airplanes?” And I thought about it and said “wow, maybe this is the way I will be involved in this ministry.” And so I agreed to allow our school to rebuild airplanes for MAF. They said, “There’s only one other thing, and that is, we need somebody to raise the money to pay for rebuilding the airplanes.” I said “let me get this right: this is the ministry that said I was too old for them, but you would like for me to rebuild your airplanes for free, and you would like for me to raise the money to pay for the materials to do it?” And they said, “well, yeah, I guess that’s about the size of it.” And I said “sounds like a great challenge to me.” So that’s how I really became involved. For the next five years I worked as a volunteer, actually raising money for MAF and allowing our school to rebuild the airplanes. Then, when the current sitting president was retiring from MAF, very unbeknownst to me people began to submit my name as somebody that had been interested, had volunteered, had just seemed to give themselves to MAF but really wasn’t involved as a staff member, and they said, “this guy ought to be a candidate.” I was an unlikely candidate in that I was not a seminary graduate and had not been a missionary on the field, but yet God led us this way. And so that was my introduction, and how God really brought my wife Donna and I into the service of MAF.

MK: Is there anything else you would like to say to our readers?

GB: I would like to say to people who see the possibilities of how God has made this technology available, to just contact MAF. You never know, people might think that you gotta be an experienced aviator, a pilot or a mechanic or something like that, but they don’t know that for MAF to do its work throughout the world it takes teachers on the field. Our families with children on the field need education for those children, so it takes teachers. We also have a lot of money that flows through the ministry in order to accomplish a very costly kind of ministry, and so we need accountants and bookkeepers and all that sort of thing on the field too. We also need people that maintain houses, that fix automobiles, and do a variety of other kinds of work. And so I would just encourage people to explore whether God would use them in this ministry or not. There’s a place for almost everyone. And so we would really just encourage people to make contact with us, learn what God is doing through the ministry of MAF, and then see whether He would call people to become involved in the ministry in one way or another. And that would probably be the last thing I would want people to know, is that God is about using people to His glory. And maybe he would have that for them in MAF as well.

<-back | go to discussion forum