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December 21, 2013 - January 3, 2014
Spirituality
www.SanTanSun.com
Pastor returns from serving country BY TRACY HOUSE
After six months in Kyrgyzstan, Air Guard Chaplain Mike Sproul has returned to his pastoral duties at Tri-City Baptist Church. In his 22-year military career, Sproul has been deployed overseas five times. Sproul has been to Qatar and Saudi Arabia during the course of five years active duty where he was deployed twice to Desert Storm. He’s deployed three other times in his career. He joined the Air Force in 1991 and has been on active, reserve and guard duty. “Some people get the reserves and guard mixed up,” Sproul explains. “They basically look the same except the guard is owned by the governor of the state and the reserves is owned by the president.” Sproul grew up at Tri-City Baptist
Church, graduating from its Christian school in 1981 and its college in 1985. He went away to seminary school returning in 1996 as the assistant pastor—leaving active duty. The church moved from Tempe to Chandler in August 2009. While deployed, Sproul was promoted from lieutenant colonel to colonel. There are 85 lieutenant colonel and six colonel positions in the Air Guard for traditional guardsman. “My posting is Europe,” Sproul says. “A few weeks a year I will go to Germany and do extra duty as the Air National Guard assistant to the command chaplain of the United States Air Forces Europe. It’s a pretty big deal actually. There are only six major commands that have this position. “(When) you’re deployed enough times you kind of know what to expect. Every
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CHAPLAIN: Lt. Col. Michael Sproul preaches in Kyrgyzstan. Sproul is deployed out of the Air National Guard 161st Air Refueling Wing in Phoenix. Photo by U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Robert Bennett
deployment is a little different. You go from really high energy, working six days a week, every week for six months. There’s no such things as holidays, three-day weekends, you don’t have any of that kind of stuff. It’s very much crisis, crisis, crisis. We were a very high operational tempo, bringing in 30,000 men and women in and out of Afghanistan every month.” Sproul oversaw 18 repatriation ceremonies as part of his duties. While he was deployed, one of the jets on the base went down. “It hit me because my son flies the exact same type of plane. Both the pilot and the co-pilot went to Air Force Academy, my son’s an Air Force Academy graduate,
a couple years behind them, but he knew them. As a human that hits you really, really hard because this is the plane your son flies and there was really nothing you can do. It was a massive mechanical failure and the plane crashed.” As the pastor on base, Sproul says he organized the memorial service and dealt with the grieving servicemen and servicewomen. “It’s traumatic. I don’t even know how to explain it,” Sproul says. “You don’t take on a professional air. You can’t be a pastor or chaplain and be a professional in the sense that you’re cold-hearted and unsympathetic. At the same time you know that if you fall apart, you can’t help