Remembering Bob Marsh

A longtime champion of Theological Horizons, Rev. Dr. C. Robert Marsh believed passionately in the ministry’s “unique contribution to the moral and intellectual debates of our time.”

We celebrate his life and legacy with much gratitude.

The Rev. Dr. Charles Robert Marsh, a Southern Baptist minister who served as senior pastor at Atlanta’s Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church from 1978 to 1993, died on December 23 while in hospice care at Lenbrook in Atlanta, Georgia. Marsh, a passionate teacher of the Bible, and a local religious leader in the desegregation of public schools in the South, was 92-years old.

Marsh began his pastoral career with a chronic stutter and fear of public speaking, but through fierce self-discipline became an eloquent and beloved preacher in an older, gentler evangelical culture. That self-discipline included long jogs through the streets of the southern towns he served with the typed manuscript of the sermon in his hand. Mile after mile, in his mismatched jersey and sweatpants, he read the text aloud until he had memorized each line and was ready to take the pulpit on Sunday mornings, where he would deliver the forty-five-minute message by heart with only his red leather King James Bible in hand.

“You and I are able to gather here in this beautiful sanctuary today only because the early church reckoned with the revolutionary ramifications of God’s amazing grace and tore down the barriers of prejudice,” Marsh said in one influential sermon on the theological necessity of ending an Alabama church’s whites-only, closed-door policy.

That sermon was the culmination of a month-long study series on the Bible and racial reconciliation, focusing on Paul’s theme of Christ the reconciler, that Marsh had convened after some white congregants objected when a Black family asked to join the 3,500-member First Baptist Church of Dothan, Alabama. The weekly studies, attended regularly by 150-200 church members, concluded with the sermon, “Amazing Grace for Every Race,” and, in turn, with the congregation’s acceptance of a Black family from Queens, New York, and a standing ovation.

“As Gentiles,” Marsh told the congregation, “You and I would never have become a member of the New Testament church, unless God, through the Holy Spirit, sent Philip to a Black man, sent Ananias to a Middle Eastern man, sent Peter to the man from Western Europe; and sent amazing grace to every race.”

The sermon marks one of many small acts of individual conscience that brought southern segregation in its extralegal forms to an end.

Charles Robert Marsh was born on July 17, 1932, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the first child of Howard and Elisabeth Marsh. When his father completed his optometry apprenticeship in the Crescent City, the family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where Howard established a successful practice with locations downtown on Capitol Street and another on North State Street. His mother was a high-spirited woman who loved bridge and crime novels and held various positions in the Optimist Club of Jackson.

Marsh was raised in a nominally religious family that occasionally attended the Capital Street Methodist Church, but that preferred to spend Sundays fishing at the reservoir.

As a senior at Central High School, Marsh made a public profession of his faith in Jesus Christ in one of Billy Graham’s services in his 1952 crusade at the Jackson Fairgrounds. Following his born-again experience, Marsh became active in Youth for Christ ministries. On the encouragement of the group leader, matriculated as a freshman at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, the flagship school of southern fundamentalism, where it was joked, “a girl could be expelled for streaking with a hole in the knee of her bathing suit.” After receiving enough demerits to be permanently “campused” for a month – mostly for missing curfew or flunking room inspection – Marsh transferred to Baylor University where he double-majored in Bible and history.

In 1954, Marsh met the love of his life, Myra Brooks Toler, a native Jacksonian and former Miss Central High School. Bob and Myra were married in June 1955 at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, by which time Bob had been ordained as a Souther Baptist minister.

His first pastorate was at the First Baptist Church of Florence, Mississippi, just south of Jackson, which enabled Myra to continue her studies in theology and English literature at Belhaven College. On the Sunday after their honeymoon to Fort Walton Beach, Florida, the newly minted Reverend Marsh baptized his newlywed in full immersion, according to the requirements of Baptist polity.

While serving full-time as the pastor of the Spring Hill Avenue Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama, 1958 -1963, and the First Baptist Church of Andalusia, Alabama, 1963-1967, Marsh continued his graduate studies in practical theology and completed his doctoral dissertation at New Orleans Baptist Seminary on “Paul’s Concept of the Person and Its Implications for Christian Education” – traveling by train on the old L&N every Tuesday from Evergreen to New Orleans and back again to Alabama late Thursday night. He graduated with a Doctorate in Education in the spring 1967.

The same year, Marsh returned to Mississippi, accepting the call of pastor of the First Baptist Church of Laurel, which occupied a multi-acre lot between a vibrant downtown and a neighborhood of stately homes. Home to the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, Laurel was also a town caught in the whirlwind of the civil rights movement.

With support of several white parishioners, including Charles Pickering, who would later be named by President George H. W. Bush as a federal judge to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Marsh supported the integration of public schools, refusing to join a small group of white families that formed a private “Christian” academy. Marsh’s views on Christian responsibility in society were inspired by numerous experiences: observing one of his seminary professors in New Orleans in a segregated streetcar condemn the absurdity of the whole ordeal; and visiting L’Abri, Edith and Francis Schaeffer’s Christian commune in Huemoz, Switzerland. Marsh would say that his greatest inspiration was the example of Billy Graham, who, during his 1952 Jackson Crusade, had removed the red segregation rope that separated black and white worshippers and said: “It touches my heart when I see whites stand shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the foot of the cross.”

These years and experiences would form the narrative arc of his pastoral vision: to show how the power of the Gospel should burn through the barriers of nationality, region, and race, and how people become “ambassadors of reconciliation.”

On July 23, 1978, the search committee of Atlanta’s Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church, chaired by Lee Burge, then the CEO of Equifax, presented their recommendation to the congregation to call Robert Marsh as the fourth pastor of the esteemed congregation on Peachtree Road. A week later, the committee introduced their new minister as Dr. C. Robert Marsh, a name he had never before used, though church members from earlier days continued to call him “Brother Bob.”

Marsh’s tenure in the influential pulpit assured him of keynote addresses at denominational events and membership on high-level boards and denominational agencies, as well as an honorary doctorate from Mercer University. In May 1980, he and author Madeleine L’Engle shared the stage at commencement ceremonies at Gordon College, in Wenham, Massachusetts. But nothing fulfilled Marsh more deeply than preaching and teaching to his congregation and going about the ordinary tasks of parish life.

Marsh’s fifteen years at “Second Ponce” were marked by success and growth amid the challenges of pastoring a prosperous southern church in a developing global city. Under Marsh’s leadership, “Second Ponce” become the denomination’s most reliable supporter of missionary activity at home and abroad, consistently leading the Georgia Baptist Convention in gifts to the Cooperative Program. “Missions was Marsh’s ‘first love,’ and an increased emphasis on missions was a natural extension of the historic focus of the identity of the church,” the historian Douglas Weaver wrote in his congregational history of the Atlanta church. Such largesse was possible because the church, during the Marsh years, reached historic levels of general budget giving – hitting the two-million-dollar mark in 1982 and three million in 1987, with an additional two million dollars raised for the proposed six and a half million-dollar Family Life Center, which was completed in 1990.

Marsh maintained a low political profile during the cataclysmic years of the Southern Baptist culture wars.

He sought to illumine a third way beyond doctrinaire fundamentalism and “moderate” denominational alternatives. The third way was not always clearly delineated, and some of his non-fundamentalist colleagues wished that he would use his influence to defend the moderate camp. At the same time, he rejected the rigid doctrine of biblical inerrancy and affirmed instead the more generous doctrine of Biblical infallibility. He supported Second Ponce’s successful move to ordain women deacons, with nine women elected in 1992. He poured resources into the church’s languishing “inner city” ministries and helped reboot the church’s Vietnamese Ministry, hiring a full time pastor for the Vietnamese-speaking congregation, sponsoring ESL and job-coaching programs, and creating networks of hospitality and support for the influx of refugees arriving in Atlanta through the U.S. Political Prisoners Relocation Program. He provided office space in Second Ponce’s educational wing for Baptist scholars who had been pushed out of their teaching posts by the new fundamentalist leaders. He remained loyal to the historic Baptist separation between church and state; he did not speak publicly on abortion, school prayer, or sexual orientation. His criticisms of the U. S. preemptive invasion of Iraq were based not on liberal political views but on his sense of loyalty to the missionaries and Christian communities in the Middle East. Indeed, in Marsh’s view, loyalty to the global Body of Christ remained the only antidote against Christian nationalism.

Four decades of ministry in a changing South took their toll. “Pastoral burn-out,” sheer exhaustion, and its attendant emotional upheavals led Marsh to resign from SPDL, to the surprise of many, in March 1993. Without the consolations of the pulpit, Marsh struggled to imagine a future beyond Second Ponce.

Eventually, Marsh’s resignation would lead to the most fulfilling chapter in his seven-decade ministry.

Beginning in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1994, Bob and Myra became true co-pastors, bringing their distinctive gifts of empathy and encouragement to Christian congregations in Copenhagen, Rome, Berlin, and Stavanger, Norway, where they served in different capacities as interim ministers. They spoke at the annual European Baptist convention in Interlaken, Switzerland, in dozens of smaller gatherings in western and eastern Europe – including Macedonia and Ukraine – and visited with believers beyond Europe in Dubai, India, Liberia, South Africa, Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Argentina. They developed friendships with Wycliffe Translators, Pioneer Missions, World Vision, and the European Baptist Convention. In the final ten years of his overseas ministry, Marsh entered into a generative partnership with Barnabas International that enabled financial support and oversight and opened new doors of Christian fellowship.

Letters and emails to friends and supporters back in the States conveyed the joys and discoveries of international Christian fellowship:

“Yesterday, I spent the entire afternoon at the Vienna Christian Center, speaking to a large group of women from across the city, mostly African immigrants. There was much praise, music, joy, and laughter (3 hours to be exact), as I taught from Psalm 73. Everyday has been filled with building bridges of friendship, being with people, and striving to share the love of Christ with precious people in this strategic city,” wrote Marsh sometime in the mid-90’s.

Marsh’s final chapter in ministry returned him to his first love of teaching the Bible in a local church in the South. Until shortly after his 90th birthday, he served as one of four teachers in an adult Sunday School Class of 100 – 150 members and wrote short theological essays in his “Bob’s Blog” for the Anchor website: https://anchorss.org/bobs-blog/.

Marsh is survived by his wife of 69 years, Myra Brooks, née Toler; brother Richard Scott Marsh of Florence, Mississippi; son Charles Robert Marsh, Jr., and daughter-in-law Karen Wright Marsh of Charlottesville, Virginia; and three grandchildren, Henry Brooks Marsh of Brooklyn, New York; William Toler Marsh of New Orleans, Louisiana; and Nan Elisabeth Marsh of Richmond, Virginia.

His son Charles, who holds the Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 1999 memoir about his father as a Baptist preacher at the dawn of a new South:

“My father’s way was never to break the bonds of friendship. He remained loyal to his church, to those he was called to serve, whether he liked the person or not. He built trust with people over meat-and-twos, football games, ice cream socials, and youth camps – in the ordinariness of the New Humanity.”

A celebration of Marsh’s life will be held at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on Monday, January 13, at 2:00. In lieu of flowers, the family kindly requests that gifts be made to the C. Robert Marsh Pavilion Fund of Theological Horizons, at http://www.theologicalhorizons.org/giving. Donations may also be given through the University of Virginia, designated to Theological Horizons and made in Dr. Marsh’s memory using this same link.

Charles Marsh
January 6, 2025
Feast of the Epiphany