Phil Fischer, best known for hard-hitting Janis Joplin style concert performances that swept through the Northwest in the early 2000’s and as his life as a colorful and reclusive dot com developer, has decided to hang up his laptop and microphone to win souls for Christ.
In July of 2014, Fischer plans to launch Seattle Revival, a ministry he hopes to reach people that Fischer describes as “lost.”
Loved in gaming circles as the lead singer of rock band The X Box Boys and in Silicon forest for launching the world’s first web-design firm, building Alta Vista, and dreaming up a dozen best selling apps, Fischer has always lived a mysterious and reclusive life. While running the headquarters of the company he founded, he makes his home in both Bellevue, Washington and a small rustic cabin in the Arctic Circle three hundred miles from the nearest road.
Fischer has long found himself serving the two passions of his life: dreaming up cutting-edge technology ideas and writing vivid rock music. But nothing in his imagination could predict the change he experienced in October of 2001, when on a second date his future wife, Jamael, she convinced him to attend a small revival service on Mercer Island.
Led by Pastor Varun Laohaprasit of New Hope International Church, that Saturday night date turned Fischer’s life upside-down.
“I felt something I couldn’t put my finger on. I couldn’t describe it. It was gentle and warm, and I wanted more,” Fischer says.
While most ministers and missionaries are out on the road reaching thousands of people in evangelistic gardens such as Uganda or India, Phil envisioned a different approach: Let’s start right here in Seattle.
For the last two years Fischer has been methodically preparing to make the break from his music and dot-com career to a full-time ministry. In July of 2014 he’ll launch what he describes as a “revival church” for people who don’t know Jesus and it will be located at his church in Bellevue but he is reaching out all over Puget Sound.
Fischer has been in ministry 30 hours per week for the last 10 years, running a small Bible study in his home on Wednesday evenings and serving on both the worship team and Usher team at New Hope International Church in Bellevue.
For almost seven years Fischer beat the traffic and drove downtown at 5PM to run an outreach for the homeless at Christ our Hope Catholic Church, located on the corner of Second and Pine in Downtown Seattle where he ministered to the homeless. 
The concept of a “revival church” goes beyond simple button-holing of likely prospects on the street, asking them if they’ve accepted Christ. His ministry will have the irresistible magnetism of a traveling gospel show, delivered to lost souls on street corners during outreaches but will meet every Thursday night at 7:30 PM In Bellevue, Washington.
Fischer’s friends will tell you that he is at home with the downtrodden of society and enjoys pulling stunts like taking 5 homeless people to Metropolitan Grill for Chateaubriand and even though Fischer thrives among the Bellevue elite, he has never felt like he was one of them spending much of his time in the wilderness of the arctic circle where if you want to eat dinner you have to kill it.
Even though the CIA was issuing travel warnings for Americans in the wake of sectarian uprisings, in 2008 Fischer went to Pakistan and after a Muslim mob stormed a Protestant church during a prayer service in Karachi, Fischer performed concerts in the streets, singing about Jesus Christ—an act of blasphemy—trailed by hundreds of locals. Fischer’s fans in India created a music video of the event, using images from the one tape Pakistani Police did not seize from him.
The punishment for blasphemy ranges from long-term imprisonment to the death penalty. Even though human rights groups, including the United Nations, have urged more protection for minority religious populations, Christians still make up less than five percent of 180-million Pakistanis.
Back home in Seattle, Fischer decided to begin his full-time ministry among a similarly undeserved population, all over downtown Seattle. His plan is to offer inclusion to people who have never set foot in a Christian church.
“I love to tell people that Jesus loves them,” Fischer says. “The lost and forgotten are on every street corner of the world. They’re not sitting in church on Sunday mornings. They are in plain site in bars, alleys, and lonely places, and they need Jesus right now.”
Fischer’s website is www.seattlerevival.com.
So if you see a singing evangelist standing in a crowd of Seattle’s homeless people in the frigid air of January, it’ll be Fischer, sharing some of that “gentle and warm” feeling he had on that night in 2001, hoping to change lives the way his has been changed.
