Senior Staff
About Tom & Marsha
Tom grew up in a rowdy Irish-Catholic family (6 boys!) in Chicago. He came to Christ through the ministry of Campus Crusade (now Cru) just one month before his graduation from Northern Illinois University. Marsha is from Texas, a proud alum of UT-Austin, where she also came to Christ through Cru. They met when they both joined Cru staff after graduation and were assigned to the same Cru Staff team at Duke/UNC Chapel Hill. That year serving together as team-mates convinced them that they should form a longer-term team by getting married, and so they did!
After one more year together on Cru staff, the Lord led them to studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, followed by a 4-year Associate Pastor position in northern New Jersey. The Lord had placed in their hearts an openness to and a pull toward serving in the more needy fields outside of the States. Through a year-long process of prayer, pondering and research, the Walshes ended up moving over to France in 1979 with their three young daughters, ages 5, 3 and 1, to begin a challenging, joyful and fruitful 11-year ministry of evangelism, church-planting and leadership development.
Returning to the States for family reasons, Tom & Marsha settled into the Philadelphia area to serve at their Mission’s headquarters and in one of their supporting churches. With nudging from the Lord and others, Tom accepted the call to a pastoral position at their church in 1995. He served there as a Teaching Pastor, Interim Lead Pastor and Missions Pastor for 23 years until his “retirement” in July 2018. He immediately joined up with Global Training Network to: 1) keep him off the streets and out of trouble, and; 2) allow him to pass on to the next generation of the Lord’s servants what he has picked up along the way during his 50-some years of ministry. His and Marsha’s particular (but not exclusive) focus is the extremely spiritually needy French-speaking parts of the world, in which there are around 230 million people spread throughout some 30 countries.
Their family has grown significantly with the addition of 9 grandchildren!