Phil Fischer, best known for hard-hitting concert performances and his colorful life as a software developer, has decided to hang up his laptop and microphone to win souls for Christ.
In January 2013, he plans to launch Seattle Revival, a ministry he hopes to reach people that Fischer describes as “lost.”
Known in gaming circles as the lead singer of rock band The X Box Boys and in Silicon forest land for launching the world’s first web-design firm, Fischer has always lived a mysterious and reclusive life. While running the headquarters of the company he founded, he makes his home in Bellevue, Washington. But almost as a metaphor for his “out-there” thinking style, he also maintains a rustic cabin on the Alaska Highway in the Arctic Circle.
Fischer has long found himself serving the two passions of his life: dreaming up cutting-edge technology ideas and writing vivid rock music. But nothing in his imagination could predict the change he experienced in October of 2001, when on a second date his future wife, Jamael, she convinced him to attend a small revival service on Mercer Island.
Led by Pastor Varun Laohaprasit of New Hope International Church, that Saturday night date turned Fischer’s life upside-down.
“I felt something I couldn’t put my finger on. I couldn’t describe it. It was gentle and warm, and I wanted more,” Fischer says.
While most ministers and missionaries are out on the road reaching thousands of people in evangelistic gardens such as Uganda or India, Phil envisioned a different approach: Let’s start right here in Seattle.
For the last two years Fischer has been methodically preparing to make the break from his music and dot-com career to a full-time ministry. In 2013 he’ll launch what he describes as a “revival church” for people who don’t know Jesus.
Fischer has been in ministry 30 hours per week for the last 10 years, running a small Bible study in his home on Wednesday evenings. For almost five years, he did outreach Bible study at Christ our Hope Catholic Church, located on the corner of Second and Pine in Downtown Seattle. The concept of a “revival church” goes beyond simple button-holing of likely prospects on the street, asking them if they’ve accepted Christ. His ministry will have the irresistible magnetism of a traveling gospel show, delivered to lost souls on street corners.
Fischer has never played it safe. He gets down in the trenches and gets his hands dirty.
In 2008 he went to Pakistan, even though the CIA was issuing travel warnings for Americans in the wake of sectarian uprisings. After a Muslim mob stormed a Protestant church during a prayer service in Karachi, Fischer performed concerts in the streets, singing about Jesus Christ—an act of blasphemy—trailed by hundreds of locals. Fischer’s fans in India created a music video of the event, using images from the one tape Pakistani Police did not seize from him.
The punishment for blasphemy ranges from long-term imprisonment to the death penalty. Even though human rights groups, including the United Nations, have urged more protection for minority religious populations, Christians still make up less than five percent of 180-million Pakistanis.
Back home in Seattle, Fischer decided to begin his full-time ministry among a similarly underserved population, all over downtown Seattle. His plan is to offer inclusion to people who have never set foot in a Christian church.
“I love to tell people that Jesus loves them,” Fischer says. “The lost and forgotten are on every street corner of the world. They’re not sitting in church on Sunday mornings. They’re in bars, alleys, and lonely places, and they need Jesus right now.”
Fischer is looking for space downtown where he can set up headquarters for his mission.
So if you see a singing evangelist standing in a crowd of Seattle’s homeless people in the frigid air of January, it’ll be Fischer, sharing some of that “gentle and warm” feeling he had on that night in 2001, hoping to change lives the way his has been changed.
