Barbara Hughes Fiscus recalls an unexpected escape from a burn and the growth of a grain of wheat, looking beyond striking stories to the faith beneath them.
Camp & Year: Indiana CFO 1971
Barbara Hughes Fiscus was a Methodist minister's daughter from Texas, a Sunday school teacher and a fourth-grade teacher whose life became increasingly centered on prayer. In a prayer circle in San Antonio, she said she saw Jesus and heard Him tell her, "Feed my lambs." She later joined Walter Fiscus in founding Partners in Prayer, a ministry calling Christians to pray for the unity and renewal of the whole church. Barbara spoke at the Washington CFO at Holden Village in 1969 and the Indiana CFO at Earlham College in 1971.
About Barbara Hughes Fiscus
Barbara Hughes Fiscus was a Methodist minister’s daughter from Texas, a Sunday school teacher and a fourth-grade teacher whose life became increasingly centered on prayer. In a prayer circle in San Antonio, she said she saw Jesus and heard Him tell her, “Feed my lambs.” She later joined Walter Fiscus in founding Partners in Prayer, a ministry calling Christians to pray for the unity and renewal of the whole church. Barbara spoke at the Washington CFO at Holden Village in 1969 and the Indiana CFO at Earlham College in 1971.
Barbara came from a family deeply rooted in the Methodist church. Her father spent sixty-three years in the ministry, and her brother served twenty years as a missionary in Japan. “My dad completed 63 years in the Methodist ministry. My brother put in 20 years in the mission field in Japan.”
Barbara taught Sunday school at First Methodist Church in San Antonio and also taught fourth grade. She was married to Frank Hughes, dean of fine arts at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and they had a son and a daughter. While living in San Antonio, Barbara became part of a prayer group led by Mary Light. They gathered in a semicircle around a fireplace.
One night, Barbara opened her eyes and saw the Lord Jesus standing on the other side of the fireplace. She watched Him go around the circle blessing each person. Then He came to Barbara, took her by the hand and led her through the front door. Together they looked out over the lights of San Antonio.
“Barbara, do you love me?” “Oh, Lord. You know, you alone know, even better than I, how much I love you.” “Then, Barbara, feed my lambs.” That question—and her answer to it—would run through much of what followed.
After the Hughes family moved to Fort Worth, Barbara was offered a scholarship to attend a CFO camp. She had never left her family for an entire week and hesitated to go. Her son settled the matter for her. “Mother, we all know how much you want to serve God. You didn’t ask for this opportunity. It came to you.”
The speakers that week were Ruth Robison and Walter Fiscus. Walter’s first message was built around a simple phrase: “God has a need.” Barbara had spent much of her Christian life thinking about her need for God. The idea that God might have need of her struck differently. It was, she said, “much more humbling, God needed me.”
On the final morning of camp, Barbara knelt in her room and saw herself standing beside Walter looking toward a mountain. “Barbara, if you two will stand together for me, you will do earth-shaking things.” She went home not knowing exactly what that meant.
Walter later came to Fort Worth for three months to speak to Barbara’s prayer fellowship and stayed in the Hughes home. One day in June 1960, while Barbara was ironing, Walter came across several yellow sheets of paper among his belongings and began reading them aloud. “The mission of Partners in Prayer had been born.”
The vision centered on John 17 and Jesus’ prayer that His followers would be one. Partners in Prayer was not intended to build another denomination or draw Christians out of their churches. It called them to pray for the church they already belonged to—and for the whole church of Jesus Christ.
Those who joined were asked to make a covenant: “I will pray definitely, devotedly, and daily for the whole church that she be filled with and controlled by the Holy Spirit, that she be one in Christ as he and the Father are one, that she complete her mission of winning the world to Christ.” The ministry also published a monthly magazine, Breakthrough, to keep that call to prayer before its members. The instruction Barbara believed she had heard beside the fireplace—”Feed my lambs”—had begun to take a definite shape.
In 1969 Barbara spoke at the Washington CFO at Holden Village in the Cascade Mountains. One of her stories came from the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at Texas Christian University. Barbara was listening to a young Russian pianist when, for about ten minutes, the national and political divisions between them seemed to disappear. “I was so completely one with that young man that I remember sitting there thinking he thinks he’s Russian and I am American but oh that’s so wrong we are just one.”
For a woman whose ministry was built around Jesus’ prayer “that they may all be one,” the experience carried an obvious meaning. She also spoke about the Holy Spirit in characteristically simple language: “God expressed His being in Jesus Christ. God expressed His love action in the Holy Spirit.”
Barbara came to the Indiana CFO at Earlham College in Richmond in the summer of 1971, while Apollo 15 was on the moon. She could hardly have asked for a better illustration. “I’m here looking, if you will, for spiritual astronauts, for research pioneers in the area of the spirit.” Barbara believed Christians should be willing to explore the reality of prayer rather than merely talk about it. She had read Agnes Sanford’s The Healing Light and began putting what she read into practice.
One evening she was preparing cornbread in her kitchen. The oven was at 450 degrees, and Barbara had forgotten that she had placed a cast-iron skillet inside earlier in the day. She reached into the oven and wrapped her bare hand around the handle. “I put my hand around the handle of that skillet to lift it out, and I cried, God, no!” She pulled her hand away. “And I testify to you, I drew my hand out as clean as it is now.”
Barbara also remembered a night from her years as a fourth-grade teacher. The father of one of her students was critically ill in a military hospital, and she stayed awake praying for him. Then, in the middle of a sentence, she heard: “Thank you, Barbara, you may go to bed now.” She stopped praying and went to bed. “And the man had a marvelous and a miraculous and a beautiful healing.”
At Earlham, Barbara returned to the question that had shaped her own calling. She taught from John 21, where the risen Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” and then tells him to care for His sheep. Barbara had heard essentially the same question years earlier in San Antonio. “Barbara, do you love me?”
For her, love was not primarily sentiment. “Love is a consuming fire, and fire burns.” From the prayer circle in San Antonio to Partners in Prayer, from a fourth-grade classroom to CFO camps across the country, Barbara kept coming back to the answer she believed Jesus had given her when she told Him that she loved Him: “Then, Barbara, feed my lambs.”
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.
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Barbara Hughes Fiscus recalls an unexpected escape from a burn and the growth of a grain of wheat, looking beyond striking stories to the faith beneath them.
Camp & Year: Indiana CFO 1971