Simple, Steadfast Commitment

In mission aviation, where thrilling flight stories are not usually a good thing and missteps can end in tragedy, missionary pilot Peter Stuart is committed to avoiding exciting days.

“Flying with Peter is about as low key as it gets,” says Nathaniel, one of Peter’s Brazilian friends and a frequent passenger. “Peter makes it his life philosophy to matter-of-factly stack the odds in his favor so that unexpected things do not go wrong.”

13 years of prep

Most 15-year-old boys are focused on sports, food, and girls. Peter Stuart ’10 was thinking about flying airplanes and what to do with the persistent feeling that God wanted his complete devotion.

While reading Jungle Pilot (Nate Saint’s biography), Peter discovered missionary aviation, a role that combined flying airplanes with serving God. Intent on becoming a missionary pilot, he chose Moody for his training and started attending Moody’s Chicago campus in 2001.

Early in his freshman year, Peter met Linda Mullenix ’05.

“Neither of us were looking to date anybody,” Peter says, and, ironically, Linda was adamantly opposed to marrying a missionary pilot.

But love found a way, and soon Linda softened her stance.

“I’ll do whatever God wants me to do, go where He wants me to go,” she told Peter. In 2005, after Linda graduated with her BA in Music and married Peter, they moved to Spokane, Washington, so Peter could continue his studies at Moody Aviation.

“From day one, they’re training you to enter into missions and fly in remote areas, in difficult airstrips,” Peter says, talking about how in the moment it seemed way overboard, but now that he’s on the field he uses what he learned all the time. “Sometimes they would say, ‘Now, you might not believe this, but when you get overseas, this is what you’re going to face.’”

In Spokane, Peter and Linda added two sons to their family, and in 2010 Peter graduated with a BS in Missionary Aviation. Their next stop was Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he spent two years gaining experience as a flight school instructor.

In 2012, they joined Wycliffe Bible Translators to serve with JAARS, a mission aviation organization. In November 2014, the Stuart family moved to Campinas, Brazil, for a year of training, and in 2015—after 14 years of training and preparation—the Stuart family moved to Porto Velho (pohr-toh VEH-lyoo), Brazil.

Facts about Porto Velho

Population: 548,952 

Location: upper Amazon River basin, eastern shore of the Madeira River

Climate: tropical monsoon

Main economic activity: agriculture (cattle, beef, soy, corn, etc.)

Primary language: Portuguese

Giving the gospel wings

There are 30,000 communities and villages, 10,000 of them unreached, spread throughout the Amazon River basin in Brazil. Many of the passengers Peter and the missionary pilot team in Brazil transport are Bible translators and indigenous leaders going to the city for training—primarily at a seminary—and then returning to their own villages to teach their people about Jesus.

Over the last 10 years, Peter has grown to love these flights and has seen firsthand the difference that having the Bible and knowing Jesus makes. Where one village might have the whole Bible in their heart language, another has just the New Testament, and another has none.

“The effects of that are so clear,” Peter says. “It’s amazing to see the difference in how joyful they are, how helpful they are, how kind they are to each other.”

One of the team’s frequent fliers, Nathaniel Shrift, is a church planter with Ethnos360. He works with a people group that doesn’t have the Bible in its mother tongue.

“Flying with Peter... is like commuting to work with an old friend on any given ordinary, routine morning,” Nathaniel says, noting how Peter always takes the long view and makes intentional choices. “There are no frills, no hurry, no pressure, no hint of anything exciting, adventurous, or pretentious. Just good conversation and the confidence that life is as it should be.”

Cool, calm, and collected

And when things happen that are outside his control, Peter always remains calm, cool, and collected.

“I consider myself a big-picture person, but Peter takes it to the next level,” Nathaniel says. “He has an uncanny ability to remove personal drama, emotions, and expectations from any situation and just look at it objectively. Peter has taught me to see molehills as molehills, even when everyone else is calling them mountains.”

Back at Moody Aviation, Peter’s instructors still remember this same trait in him.

“Peter was a quiet, diligent, focused student,” says Steve Thimsen, director of maintenance training and a Moody alumnus himself. “We don’t have stories from his training, which is usually a good sign!”

Bruce DeVries, a Moody alum and a flight instructor serving Moody Aviation on loan from MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship), shares similar memories about Peter.

“He did not need to be the star of the show or have the most amazing story,” DeVries says. “He would look for where someone needed help or encouragement and be there for them.”

A day in the life

Asas de Socorro is the national aviation organization in Brazil, and it borrows pilots from JAARS. The Asas de Socorro aviation team in Porto Velho has three pilots—Peter Stuart, Marcos Baughman, and Tim Reed—and two Cessna 206s: a single-engine, six-seat general aviation aircraft with fixed landing gear. One of the planes is a biplane.

Typically, Peter, Marcos, and Tim fly two days a week. When they’re not flying, they clean the office and the airplanes, complete paperwork, perform maintenance on the planes, and do other odd jobs.

For part of the fall, the team can’t fly because of the smoke. Every year Brazilians cut down and burn swaths of the Amazon to make room for sustainable farming, and the smoke decreases visibility for weeks.

But, when everything is normal and the air isn’t thick with smoke, their flying days are full:

In the meantime, Linda is doing equally important work: raising their three sons, the youngest of whom was born in Brazil. Linda oversees the homeschool process and keeps everything in their household running smoothly. Peter speaks of her with great admiration.

“It’s harder for her because I go out and fly for the day and then come back, but she’s at home taking care of the kids, taking care of school,” Peter says. “It’s a much bigger challenge for her. In the States, there are more resources in every way to run a household.”

Running a household away from family has its unique difficulties, but after 10 years in Brazil, the Stuarts have built family relationships at their Brazilian church.

“That is the church where we go to be fed, just like we would in America,” Peter says. “When I’m in church, I just want to be a normal person and have my ministry, and invest in others one-on-one discipling and encouraging. When I’m in church, I don’t want to be in ‘missionary mode.’”

Practically speaking, sometimes this means spending time with their church family after a long day, but the friendships and community they’ve built have been a steady source of refreshment over the years. Attending their church has also had its share of joyful surprises—like the time the guest preacher stepped onto the stage and Peter recognized him.

“He’s been my passenger multiple times over the years!” Peter says. “He’s from a remote indigenous village with the only access being via hiking and canoe or the airplane. And here I am sitting and listening to him and he’s preaching to me.”

‘We’ll be here’

The Stuarts love the people and the place where God has called them, and Peter eagerly lists some of the joys: their flourishing community, helping bring the gospel to unreached people groups, getting to fly indigenous leaders and Bible translators, and building long-term friendships. He is forever grateful for the training he received at Moody Aviation that prepared him for this role.

“We still talk about our professors and how amazing they were. It has had a lasting effect in a very practical sense right until this day, through the Bible and theology,” Peter says. “We were given a really, really solid foundation.”

But he’s also honest about the sacrifices.

“After you've been overseas for 10 years, all of a sudden you look back and you're like, Oh, shoot, we missed a lot,” Peter says. “My parents are getting older now, and I've hardly seen my sisters at all.”

But Peter doesn’t make a big deal about the years of training, his commitment to completing every flight safely, his family’s sacrifices, and all the little moments of missionary life that many people who haven’t lived it will never quite understand.

Instead, in his non-dramatic way, he has just one thing to say: “As long as God wants us here, we'll be here.”