No Fear - Mary Fisher

1623–98

In 1651, Quaker founder George Fox spoke with a family in Selby, England, and persuaded them to join his cause. Yet the most influential convert that day was the maid who was listening in, twenty-seven-year-old Mary Fisher. In the following years, she would fearlessly spread the message of Christ on three continents.

The Quakers were shaking things up in England, challenging nominal Christians to get serious about their faith. As they saw it, churches were caught up in wealth and power, preachers were delivering academic lectures rather than an authentic word from God, and the poor were often ignored. As Fox shared his countercultural views, he collected teams of ministers—men and women alike—who would go out preaching wherever God led them.

Shortly after her conversion, Mary was led to the local Anglican church, where she addressed the congregation after a worship service, rebuking the vicar. This got her thrown into jail. In fact, most of the Quaker ministers in those early years (who became known as the Valiant Sixty) spent time behind bars. Later, Fisher challenged students at a seminary and was flogged for it. In transatlantic travels, she and her colleagues got a good reception in Barbados but were terribly mistreated in Boston.

And then she decided to go and see the sultan. The Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey, was a major world power. The sultan, whose brutality was legendary, had thousands of soldiers at his command. Yet Mary Fisher felt that God wanted her to talk to him.

Travel was difficult. The English consul in Turkey was no help, tricking Mary and her companions into boarding a boat headed the wrong way. But finally Mary, by herself, got to the place where the sultan was encamped with his troops. Telling his adviser that she was an emissary of “the Most High God,” she was received with high honors, and she gave her gospel message. “There is a love begot in me towards them which is endless,” she commented later.

Lots of us are afraid to talk to our next-door neighbors about the Lord. What if we offend them? What if they ask questions we can’t answer? Well, if God’s love can lead an uneducated maid to stand before the sultan, what can it do for us?

Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?

Esther 4:14, NIV