A well-loved Seventh-day Adventist evangelist William Pergerson lost his life when the light plane he was piloting crashed last Aug. 27 in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was 48.

Pergerson was on his way home in Berrien Springs when his kit-built Long-EZ plane began experiencing engine trouble and crashed.

According to the Adventist Review, the evangelist was flying alone and tried to land twice while keeping in touch with the control tower. The plane crashed on a grassy field near one of the runways, immediately exploding on impact, killing him.

Firefighters immediately responded to the scene, but they failed to salvage anything save for Pergerson's pilot logbook, which recorded his many flights to different churches in North America.

His wife of 18 years, Sharon, who is also his ministry partner and mother of their two teenage children, said it was a miracle they were able to salvage her husband's logbook out of the smoke.

Sharon and others who knew Pergerson recalled that his most incredible journey did not involve his piloting of an airplane but his "close walk with Christ."

After graduating from college, Pergerson worked as a Bible worker and then a pastor and evangelist in the 1990s.

"He was a hard-core legalist," said Richard Kearns, one of his close friends.

He was so strict about rules that he once refused to accompany a woman who was wearing a ring to the pulpit, Kearns said.

At one point in his life, Pergerson considered quitting as a pastor and evangelist when his efforts to evangelise resulted in just a handful of baptisms.

"I was scraping at the bottom of the barrel, and I didn't have anything to give to people," a friend quoted Pergerson as saying.

"I used to try all sorts of gimmicks to bring people across the line," he told another. "Brother, I was a lost man," the friend quoted Pergerson as saying.

However, in 2001 he had a change of heart when he went to speak at an evangelistic series in Las Vegas, Nevada. A local Adventist member gave him a car to use on weekdays, a gesture no one had given him before.

"That just blew Will's mind!" Sharon said. "He said to me, 'Who is this guy who would do this?'"

Then a second surprise came his way. A retired pastor came all the way from the East Coast to speak with him.

Sharon said his husband was not at all pleased to see the old man approach him in the hotel lobby.

Lloyd Knecht, 91, the retired pastor, recalled: "When he first met me, he said to himself, 'What can this old man tell me that I don't already know?'"

Knecht eventually became Pergerson's mentor, "Those 10 minutes changed my ministry and my life," Pergerson was later quoted as saying.

Pergerson later organised a "gospel summit," the term he used for the evangelistic meetings he held in churches across North America.

"He taught our distinctive doctrines drenched in Christ and His righteousness," his wife said. "Every night was Jesus and how those doctrines fit into Jesus."

The series of meetings was a success as they attracted more non-church members.

Pergerson "uniquely presented the prophecies permeated with the theme of Christ our righteousness. My congregation absolutely loved him! He was one of the finest evangelists I have had the honour to work with in my almost 40 years of pastoral ministry," said Bill Brace, pastor of the Adventist church in Braintree, Massachusetts, where Pergerson led a series two years ago.

Pergerson will be buried after a memorial service at the Battle Creek Tabernacle on Sept. 19 and a memorial service at the Pioneer Memorial Church at Andrews University on Sept. 20.

Aside from his wife Sharon, he is survived by their two children — William III, 16, and Jaissa, 13 — his father, William, and two younger siblings, Joel Pergerson of Virginia and Kim Pergerson-Williams of California. His mother died in May.