From his birth in Lexington, NC, in 1933 during the Great Depression to his death in Matthews, NC, in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2023, Carl Melchior Fisher lived an enchanted life. He grew up the son of man who wanted to become a missionary but served in the military across the Atlantic. He spent time on military bases in Japan and took classes at Sophia University in Tokyo. He attended Lenoir-Rhyne College, like his father did, and attended Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary. He was a poker shark and a prankster, pouring beer into a seminarian’s vaporizer and flying his pajamas from a flag pole. He became a career missionary and Lutheran bishop in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He wore many different “hats” and served as a representative and consultant for various Lutheran bodies, traveling the world, visiting heads of state like the philosopher, statesman, and president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in New Delhi, meeting Mother Teresa, and conversing at leisure with celebrities like Bette Midler. The number of trips recorded in Fisher’s memoirs is dizzying. Istanbuhl, St. Petersburg, Ephesus, Cairo, Troy, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and countless other places. Is there a country or city to which he did not travel and visit? (Perhaps Antarctica.) He was adventurous. Even audacious. He smuggled bootleg whiskey and cigarettes as bartering goods into countries to help small Tamil Lutheran congregations struggled to survive in hostile, anti-Christian environments. Among his more amazing accounts, he relates an experience in India that led him to irrepressible belief in the reality of demon possession, as well as voodoo practices in Haiti that lead him to state that “there is evidence that Zombies exist,” apparently soulless individuals who give the appearance of being reanimated by witch doctors after being dead. Above all else, however, Fisher was a humble servant of Christ concerned for the salvation and care of souls, primarily in Malaysia, but also as a pastor serving at Lutheran perishes in North Carolina later in his life. Significantly, he writes: “I was a Christian when I went to the mission field. But it was on the mission field that I came to know Christ in a very personal way.”
What made these memoirs particularly interesting to me personally is the number of events, places, institutions, and people which intersected with my own history. I, too, spent my formative childhood years in Asia, the son of Protestant missionary parents in Japan, where I spent two decades. I, too, studied at Sophia University in Tokyo. I, too, spent years – twenty of them – at Lenoir-Rhyne College (now Lenoir-Rhyne University) teaching philosophy to Lutheran students, many of them on a “theology track,” eventually headed for Lutheran seminary studies in Columbia, SC. I, too, knew the Fisher family, particularly through Carl M. Fisher’s son, Jeremy Fisher, whom I had in my philosophy classes. I didn’t know his middle name was “Eleazer” (Abraham’s chief steward, how cool), but I did also know, as his father discovered, that Jeremy came to be called “Fleazer” by some of his college friends, in part, due to a cartoon series in the Lenoir-Rhynean (school paper) featuring a character based on Jeremy whom my son Chris called “Fleazer.” I, too, knew many of the same people mentioned by Jeremy’s father in his memoir, particularly Michael C.D. McDaniel, bishop of the NC Synod, Leonard Bolick, the Yoder clan, Dr. Paul Weber, and many, many others. I, too, am familiar with many of the places named, such as Hickory, Rural Hall, Mount Pleasant, Salisbury, Holly Grove, Concord, etc. I, too, witnessed the formation of the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) from earlier Lutheran denominations. I, too, witnessed the Lutheran-Catholic Dialogues at Lenoir-Rhyne. On one occasion I even had the privilege of meeting Dr. Carl M. Fisher himself on one of his visits to the college.
The life of Carl M. Fisher is elegantly set between two “bookends” – a beautiful introduction and moving “epilogue” written by his son, Jeremy E. Fisher. No review can do justice to the immense detail and passion of these memoirs, the missionary years in Malaysia, the years of incessant travel around the world, the years of serving (and developing) parish churches back in North Carolina, his reception of the Order of the Long-Leaf Pine, the highest honor bestowed by the state of NC, his loving attention to his grandchildren, and the slow decline of mounting medical ailments, eleven surgeries, and thoughts about death: “I believe you really can’t live free and be happy until you realize death comes to everyone.” Fisher explicitly put his confidence in the Lord. As I told Jeremy, his epilogue nearly moved me to tears by the beauty of his language: “His eyes sparkled with the intensity of a man determined to etch his legacy upon the pages of time . . .” His memoirs “remain a testament to his resolute spirit, even as his physical form gradually succumbed to the weight of the passing years.”
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