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The Fishers live in a comfortable, six-room flat in 140-room Lambeth Palace, the archbishop's official residence across the Thames from the Houses of Parlia ment. Here the archbishop works seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 11 or 11:30 p.m. He has the reputation of being a fine after-dinner speaker, good mixer and all-round good fellow. In New York in 1946, he loved to ride through the streets behind screeching sirens, and once he turned a street organ for charity. He is easily England's most-traveled archbishop ("The world is covered with places I'm going to retire to—New Zealand, America and every county of England"). He is devoted to crossword puzzles (the one in the London Times takes him just under half an hour).
Fisher is conscientious about his pastoral responsibilities in his own diocese of Canterbury, preaches a carefully prepared sermon at least once a week, does his duty by ordinations, confirmations, baptisms, weddings and funerals. But he always looks beyond his own parish and his own church. He is devoted to the ecumenical movement. He broke all coronation precedents by arranging for inclusion of the Presbyterian Moderator of the Church of Scotland in the service. Against considerable initial opposition he has furthered the cause of the seven-year-old Church of South India, in which the Anglican Church merged with Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian and Reformed churches.
In Evanston last week, Geoffrey Fisher was in his ecumenical element; no one knew so well how to untangle a snarled meeting with grace, good timing and a twinkle of the eye, how to quell a theological pillow fight with a headmasterly hand, or how to turn out a neat simplification for the benefit of third-formers.
When Fisher presided over a plenary session to elect new World Council presidents, Germany's Pastor Martin Niemoller tried to upset the carefully worked-out slate with the proposal that one of the presidents should be a layman. Presiding Officer Fisher moved into action: smiling tactful, and ever the perfect parliamentarian, he dealt with the proposal, in the mildest of tones dared dissenters to speak up (none did), and carried the original slate with a big majority. There were some nays, but the archbishop suavely managed not to see or hear them. To a reporter, he said with deliberate folksiness: "What matters for a Christian in this world is that you do your best for the kingdom of God. The thing that none of us must ever say is, 'We're not doing too badly.' If we ever say that, we're sunk. But if we say, 'Things may be frightful, but we'll do our best,' we're O.K." It was Fisher at his best: cheerful, politic, superbly skilled in handling people, a man with relatively few unshakable notions but thoroughly unshakable about those.
Evanston often required all of his talents. Rare was the conference room, corridor, hotel suite or street corner in Evanston that was not the scene of a red-hot discussion.