Jeremy Marshall, who died recently aged 60, was a rare specimen: a committed evangelical Christian with a high public profile in both the secular and Christian media.
Many encountered him through the myriad Christian organisations with which he was involved, or within the higher echelons of the banking industry, both in the UK and overseas. But I came to know Jeremy through his parish ministry, after he and his wife Jeanette joined the leadership team at St Nicholas, Sevenoaks, the church plant our family had started to attend.
We all loved attending the annual church barbeque they held in their spacious garden, where we also got to know their children, Naomi, Nat and Sam. That was nearly 20 years ago, long before his first sarcoma was diagnosed in 2012.
Jeremy led Bible studies and preached frequently at St Nicholas. His sermons were always faithful to Scripture and engaging, but what I remember most was his almost uncanny ability to apply the passage to situations so often highly relevant to us and others in the church.
His approach to leading Bible studies was the same. Many other people at St Nicholas and the other places he taught at, including St Helen’s Bishopsgate, would echo such sentiments. And he was never afraid to speak directly and honestly about his cancer, as he did at St Helen’s in 2017, for example, when he took as his title ‘Hope in the face of terminal cancer’. Those talks eventually led to two books – Beyond the Big C: Hope in the Face of Death (2019) and his devotional work, Hope in the Face of Suffering (2021), both of which sold in great numbers.
Jeremy wrote those books because he had an immense heart for evangelism, being one of the most effective Christian speakers I have ever heard. He was always happy to seize opportunities to speak about the Lord Jesus wherever and whenever he could. So last year, by which time his prognosis had worsened significantly, he was still quite happy to come to West Sussex, to where we had moved a few years previously, to speak at one of our new church’s evangelistic men’s breakfasts. He adamantly refused to put us out by staying with us the night before, so drove the hundred or so mile round trip in a single day, all by himself. When he arrived – with just minutes to spare, incidentally – he was as ever amusing and compelling. One could have heard the proverbial pin drop as he told his story, pointing to Jesus at every step. Everyone there not only took copies of his books away with them, but were at pains to tell me later what an impact the talk had had upon them.
Jeremy was a City man and City men tend to be great networkers. And I have never met a better Christian networker than Jeremy. Working in the somewhat obscure field of Christian PR, I was a regular beneficiary of his skills, for he often introduced me to organisations – hitherto quite unknown to me – which needed help with their public relations. And many, many other people, across a wide range of disciplines and activities, benefitted from Jeremy’s kindness and consideration in similar ways. But there was another side to Jeremy. He also had a deep sense of fair play and could be tigerish in defence of a victim of injustice, as I discovered when we once worked together to put right one such wrong at a church.
Jeremy was also a devoted family man. The cancer eventually killed him, over a decade after the original diagnosis, but not before he had had the huge pleasure of seeing all three children grow into adulthood and Naomi and Sam happily married. He is hugely missed, but he is in eternal glory now. Thank you so much, Lord, for my friend Jeremy Marshall.
