Vanguard (the Song)
by John Fischer

The lyrics below are to a song I wrote for an award ceremony produced by my wife, Marti, honoring women in business, but it’s really a song about Marti. Her presence, personality, and gifts are in every line.

Vanguard
by John Fischer

She’s a rebel
She’s a lady
She’s a ticket to a Broadway show
There’s no doubt that she’s a winner
No beginner, you have got to know that

Chorus:

She is walking into all situations
She is working hard
She’s a leader in a new generation
Vanguard

She’s a servant of the people
She’s a sentry of the human soul
She’s a heart of compassion
She can see the highest goal

(Chorus)

Keeping all her fears down under
Against the flow
The price she pays is high no wonder
Only a few will know

There’s a purpose in her posture
There’s a wisdom in her widening eyes
She makes a pathway with her footsteps
And with her hand she takes the prize

(Chorus)

A Vanguard. Vision Builder. Wake-Maker.

Those acquainted with the Fischer household’s happenings know that Marti and I   are a ministry, and that my growth and contributions since our marriage stem from a deeply engaged shared life. We challenge each other constantly, and that iron-on-iron has produced decades of grace, grit, and Gospel.

Marti was born into East Coast wealth. She was disinherited when she found her life in Christ and married a penny-pinching, somewhat radical, long-haired musician and preacher. She is a woman arrested by her encounter with Christ. She is fixated on personally fulfilling the Great Commission and having everyone, everywhere, meet Jesus.

And she means everyone.

Culturally, she is a sharp contrast to my Southern California evangelical roots and a foil to my easy West Coast ways. Missing in her makeup are the mainstream evangelical cultural cues. Nevertheless, a starched social duty and personal propriety startle and then (if you give it a moment) disarm. 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. The cultured surface dutifully conceals a life marked by painful sacrifice, tender humility, brutal honesty, and a furnace of undying, insistent, and selfless zeal.

Conversations with Marti are rarely casual. More like collisions—with insight, conviction, and the uncomfortable question that always gets to the heart of the matter: How can God’s love be realized here?

That question drives her life. And the answers have taken shape in remarkable ways.

Marti didn’t wait for a title or an invitation to lead. She just started asking, “Why not?” Why not form a global network of Christian airline professionals with a Fellowship of Christian Airline Personnel chapter in every domicile worldwide? (She did.) She is known for saying, “If you cannot touch poverty, you will never grasp the need to give.” Out of a side conversation with a World Vision executive, why not launch 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 did,) Why not create a program for at-risk youth in L.A., sparked by a halftime conversation with Terry Bradshaw at a Super Bowl halftime show she produced starring Michael Jackson? (Touchdown for Youth is a mentoring program now replicated in cities nationwide.) Why not deliver college education to foster youth? A national outreach to single moms? And through it all, she never branded herself. No Marti Fischer Ministries. No glossy headshots. Just results. Relational. Strategic. Kingdom-minded. Quietly seismic.

A second career that Marti has pursued for forty years is in executive-level diplomatic leadership that has generated dollars to support successful nonprofit and for-profit initiatives, often by fostering surprising partnerships between the most unlikely bedfellows of power and wealth.

In 2015, Marti agreed to become the President and CEO of Catch Ministries—reluctantly and only after being convinced by the ministry’s founder, Peter Herschend, a man worthy of great respect. She brought a wealth of nonprofit strategy, a fierce devotion to the ministry’s purpose and vision, and executive-level plans designed to stabilize and expand the ministry’s financial core and reach.

While Catch Ministries now meets all of the Internal Revenue Service’s recognized attributes of a church, it is unlike a local community church that seeks to bring people into its building. As a leader in a new generation, Marti builds cross-sector partnerships and encourages the Ministry’s community to be the voice of Christ to the twenty-first century generations by going out and introducing the Gospel of Welcome—Grace Turned Outward—to everyone, everywhere.

Of Marti’s three full-throttle careers, the one closest to her core is motherhood, both in her home and at the center of this ministry. She answers calls no one else hears. She prays with people no one else sees. She pastors the outliers, the doubters, the spiritually displaced — those who still aren’t sure if grace truly includes them. And she means it when she says: it does. Catch Ministries is a lifeline for thousands, and Marti’s hands are on the rope, pulling people in one by one. Think of this when rocking in the wake of this craft beside you in the dock.

Catch Ministries has never been a project for Marti; it’s a movement. It continues because Marti is a Vanguard, and I am its Prophet. She is the Builder, and I am its Watchman. While I am the Ministry’s Voice, she is the Wake-Maker.

It works because we walk it together.