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Good morning Last week New Orleans televangelist Jesse Duplantis asked his followers to fund a $54m dollar private jet to enable him to fly anywhere in the world without refuelling. In a youtube video of 2015 that he’d already made with prosperity preacher, Kenneth Copeland, Duplantis explains how taxing it is for famous evangelists to have to travel in planes with ordinary people who might recognise them and want to interact. Responding to angry American headlines about the new plane, on Friday he argued that, “If Jesus was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey he'd be in an airplane preaching the Gospel all over the world.” But would he? Mostly Jesus travelled on foot. Only once was he reported to get on a donkey and that in a deliberate parody of a Roman triumph. And in the three years of his active ministry he made no attempt to jet set about the Roman empire at lightning speed … rather he itinerated within a small patch of occupied territory, taking time with ordinary people before taking on the religious and political powers in Jerusalem - though even there he irritated his followers by his willingness to stop and converse with those of no account… The story of Jesse Duplantis was brought for me into sharp relief this week as I read it alongside the obituaries that have appeared reflecting on the life of Colin Morris, British Methodist Minister and broadcaster, Zambian missionary, head of religious programmes on ��ѿ��ý television and ��ѿ��ý Controller for Northern Ireland during the last days of the troubles. One of the much rehearsed stories about Colin is his friendship with a young Kenneth Kaunda who went on to lead the Zambian nation and for whom Colin remained a trusted advisor, often flying to important meetings with him, ironically, in Kaunda’s private jet. Brought up in a mining village, uncomfortable with ever being overdrawn, horrified by the pre-occupations of religious people with power and money whilst the poor starve, (he remained haunted by the Zambian man who died of malnutrition on his doorstep) despite Colin’s success and powerful friends he remained someone with his feet on the ground, someone committed to dignity for ordinary people and someone who was prepared to risk speaking truth to power whether in the UK in the 1980s where he was proud to have been considered one of Thought for the Day’s ‘trendy left wing vicars’ as dismissed by Margaret Thatcher, or in North Rhodesia in the 1950s where he drew great crowds but lost much of his white following by speaking up for racial integration. A preacher to the last Colin Morris might have enjoyed this posthumous juxtaposition with Jesse Duplantis but he would have asked what any of us intend to do about it, believing that conversion is not about ‘superheated pietism’, but about ‘bringing our priorities into line with those of Jesus and deriving our power for living from the same source as he did’.