Frederick B. Fisher

Frederick B. Fisher

14 February 1882 - 15 April 1938


Frederick Bohn Fisher

On April 15, 1938, his universal spirit, so ready for the Great Adventure, took wings and left his body. He had been exceptionally well all year, and had not only put radiance into his great work in Detroit, but into his lectures and sermons to universities, ministers’ and school teachers’ conventions in many parts of the country. Then, on Maundy Thursday afternoon while driving his car he was taken with an overwhelming pain, caused by a rupture of the inner lining of the aorta which was traced to an automobile accident on February 27. Friends took him to the office of a physician, and from there in an ambulance to the Henry Ford Hospital. During the night he seemed to be resting, but on Good Friday morning, as the birds were greeting the day, he slipped away in dramatic keeping with his life.

Funeral services were held at his own church on Easter afternoon. Between one and four, when the service began, six thousand people passed through the church to the chancel rail in silence. Men of all creeds, of all social stations, of all races, filed slowly by. Bishop Blake conducted the service, assisted by the Rt. Reverend Herman Page, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan; Dr. Edgar DeWitt Jones, president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, and Dr. E. Shurley Johnnson, Dr. Fisher’s associate pastor.

Frederick Bohn Fisher was born at Greencastle, Pennsylvania, February 14, 1882. He was the son of James E. and Josephine Fisher. His early boyhood through high school was spent in Muncie, Indiana. He graduated from Asbury College with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1902, received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1903, and was awarded a Doctor of Divinity degree from that school in 1916. He attended Boston and Harvard Universities during the years 1906-1909. Boston University granted him in 1920, the degree of Bachelor of Sacred Theology -- the only time in its history when it granted an academic and earned degree to a man who had not done the technical studies required. In 1909 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Boston University, and the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology in 1930. He also received the following honorary degrees: D.D. from DePauw University in 1920; LL.D. from Wesleyan in 1924; L.H.D. from Hillsdale College in 1932; and LL.D. from Southern College in 1938.

He was married in 1903 to Edith Jackson of Muncie, Indiana, who died in 1921. In 1924 he married Welthy Honsinger of New York, who is his present survivor. He was ordained to the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1903, and became the pastor at Kokomo, Indiana. He was a missionary of the Board of Foreign Missions in India from 1904-1906. In 1907 he became the student pastor at North Cohasset, served as minister of the First Church in Boston from 1908-1910, and then became secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions and the Laymen’s Missionary Movement, serving in this capacity from 1910-1920. He was elected a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Des Moines in 1920, with Episcopal residence in Calcutta, India. He served there until 1930. It was at this period that he attracted world-wide attention by his resignation from the episcopacy in order to become a pastor again. He served at the First Church in Ann Arbor from 1930-1934, at which time he became the minister at Central Church, Detroit, where he was serving at the time of his death.

In recent years Dr. Fisher had been in intimate touch with all of the great movements in the church. He was a delegate to the World Missionary Convention in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1910; made a missionary tour of India, Japan and China, in 1917-1918; was the director of the Industrial Relations Department of the Inter-Church World Movement in 1919, (which appointed the Inter-Church Commission of Inquiry and published the report on the Steel Strike of 1919); and was a delegate to the World Conference on Faith and Order at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1927. He also had intimate contacts with all of the great movements of the Orient, and was a personal friend of Gandhi and the Poet Tagore. He made frequent visits to Europe, his last being in the summer of 1935, when he spent much time in Russia and other countries gathering information at first hand on Communism, Hitlerism and Fascism.

He was president of the International Society of Theta Phi, a scholastic fraternity for clergymen; president of the Free Church Fellowship for two years; a Fellow of the American Geographical Society; Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; a Scottish Rite Mason and Knight Templar; Member of Alpha Kappa Lambda; Exchange, Rotary, Kiwanis and Detroit Athletic Clubs. He was the Fondren Lecturer at Southern Methodist University in 1931; Earl Lecturer at the Pacific School of Religion at the University of California in 1932; Beemer Lecturer at DePauw University in 1932; Special Lecturer at Boston University in 1924, 1928, and 1930; at Syracuse University in 1933; Morningside College in 1934; Adams Lecturer at Indiana University in 1936; Cole Lecturer at Vanderbilt University in 1937.

The following books were written by him: The Way to Win; Gifts from the Desert; India’s Silent Revolution; Garments of Power; Which Road Shall We Take?; Personology; That Strange Little Brown Man Gandhi; Can I Know God?; The Man That Changed the World; How to Get Married and Stay That Way.

It would take several books to even inadequately comprehend and state the significance of this international figure whose name was an inspiration in the councils of Christendom -- the record of a Christian missionary and statesman who never compromised the truth, who constantly took the side of the under-privileged and exploited peoples of the earth. Symbolized by the beautiful Hindu Temple which he and Mrs. Fisher brought from Benares, India, ten years ago, and that has just been erected as their gift to the new E. Stanley Jones School of Religion in Lakeland, Florida, where beside a quiet pool on the orange grove campus with a lake as its background, it lifts its spire twenty-seven feet to the bronze Indian cross that sanctifies it, this life has served its fellow men. Edgar DeWitt Jones in paying tribute to him caught this truth, "His was a global mind. He belonged not to a part but to all of Christendom. There was a touch of universality in everything he said *** Interested in Old World Religions, and searching them for the good they might contain he found that good and baptized it in the spirit of Christ."

Bishop Blake quoted from one of Detroit’s noble citizens: "Dr. Fisher ended his labors on Good Friday -- laid to rest on Easter Day: a glorious, victorious completion of a life always Christian! He dared to 'die daily' -- to live as if each day were to be his last! His death and burial to me perfectly symbolize how he gave himself to the Christ ideal and daily program of living sacrifice -- and now -- Resurrection!"

Bishop McConnell, at the Memorial Service at the Bishops’ meeting in Marietta, Ohio, said "if you brethren get to heaven, and I trust you will, and you want to get the best view of heaven, ask for Fred Fisher and he will show it to you."

His body was cremated at White Chapel, Detroit, and the ashes are to be divided in three parts: one portion to rest in the sanctuary of beauty and life that was his dream and creation at Central Church; a second portion to be placed in the altar of his home church in Muncie, Indiana, where he was converted and ordained to the Christian ministry; and a third portion to be sent to India, where a memorial will be created expressing the love of the Indian people.

- Detroit Annual Conference minutes of 1938, pp. 494-496

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