Beginning tomorrow, March 28, John and Marti are taking a week of rest followed by a retreat, where they plan on creating a series of workshops they hope you will embrace. They will return on September 11. 

While they are away, the Catch Ministry will continue its operations and services through the very capable hands of its ministers. Please feel free to call on any one of the following with your needs, questions, concerns, and recommendations.

• Associate Pastor, Wayne Bridegroom — (209) 312-1954
• Director of Discipleship, John Shirk — (773) 520-2554
• Prayer Ministry Pastor, Cynthia Cody Vera — (209) 588-6947
• Director of Community Life, Terri Main — (559) 847-7250

The Catch will feature a series of teachings on the story of Gideon with entertaining videos daily.

Meanwhile, we thought you might be interested an independent business analyst’s study, where he discovered  a number of misperceptions specific to John and Marti Fischer that the analyst sought to correct in the following narrative. We look forward to learning of your good thinking, insights, and understandings. 

With appreciation for your consistent support of the Catch,          

The Vanguard Group

 

A. Reintroducing the Minister/Pastor

It will not be difficult for people who know John and his Ministry to imagine how uncomfortable John is with the intersection of independent ministry and entrepreneurship.  

Consider the origins of John’s Ministry.  John was the son of a choir director of a well-known evangelical church in southern California, destined for ministry. He grew up with that air of destiny about him. In 1969, with a BA in Social Sciences from Wheaton College, Illinois, and with the album “Cold Cathedral” to his credit, the first contemporary Christian album released in the United States, John was selected for the licensed internship program at Peninsula Bible Church, Palo Alto, California, pastored by Ray C. Stedman, and focal point of the Jesus Movement in Northern California. (John became an ordained minister in 2006)

With this undocumented preparation for entry into Christian ministry, along with a substantial academic class-load taught by the professors, John was steeped 24/7 in spiritual principle, becoming laser-focused on living out and teaching the Bible. For this, be it noted, John raised monthly support for his earthly needs amounting to $300 a month.

He was unemployed when he married Marti, who, thankfully for the undertaking at hand, held an executive position at United Airlines. Through John’s record label, he secured a booking agent – the first act of obtaining employment or income John had taken in his life, initially at no cost to him, but for a 20% commission on the gross. With his guitar, Bible, and boxes of albums and cassettes for sale in tow, John launched from nothing into what everyone else assumed would be a viable independent ministry with his blend of music and speaking. 

The sheer courage of striking out on this utterly untried path and sticking to it, entirely alone, is incomprehensible.

As an indicator of John’s unpreparedness for entrepreneurship, when John received his first engagement contract, for a fee of $500 plus travel and expenses, John fell to his knees in a paroxysm of guilt at this extravagant amount and prayed, “Oh Lord, make this right!” Nothing has changed since.

Had John been groomed to be a performing artist, the process would have oriented him to quite a different attitude toward the business side of his career. After all, a musical profession, which John was in, requires a sharp eye on revenue and a clear-eyed embrace of self-promotion. But John received a minister’s training, was licensed and ordained as a minister, and continues to this day with a minister/pastor mindset. Not just a pastor’s perspective, though — John’s utter focus on what has come to be called The Gospel of Welcome — Grace Turned Outward, has the reach of a gift we are less comfortable with — of the prophetic nature of someone burdened to do what he does, and say what he says, whether paid or not. 

John is a watchman, one who climbs to a high vantage point to see the danger in the distance before anyone at ground level is aware of it. As a prophet, he is the Voice of God and the conscience of society, and he is a champion and guardian of the covenants. John is a social critic mandated by God to speak truth to power and challenge corrupt leaders and influencers. Yet, also like other prophets, he is powerless. John declares God’s word with no means of enforcing it. All he has is influence. John has charisma without power. Thus, John’s winning, attractive and charismatic way of communicating, whether through music, speaking, or writing, is how he leverages his talent to win people over to the truth, with little knowledge of how to sustain these methods in the real world. He is, after all, first and foremost, a prophet.

Similarly, this immunity to self-promotion and allergic reaction to marketing and strategy is the flip side of his gifting — his ability to walk unarmed onto any platform to disarm defenses and opposition and change lives. John’s capacity for self-promotion ends where it began, with those boxes of albums and cassettes to sell after his concerts, some would say a strategy found suitable for the Girl Scouts. 

Yet, John is a distinctive Voice among biblical Christians for cultural engagement, where he shares the global stage with some of his good friends who are household names and who love to work with him.

. . . . . . . .  

Thus John Fischer of the Catch Ministry is doing everything he knows to carry on and hounded for what he doesn’t. He currently addresses over 3,800  individuals daily from the expanding Internet cyber church community, with Sunday’s Church at the Catch attendees numbering 600 people or six generations sitting side by side, weekly bible studies, social media, podcasts with an array of prominent guests and he extends his support to membership interaction, a 24/7 interactive prayer ministry, a discipleship ministry providing “boots on the ground” to over 143 countries the Ministry presently serves, one-on-one counseling to well over 200 people a month, and a personal ‘triage’ that connects members to its network of local ministries are examples of its expanded territory.  Yet, for eight years, John has had the look of a bad bet. How else to explain the six-year pattern since Marti became CEO of denied proposals for investment in ministry infrastructure? 

John never aspired to be a “bet,” and he certainly isn’t a bad one at all. But where thoughtful plans are in place, he is an excellent bet indeed, for the one thing that is true about John is that people find him and respond to him and his prophetic Ministry. 

John studies his Bible. John prays. John pastors, counsels, thinks, listens, and speaks. And, in compact form these days, because of time constraints, John writes. Other than that, his calendar is full, uncomfortable exchanges, and financial issues of a ministry on the brink of viability, but to quote one of his lyrics, “He’s always got time for you.”

First, the upshot of these reflections is to re-understand John by his strengths, gifts, ministry legacy, and heart. John is the Minister/Pastor of the Catch Ministry community, and the Catch Ministry is the entirety of the platform for this community. It hasn’t been a blog, or a daily devotional, for years. 

John’s service in the Catch Ministry is entirely devoted to those proper activities of a spiritual and not an administrative pastor, namely study, prayer, writing, speaking, and tending to the many people and issues that present themselves to this Ministry. Consequently, his expertise does not include ministry expansion strategy and infrastructure initiatives, except as they affect his communications with the community. Nevertheless, the Catch Ministry remains John’s flock, and he delegates the Catch Ministry’s growth and expansion plans to others.  That is the Biblical method established by the First Century Church.

John is the Minister/Pastor of the Catch Ministry and the thousands that show up on its virtual steps. The platform is viable with its own life, concerns, and needs. No longer is John’s ministry sold in bits out of the trunk of a car, and other roads that might support John are closed. It must be seriously regarded and funded into viability – and that by one of the most successful launchers and sustainers to benevolent partnerships and ministries in the nation; the Catch Ministry’s CEO.

B. Reintroducing the CEO 

Those who are acquainted with the goings-on of the Fischer household know that John and Marti are a ministry, and that John’s development and output since they married is the product of a very engaged shared life, engaged with each other in challenging their shared faith and spiritual gifts to engage, in turn, with the world around them “while it is today.” Ideas and action are high traffic areas, as are celebration and confrontation. Those who follow and benefit from John’s ministry in the various forms it has taken over the years, are benefitting from this two-person ministry engine.

That said, most of the Catch Community will be unaware that Marti is known in entirely different circles than John is.

Marti is a woman who was born into east coast wealth. When finding her life in Christ and marry a penny-pinching and somewhat radical and long-haired musician and preacher, she was disinherited. She is a woman arrested by her encounter with Christ as an adult. She was fixated from the beginning on personally fulfilling the Great Commission and having everyone meet Jesus one way or another.

Culturally she is a sharp contrast to John’s southern California evangelical roots, and a foil to his easy west coast ways. Missing in her makeup are the mainstream evangelical cultural cues. Nevertheless, a starched puritan social duty and personal propriety startles, and then (if you give it a moment) disarms. But for most people, encountering her is like docking your fishing punt next to a newly-minted battleship-cum-ocean liner. One rocks in the wake.

The heart that beats inside this impressive carriage is one of utter and simple heart-wrenching devotion to Christ, and the cultured surface dutifully hides a life marked with painful sacrifice, a tender humility, a self-brutalizing honesty and a furnace of undying, insistent and selfless zeal. Her mind alternately addled or enhanced by dyslexia, memorizes everything it sees, hears, or reads, and somewhat helplessly zeroes in on the point of it all, which to Marti is, how can God’s love be realized here? The results are as follows.

Marti has three careers. Each one receives 110 percent of her energy. The most accessible trajectory to trace in her life is the ministries and services she has launched as a by-product of wondering “why not?” Finding herself in a career as a flight attendant, she launched the Fellowship of Christian Airline Personnel, which today has chapters in every international airport in the world. Also, out of a side conversation with a World Vision executive, Marti launched its subsidiary, Women of Vision to teach women of wealth philanthropy and connect them with the conditions of women living in grave poverty around the globe. She is known for saying, “If you cannot touch poverty, you will never grasp the need to give.”

While producing the Los Angeles Super Bowl’s halftime show starring Michael Jackson in 1993, a conversation between NFL great and sportscaster Terry Bradshaw and Marti created a mentoring program, “Touchdown for Youth,” for at-risk LA youth, replicated today in major cities across the country. Also, “Mission Tuition,” which delivers two years of college education to foster children in the state of Missouri, and “The Caring People,” providing support and mentorship by women to single mothers – and more. 

Look in vain among these and other established undertakings for “Marti Fischer Ministries, Inc.” You will not find it.

A second career is Marti’s marketing, launch, and rescue career. Marti has a string of successes, some of which were failures when she started with them. It has elicited tens of millions of dollars to capitalize successful nonprofit and for-profit undertakings, often by creating surprising partnerships between the unlikeliest of bedfellows of power and wealth.

In the interest of grasping Marti’s character, her third career is that of mother and wife, which she pursues with a passion for God’s intent to bless women, children, and men each and severally like no one else. Extend this passionate maternal instinct to hundreds of callers responding to Grace Turned Outward, people who feel barred from legitimate entry to the Church, calling at all hours and for all reasons. Think of this when rocking in the wake of that prodigious craft beside you in the dock. 

In 2015, the founding chairman convinced Marti to accept the Catch Ministry role of CEO. Already a multifaceted online ministry to an emerging online congregation, Marti assembled several plans which, per her practical knowledge of the nonprofit dollar, require “investment” and designed to increase revenue for the Ministry over one to two years with a return no later than three. Efforts to recruit support teetered on the brink of ignition yet always relapsed. 

In the same way that a renewed understanding of John and his role in the Ministry are necessary for all, the Board can apply a similar process regarding Marti’s role. There is probably a cultural difficulty with the combination of John’s amenable manner and his intermittent need to spearhead the Ministry’s growth against Marti’s considerable leadership skills and efforts to support John’s leadership. But it is very likely that Marti is substantially known as an “aid” to John and not known as the reputed nonprofit builder that she is.  Marti’s plans are not suggestions. Instead, they are professional executive-level blueprints for viability, drawn within a sharply limited scope calculated for success and backed by the promise of Marti’s legendary energy.

The longstanding pattern of counter-offers and outright rejection of plans suggests that an unfortunate relational practice has set in. Moreover, Marti’s career accomplishments and ministry accomplishments do not seem to be acknowledged. Instead, John’s lifelong pattern of avoiding trappings of success appears to be the consistently deciding factor. 

Without being acquainted with the blended Ministry of John and Marti, some Voice always calls for John to toil a bit more along this five-decade journey of making bricks without straw, of being a public person without a platform, a Voice in the wilderness to be respected but not promoted.

C. Reintroducing the “Catch” as a Ministry

     1. Purpose

In the same sense that John Fischer is no longer John Fischer – lone itinerant thinker and communicator – the Catch is no longer the Catch. One can characterize John’s ministry and message in the words of Andy Crouch of Christianity Today:

“There are few folks who more regularly have articulated a compelling and careful vision for Christian faithfulness in the culture.”

John’s mark on American evangelicalism has been to constantly call it back to capital-T truth, like a tent peg fixed in the ground at the end of a very strained rope in a storm. John’s blog carried on with both of these in bitwise homegrown fashion.

When Marti joined the ministry, John’s personal message remained (and still does), but the banner of the ministry became Grace Turned Outward, focused on cultural engagement and action, and its direction changed from the meditational to the decidedly active. This arose out of the chemistry of John and Marti’s blended ministry, which has been ongoing throughout their marriage. In to Marti’s “so what,” the Catch Ministry has committed to becoming as it was incorporated 2012, a cyber-church, with a very large front porch, as it were, for discussion on the street.

As Marti has characterized it elsewhere, the Catch has grown in response to response.

Calls poured in, and continue to pour in, and John and Marti can be hard to get a hold of and cannot predict when the day will end (or if it will end). Members were identified to ignite a prayer and counseling triage ministry to respond directly to the large volume of requests that come in writing and by telephone, and an entire ministry is now in place and thriving.

The content expanded, which Marti incorporated into interviews with the broad range of people who are authentically speaking to issues inside and outside the church, whether they are evangelical adherents or not. In keeping with Marti’s commitment to discipleship, several forms of discipleship have been launched, and disciples are reproducing, not as prospective pastors of conservative Baptist congregations but as “boots on the ground,” Christians or people positively engaged with Christianity bent on impacting the world around them. An online church pressed itself into being, with online meetings of some hundreds. A founding group is meeting weekly to determine leadership for the burgeoning congregation, and Marti is discipling year-long small discipleship groups as always. Interns are being identified and developed for ministry involvement and a group of Millennials are leading efforts to deploy a YouTube television channel service that features the incendiary Jesus People musicians of the late 60s. Interactions and interviews will bring the prophetic message forward to the Millennial Generation and where they are now. The message is about Jesus and how his gospel relates to the deep, unresolved needs of the Millennial generation for love, meaning, community, peace and justice.

The ideology has skewed toward the progressive range of the global culture war. As a result, the gospel’s truth filters into a field, which is otherwise hostile to it, and to which the mainstream Church has declared itself hostile. Nothing is political beyond the immediate concern for God to be in the picture. Every picture. Everywhere — Worldwide. Now.

One conclusion is this: leadership for the Catch has always tended to conform itself to John’s legacy ministry,  that pastoral concern for capital-T truth. With the enhanced involvement of other capital T-truth pastors associated with the Catch, that concern remains, but it is talking to an increased audience representing several generations now because these audiences that showed up by the Lord’s providence. 

In examining the Catch Ministry for what it is today, its leadership must commend itself to its vision when incorporated in 2012 as a cyber church. Introducing the Gospel of Welcome — Grace Turned Outward — to everyone, everywhere. These are capital-T truth people. But included in that truth is the “deeper magic,” the principle that the gospel proceeds by utter grace to needy humanity, who need God far more than they need a moral cleanup. 

And, of course, the prophetic message of the watchman, and the perspective from the guardian of the new covenant, and the conscience of society continues unabated because it is who John is.

One might think of the Catch Ministry as the early Christians, who, bereft of real estate, met anywhere and everywhere, worshiping among their enemies, and speaking their languages. It is the actual endpoint of the moment John and Marti became husband and wife. It was never their intention to carve out a niche inside the Church; together, they purposed to join their gifts and energies and take the Church and its gospel to the streets. That is where they are now. John is the Minister; Marti is the Ministry.

It’s not a ministry for everyone. It is characteristically a little outrageous. Prospective leaders are asked to reasonably examine themselves if this is a ministry they want to take the lead. Those that do will be glad they did.

     2. Scope

John and Marti never had a choice as to whether to minister or not. In time two things became clear: first, that if they wanted a viable platform for ministry, they would have to create one; and second, that the Catch was naturally expanding into several channels of ministry (beside the daily devotional). This came into focus some 5-6 years later when Marti became CEO of the Catch Ministry.

The other way to create a suitable platform is to expand the Catch Ministry by releasing Marti’s inspirational and organizational capability on expanded infrastructure. As a community has formed and ministries have multiplied, and now as a uniquely-positioned online church is under formation, the Catch Ministry has done all it can without this overdue decision. And it has done it while struggling for support for mere survival that would have long ago generated financial viability.

The Catch Ministry is the platform that must be built to viably support John’s ministry, Marti’s ministry, and the ministry of a core of leaders, all multiplying each other’s harvest and straining at financial hardship and lack of infrastructure. The ministers of the Catch Ministry have passed the point of commitment to making the Catch Ministry this platform in truth as well as in concept.

The Board of Directors is composed of persons committed to igniting platform-scale capability of the Catch Ministry, trusting in the worthwhileness of the idea, the capabilities of its ministers and the faithfulness of its Lord.

     3. 2023 and Beyond

At this point, when others might well be wrapping up their working lives for good or ill, John and Marti are intent on a continuing expansion into the future. In the event of their death or disability, they are intent on placing trusted leaders at the helm of the Catch Ministry. No wrap-up, retirement or contraction is contemplated.

There is at least a sentiment that at some point even John and Marti will be forced to contract their lives, that is, to cease full-time ministry, to cease fundraising and ministry aspirations and undergo, however abruptly and unpreparedly, the process of retirement – to fixed income, fixed sphere of activity, to be repeated until death.

Not so the Fischers. They have no vision of ever stopping what they do. They have no vision of even slowing down.

As identified within the Crisis Communication Plan, end-of-life concerns, at this point for John, are due to be acted upon. Should John die or become disabled, plans call for Marti to continue undertaking ministry leadership assisted by a council composed of ministry leaders, pastors, and volunteers.

We as a community are made up of persons committed not only to John’s legacy ministry, not only to the progress and expansion of the Catch Ministry platform, but to the responsibility of the body of believers within the Catch Ministry community to provide for its pastor and CEO. 

And we have no doubt the Citizens of the Catch Community will provide for its pastor and CEO.