 Deep faith, commitment help describe Bob Fish By Craig M. Kibler The Layman Volume 35, Number 6 Posted December 6, 2002 For someone who has lived “all over, from Niagara Falls to Texas to Germany,” Robert B. Fish has deep roots in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
His real faith journey began with “a faith-centered family and a gifted Sunday school teacher when we lived in Maryland,” he said. “In junior and senior high school, I had a gifted church teacher and good programs in the church. So, I’ve always had the feeling that I believed.” Fish said he could see the strength of that faith “just through a whole series of events that have gone on through our lives, the experiences in my church, in Boy Scouts – where I earned the Eagle Scout and God and Country awards – and college. Since then, as I’ve had greater experience in the church, I continued to build my faith, build it every day – it’s a wonderful thing.” So wonderful, in fact, that he asks himself all the time “how can people without it make it through the day? It’s just a necessary part of our lives.” Living in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, New York, Texas and, after graduation from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, during his Army service from 1968-1971 in the then-West Germany, the church always has provided one anchor in Fish’s life. His family provides another. His wife Barbara, a former teacher, is a member of the West Virginia Board of Education and also a lifelong Presbyterian. They have two grown sons, Robert B. Fish III and T. Ward Fish. A third anchor in Fish’s life has been the Dupont Company, for which he has worked as a chemical engineer since 1967. He has worked on “a lot of different products and processes” for the company, and holds five U.S. patents for processes related to making fishing line and nylon. For the patents on fishing line, he quipped, “What else would Bob Fish work on?” He is an avid sailor and leads a group involved in sailing and boating education efforts. Other hobbies are hiking and travel. He’s also an amateur parliamentarian, hoping in the next six months to take the examination for registration in the National Association of Parliamentarians. But it’s the church that Fish talks about most. He has been elected an elder five times in three different churches and has taught adult Sunday school for 22 years. Active in his presbytery, Fish has served as chair of the Representation Committee and as a member of the Permanent Judicial Commission and the General Council. He was an elder commissioner to the 202nd General Assembly (1990). He presently serves as an elder and chairman of the Personnel Committee at Pioneer Presbyterian Church, just over the Ohio River from Parkersburg in Belpre, Ohio. A member of the congregation for about four years, Fish said that he and Barbara moved to the church because of “sexuality issues” in his previous church. “It was a painful decision” to move, he said. “We had been members of that church for 20 years. That was a difficult decision for us to make, but it was pretty obvious that the same issues the Presbyterian Lay Committee was concerned about nationally were occurring right there in our church. We don’t feel we left the church, but that the church left us.” The problem, Fish said, was that some of the ideas held by the pastor and by the session were not supporting Biblically-true views. “So, it was time to look elsewhere.” He sees an analogy to the national church. “Some of our national church leaders become so accommodating to the culture’s trends that they wish to fit the trends. That’s not going to produce the type of constancy and changed lives that will be effective in the Kingdom. “Think about how many people out in the churches, looking for a hopeful work, look to the general assembly – and don’t see it. Inevitably, some of them become unchurched. That’s a terrible thing,” he said. “It’s an opportunity that the church universal has had and failed to accomplish.” One way to reverse that statistic, Fish said, is to organize, which will complement effective preaching of the Word and studies of Scripture. People have a “yearning to better understand the basics of the faith and put them to use in changing their own lives.” “I believe what Scripture really tells us about is a changed life. Christ said we’re a new creation. People want that in their church.” |
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