Meet Mark Sheard, our new chair – part 1

We’re delighted to introduce our new chair, Mark Sheard, who joined us on 1 January. Mark has had a stellar career in both the commercial and charity sectors as well as a long connection with BRF Ministries. He brings a wealth of wisdom and experience to his new role, and an affection for BRF that goes back to a faithful Godfather who introduced him to our daily Bible reading notes as a teenager. A licensed lay minister, he has been deeply involved in church life at every level, including in local parishes in London and Suffolk, as a lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral and as a member of the Archbishops’ Council.

12 January 2025

A career of two parts

Having studied medieval history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Mark spent the first 20 years of his career in advertising, marketing and communications. Just before his 30th birthday, with the backing of investors, he founded an advertising agency.

‘It was a very interesting time, the beginning of the 90s,’ he says. ‘Data was just starting to become really important, and we carved out a niche for ourselves as a data-driven agency.’ They had a high-profile client list, including NatWest, Renault, Coca Cola and Procter & Gamble, along with a number of not-for-profit clients such as Médecins sans Frontiers, the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, and Shelter. It was important for Mark to have that mix, but despite the fact that he loved the work and had ‘tremendous fun’ doing it, it was only for a season.

‘I knew the agency was a phase in life. I didn’t expect to be building a business, doing it till I was 70 and then passing it on to my children. That was never part of the plan. To spiritualise it, I honestly thought God had something else for me, but I didn’t know what it was.’

Ten years after he started the agency, Mark sold it to ‘some nice, kind Americans’. He worked out his contract with them and then took a six months sabbatical saying, ‘God, what next?’

A broken heart

Mark was brought up in a Christian home in a village in Essex. Church was middle of the road and not very exciting for a teenager, but when a Crusader class opened up his parents let him go there on a Sunday morning rather than to church. ‘It was led by a couple of very committed guys, who just emphasised the importance of personal choice and said you don’t become a Christian by going to church. It’s Jesus’ question: who do you say that I am? I heard that week in, week out, and it kind of got into my brain, I suppose.’

Crunch time came when his girlfriend dumped him and he was heart-broken. Alone and grieving, his entrepreneurial spirit flickered even then: ‘I tried to make a deal with God and say, “Look, God, I know you want me to give you my life. So, you know, if you give me ‘P’ back, I’ll give you my life.” And God said, “Okay, your move.” So I prayed my prayer of commitment and gave my life to God, and then he welched on the deal completely. I never got P!’

But that’s because, as Mark can now say, ‘I know and believe with all my heart, he had much better plans for me and that’s been my experience in the last 50 years or so.’

St John’s, Ealing

The discipling he received through Crusaders served Mark well at university, but it didn’t stop him spreading his wings and ‘enjoying’ student life to the full. He moved straight to London after graduation for his first job in advertising, but he only started to put down roots when he and his younger brother bought a house together in Ealing, halfway between their workplaces.

‘He was working in Slough and I was working in the West End, and we started going to a church that still is part of my life, St John’s, Ealing. It was my family church for many years, where our four children grew up, and it was a great church to be part of as a young person; very vibrant, full of young people like me, and I’m so grateful for that.’

Mark has had many different roles in St John’s since those early days, including leading Alpha groups. In 2015 the vicar asked him to lead the main Sunday morning congregation, one of five different congregations at St John’s, including a church plant, Messy Church and Café Church. Along with the invitation to lead the Sunday morning congregation, the vicar suggested that it would be good for Mark to have some formal training. ‘His proposition was that I should become a non-stipendiary minister, but I didn’t feel any call to get ordained so I said I’d be very happy to do licensed ministry training, which I did at St Mellitus.’

He thoroughly enjoyed the course and in particular the introduction to different Christian traditions it gave him. ‘I hate labels,’ he says, ‘but I suppose my tradition would be evangelical, and training with people from different traditions, understanding how they encountered God and the way that God worked with them, made me more appreciative of other traditions and broadened my understanding of God.’

Mark and his wife Lois have lived in a village in Suffolk since 2021, but they retain their links with St John’s. ‘We’ve got a foot in both camps,’ he says. ‘God has not actually told us to leave St John’s yet and the current vicar still welcomes our ministry there and encourages us to play a role. Sometimes it’s slightly difficult to work out where our priorities should be and I hope we’re still open-eared enough to hear if God is telling us to move on, but we haven’t heard that yet.’

A college scarf

After Mark sold his agency and was taking time out to reflect on the next step, a number of people and organisations approached him, including a former vicar of St John’s who’d heard he might have some time on his hands.

Might he get involved as a trustee with a very small NGO working with farming communities in up-country Uganda? He was very unsure but said he would go to one of their trustee meetings. ‘I went to a meeting in Birmingham, and I had complete imposter syndrome. They were all people who’d worked in Africa or done amazing things and at the end I said, “This has been fascinating. I’m in complete awe of you and I don’t know what I can add to what you’re doing. I’m just a guy who ran a business.” And they said, “Well, that’s exactly what we want! We want that objectivity and commercialism.”’

Mark still hesitated, saying he’d go away and think about it. ‘But then,’ he recalls, ‘there was another little God moment.’ Retrieving his coat from the coat stand there was a scarf hanging beside it. ‘Oh, whose scarf is this?’ he asked. It belonged to the founder of the charity, John Maitland, who asked Mark if he recognised it. ‘Yes, it’s Emmanuel College, my college!’ John then revealed that they’d been praying that God would send them someone from Emmanuel and that was it. ‘I thought I really can’t get out of this now, so I said yes, okay.’

Arriving late in Uganda

It was clearly the right decision. Mark joined the board and went out to Uganda, where the charity was in the process of transferring the responsibility for running it to Ugandans, so it wasn’t just run for Ugandans, it was run by Ugandans. His role was to train the board in how to be a good board.

‘The flight was delayed 12 hours at Heathrow so instead of arriving mid-morning, with plenty of time to acclimatise, it was 11 o’clock at night, and I thought there’d be nobody to meet me. But there was! He said, “Mr Mark?” I said, “Yes!” He said, “Let me carry your bag.” And I thought, no, I can’t let that happen, so I said, “No, it’s alright, Geoffrey.”

‘And he looked at me with what I can only describe as a bit of pity in his eye, and said, “Mark, will you not accept my gift?” I felt so humbled by that and it set the tone for my whole first trip to Uganda, as I realised I had far more to learn than to teach, and that’s how I got bitten by the international development bug.’

World Vision UK

The Ugandan charity was the springboard to 20 years’ involvement in international development. In 2006 Mark was approached to join the board of World Vision UK. They were looking for a committed Christian who understood marketing, communications and advertising, had some fundraising experience and had a heart for international development. ‘I thought that’s quite a tight spec. There aren’t going to be many people who can tick all those boxes!’ So he joined the board of World Vision in 2007 and in 2010 was asked to become chair, a role he held until 2016.

‘I loved it! I had a chance to go to all sorts of places, from Myanmar to Bolivia, and many other places. It was a fantastic blessing. I learnt so much through it, but my time was over, or so I thought.’

Or so he thought! For a variety of reasons, at the end of 2019, just as we was completing his licensed lay minister training, Mark was asked to become interim CEO of World Vision UK for three months.

But then, of course, the world imploded and he was asked to stay on ‘a little bit longer’ to see the organisation through not only Covid lockdown but shaping a five-year strategic plan. The experience taught him some important lessons about faith and risk.

‘Lockdown was certainly uncharted waters for all organisations. There was huge concern and apprehension about the future: people were hugely worried about income and jobs, about everything, and we prayed about it as an organisation. People were putting rainbows in their windows for the NHS, but also, of course, it was a reminder of the story of Noah’s ark. I started to go back into the story and the phrase that kept on coming out to me, to the board and the executive team, was that before the promise God tells Noah to go and multiply. He says it three times: commanding Noah to be ambitious, to have ambition for the future. We were struck by the counterintuitive element of this instruction to “go for growth” in the devastation of the post-flood world.

‘So we took a slightly different approach to other charities, and we started to invest and expand through that period. And I believe God vindicated that: we saw our income grow 50% over two years. That’s a very practical example of risk-taking under God. We did something that was counterintuitive because we believed that’s what God was calling us to do. And I think we heard him right.’

More time to reflect

When he finally stepped down from World Vision at the end of 2023, Mark found himself back in a similar position to the one he’d been in 20 years earlier after he’d sold his company. So, once again, he took a little sabbatical ‘just to wait on God and see what he had for me next’.

To find out what God had in mind, read part 2 of Mark’s story next week on Sunday, 19 January.