Mercy Wings
By Jeff King

The hill has no name. It rises out of the dreary Mexican desert, a mile south of a small village. The only distinguishing mark on the 4,500-foot peak is a crude pagan altar near the summit.

But for a few minutes in 1999, this forgotten mountain became holy ground to a small Christian medical team, which was preparing to minister in the town below. As they huddled on the slopes to pray, missionary pilot Jerry Wiley whispered a prayer with the faith to move a mountain: Lord, capture us in your glory as You did for Moses on Mount Sinai.

As the doctors were scattered around him in prayer, Wiley looked down and saw fog emerge from the backside of the mountain and move toward them. “It comes straight up and covers the whole top of the mountain,” says Wiley, who works with two other pilots in an aviation ministry called Mercy Wings International out of Durango, Mexico. “It almost hooked around and met in front of us. I closed my eyes and lifted my hands. I felt a coolness.”

The cloud was so thick that Wiley hardly could see the other team members around him. But everyone was impacted by God’s presence.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” Wiley says. “People fell on their faces. It stayed with us for about 15 minutes. As fast as it came in, it went away the same way. It just melted away.”

Signs and wonders are not foreign to these missionary doctors and pilots, who have seen the dead raised and sick healed in the Mexican outback. But this was such a powerful demonstration of God’s sovereignty that they returned to camp shaken and weeping. Team members said later that the Lord spoke specific things to them individually on the mountain.

“It was an awesome, awesome thing,” Wiley says. “God put a stamp of approval on what we were doing. We felt a great breakthrough in that village.”

The glory cloud has not returned, but the Mercy Wings pilots have come to expect the miraculous as they help spread the gospel to the indigenous tribes in central Mexico. The danger of flying into these remote mountains and canyons is so extreme that the pilots literally depend on the hand of Jesus Christ for protection daily.

Pilot Jerry Witt, the founder of Mercy Wings, has been shot at in the air by drug lords and robbed by bandits. The pilots thread their single-engine planes over and around mountain ridges and land on primitive, man-made airstrips made of rock, dirt and rough patches of grass.

“I have one airstrip I call the aircraft carrier,” he says. “It has a launch ramp. You literally go off the side of a mountain. Wind is always a factor. A down draft can put you into a mountain side and there is nothing you can do about it.”

Witt once damaged his plane on an airstrip when it hit a muddy bog and tilted onto its nose. Unable to fly, Witt hiked 43 miles for help. Later, he learned the mishap probably saved his life. During repair work on the plane, he discovered a mechanical flaw that could have caused an accident on a future flight.

Despite the risks, the three pilots – Witt, Wiley and Alex Fedorenko – have dedicated their lives to evangelizing these indigenous people groups that Mexican society has forsaken. Mercy Wings works with other ministries to spread the gospel and meet practical needs in villages. Witt has used airplanes to support outreach teams by transporting supplies such as cement, lumber, medical supplies and gasoline. “We’ve even flown in bees,” he says.

One of Mercy Wings’ most daring projects is using parachute drops to distribute palm-sized, solar-powered radios in hard-to-reach locations. The short-wave device receives gospel messages transmitted by High Adventure Ministries in Los Angeles.

The pilots drop the tiny parachutes from a cockpit window, sometimes dodging mountain ridges and rooftops by as little as 20 feet.

Miracles in the desert

The parachute drops have provoked many responses, some even comical. One man was seen attacking the unmarked package as if it were a bomb. “You have to realize these people have never been face to face with an outsider,” Witt says. “So here’s this machine screaming over their house. They have no idea who it is.”

On another mission, a box was dropped next to a primitive school, which immediately attracted a group of children. After inspecting it briefly, the children took off running, apparently thinking it was about to explode. After a pause, they returned to the box but no one dared touch it. Finally, curiosity got the best of one little boy who grabbed the box and carried it to a group of adults.

In most cases, the fear and hesitation turns to excitement and gratitude when they discover the cargo is a radio and gospel booklet. It is the first time many of these villagers will hear about Jesus Christ and the message of salvation.

Wiley talks softly as he recalls the day he dropped a Bible by parachute to a poor farmer plowing his field with oxen. As Wiley circled his plane overhead, the man picked up the Bible, looked up and waved for him to come down.

“It tore my heart out,” Wiley says. “I said, ‘God, what I’d do for a helicopter right now to go lead that man to Christ.’ The man took off his big-brimmed hat and put it over his heart, letting me know he appreciated the Bible. In these hills many people have never seen a Bible or held one.”

Mercy Wings has distributed thousands of radios by air and on foot. Gradually, the pilots will hear scattered reports of salvations and healings as a result of the airdrops. Some natives will make pouches for the radios and wear them around their necks. “I ran into a non-convert Indian going down a trail with his radio hanging around his neck going full blast,” Witt says. “When you hear the Word day after day you get results.”

Witt heard about a 62-year-old woman who was healed from disease after listening to one of the radio broadcasts. The program instructed anyone with an affliction to lay a hand on the radio and the other hand on their body. Listeners were told Jesus would heal them if they had faith.

“She received healing instantaneously. This is no-man’s land,” Witt says. “She suffered for 40 years and tried to get healed by witch doctors. So now she understood this little book (gospel of John) was a portion of a book they talked about on the radio called the Bible.”

Reportedly, the woman found a Bible and – even though she couldn’t read -– asked the Lord to teach her the Scriptures. Within nine days she was reading her Bible in Spanish and inviting relatives to hear the gospel.

Angelic visitations

The field of aviation ministry isn’t glamorous, although some of Witt’s friends call him Indiana Jones. The work is daunting, dangerous and expensive. Mercy Wings receives funding from friends and family in the United States, as well as Mexican ministries.

“People have a romantic view of aviation. But not many people want to rough it and pay the price to work in such difficult areas,” Witt says. “You invest huge sums of money to get modest amounts of progress.”

But the challenges don’t deter Witt, Wiley and Fedorenko, who work in mountains as high as 13,000 feet and canyons twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. In some remote locations, the Indians live in caves and wear loincloths.

“When you fly and see these huge canyons littered with thousands of huts and little trails going up and down, you realize it’s going to take more than conventional transportation to reach these people,” Witt says. “The Spanish conquest under (Hernando) Cortes (in 1520) drove the people out of the flatland, and this is all that’s left. One canyon is 11,000 feet deep and has 13,000 people living in it.”
Another challenge is ministering in an area that historically has been hostile to evangelical Christianity. Witt’s father, Jerry Witt Sr., died when his plane crashed in 1964 while dropping gospel tracts in central Mexico. One eyewitness claimed the plane was belching smoke before it crashed, adding to speculation that the plane was shot down.

The burnt corpses of Witt and a co-worker were pulled from the wreckage and delivered to a nearby mining town, where the bodies were strapped to chairs in the main plaza. Children were released from school and promised ice cream if they would spit on the missionaries.

Within three weeks of the plane crash, two city officials responsible for Christian persecution died suddenly. “One had a massive heart attack, the other had an accident in a pickup truck,” Witt Jr. says. “It’s a graphic demonstration of God’s vengeance. One man was buried before my father.”

Witt Jr. believes his life was spared when a stranger driving an old pickup truck, coming in the opposite direction, waved his arms out the window and flagged Witt’s car to a stop on a logging road. The man warned Witt that bandits had set an ambush a few miles down the road. A stunned Witt turned his car around and said to his brother-in-law, “I think angels drive green Dodge pickups. I’ve never seen that man before.”

Wiley flirted with death in 1976 when the plane he was piloting crashed into a hillside during a mission trip. A villager pulled Wiley and his father – the only passenger – from the crushed airplane and they were rushed to a hospital. Wiley, who had third-degree burns on his left leg and a broken right knee, said the accident “almost took the flying out of me.”

But Wiley received encouragement from an unexpected visitor. As he slept in the early-morning hours following knee surgery, his father was awakened by an angel, whose presence illuminated the hospital room.

“The angel told my father to get his Bible and turn to Psalms,” Wiley says. “He ministered to my dad. He wasn’t sure how long the angel stayed. When I woke up, my dad was weeping. He said, ‘Son, an angel told me to tell you everything is taken of. Don’t worry. You’re in God’s will. Hold up your chin and move forward.’ It tore me up. Here I was complaining. All I could do is weep and ask God to forgive me.”

Wiley purchased a new plane and returned to flying a year and a half later. It wasn’t long before God rewarded his obedience with a front-row seat to His miracle-working hand in the outback.

Raising the dead

None of the Mercy Wings pilots could have dreamed when they began this mom-and-pop aviation ministry that they would see the book of Acts come to life in this poverty-stricken region. They have witnessed God heal the sick, raise the dead and set the captives free.

But the pilots know that nothing happens here unless it is birthed in prayer.

Every flight plan is prayed over because the pilots know that one bad decision can result in disaster. Although Witt says he doesn’t fear flying in these dangerous locations, he approaches his work prayerfully and cautiously each day.

“We have to rely on these machines to operate correctly,” he says. “We can’t fly in wind or heat. It has to be cool early in the morning. Sometimes the Lord will warn us off stuff. One time we had a bad situation develop on a ridge and we backed away. A down draft almost put us into the side of the mountain. We spent another 20 minutes meditating and praying. We bypassed the area.”

On another flight, wind prevented Witt from reaching a mountain airstrip. So he prayed and asked Jesus for a miracle. The wind, which had gusted all night and morning, stopped suddenly and the plane landed safely. Thirty minutes later the wind returned and continued for another 24 hours.

On the ground, prayer also is their most valuable resource.

During a medical outreach, a mother entered the Christian camp carrying her limp, 5-year-old daughter, who had collapsed earlier in the day and showed no signs of life. The doctors in town had pronounced the girl dead, then pointed to the Christians and said mockingly, “Maybe those hallelujahs can help you.”

A Christian doctor took the little girl in his arms and cried out to Jesus to heal her. Within five minutes, the girl opened her eyes and a half hour later walked out of the camp with her mother.

The doctors also prayed over a boy who had been bitten by a poisonous snake. The child, who was struggling for life when he reached the camp, was healed instantly. He could not be found an hour later because he was playing with friends.

Prayer also has protected the lives of doctors and pilots as they serve in the outback. Once, a Mexican pastor was preaching outdoors when a scorpion fell from a tree into his shirt. He was stung several times on the stomach, but Witt and others immediately prayed over him. The pastor continued to minister without any symptoms.

“Not every medical mission has those types of miracles, but on every short-term trip we’ve done in these remote areas we’ve had some type of manifestation of God’s sovereignty,” Witt says.

Witt is considering plans to expand operations into Central America. If funds are available, he would like to buy a custom airplane designed by a former missionary that can land on airstrips as short as 100 feet.

Whatever God calls these men to do, they will approach their work with humility and gratitude.

“We’re nothing special,” Wiley says. “God put this desire in our hearts. Someday we’ll be buried here in Mexico after this work is completed. Someone else will grab the torch and run with it.”


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