CHRIST
IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
I
admire Neal Fisher for a number of reasons. Most important for “faith in the
winter years” is how seamlessly he moved from a large stage to a small one
without losing his focus or his identity.
Neal
is a theologian by profession and spent most of his career as a leader in
theological education, especially as President of Garrett-Evangelical
Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U. He presided over G-ETS during
turbulent years and held together a faculty and student body that ran the
theological alphabet from Anselm to Zwingli, from aggressive liberals to
absolutist conservatives. I’m not sure anyone else could have done that with
the success and sense of joy and wholeness that Neal brought to it. All this
time he also cared for his wife, Ila, whose suffering from Parkinson’s disease
for 24 years steadily progressed from manageable to impossible. Toward the end
of his G-ETS presidency, cancer hit Neal himself, but it barely slowed him.
As
president of G-ETS, Neal was a “player”—nationally known, nationally
recognized, nationally sought. Neal retired, and he and Ila moved to Vermont,
to be near their daughter, Bryn, who was a floor-mate of our daughter, Katie,
at Indiana University.
Neal
got the usual invitations in the first couple of years of retirement—teach a
little here, preach a little there. Like most of us in the first years of
retirement, he thought he should try to answer those calls. After all, it is an
honor that those still in the harness ask us to help pull the load. And also,
we’re not sure who we are if we’re not helping with that load. That’s what
we’ve always done.
That’s
especially true if you’ve been on a big stage, especially difficult to move to
a small stage. Neal did that, though, as seamlessly as anyone I know, keeping
the same focus he used as president of
G-ETS, but now “just” in the congregation of which he is a member, keeping the same focus he used on faculty and
students at G-ETS, but shining that light on Ila and other members of his
family who struggled with illness.
When
we are young, we have heroes who inspire us to do great things. When we are
old, if we are fortunate, we have models who show us how to move from doing
great things to doing small things with the same grace.
JRMcF
During
the time Neal was president at G-ETS, the seminary decided to endow a
scholarship in our name, The John Robert and Helen Karr McFarland Scholarship.
It is awarded each year to a student from the Illinois Great Rivers Conference
of the UMC, the conference in which I spent most of my career. Neal came to
Arcola, where I was pastoring at the time, to preach at the service announcing
the scholarship. Fittingly, the first recipient was Jennie Edwards Bertrand,
from that Arcola congregation, who went on to become the Director of The Wesley
Foundation at ILSU, where I spent the early and best years of my career.
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