J. John writes:

THE Christian speaker and writer Jennifer Rees Larcombe was the daughter of the evangelist Tom Rees, who, with his wife, turned Hildenborough Hall into a pioneering Christian residential centre.

Jen married Tom, a schoolteacher, with whom she had six children. Despite having dyslexia, she began a career as a writer, producing books for children. She increasingly wrote on practical spiritual issues, with clarity and honesty, and this led to her becoming an increasingly popular speaker.

In 1982, she suffered a serious attack of encephalitis, which led to her using a wheelchair. As the years passed, and she found no healing, she developed a ministry to the many who had sought but not received healing from God. After eight difficult years, she found herself healed through the prayer of a new Christian. But she took more setbacks, when Tom left her after 30 years of marriage, and, in her seventies, she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Jen’s influence and ministry spread wider than women and in Britain. I think that this came from four things: she was a woman with whom people could identify; she had utter integrity in speaking about how she felt and believed that God was dealing with her struggles; she was a woman of insight; and she was a woman of spiritual intimacy.

Jen expressed a quiet and compelling hope in Christ, and let Christ lead her out of her struggles. She created an organisation, a prayer ministry for those hurting, called Beauty from Ashes (Interview, 17 June 2016), which included residential healing retreats, quiet days, training in prayer ministry, and speaking at churches and conferences.

Jennifer Rees Larcombe died on 24 October, aged 80.