MARSHALL KEEBLE: A PREACHER OF THE GOSPEL

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A Sermon Outline

Presented to

Instructor: Keith Mosher

Memphis School of Preaching

Memphis, Tennessee

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As a Requirement in

Restoration readings

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By

David Jiménez

September 23, 2020

 MARSHALL KEEBLE: A PREACHER OF THE GOSPEL

INTRODUCTION
1. “I have given up all, that I might preach the gospel to my people”.
a. These words were said by Marshall Keeble in 1917, and no better description
could be made of his life.
b. He gave up all his life in order to proclaim his Lord and bring many black and
white men and women to the feet of Jesus Christ.
c. He could say, as Jeremiah, “His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up
in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay” (Jer. 20:9).
2. It is estimated that from 30 to 50,000 people were baptized through the preaching of
Marshall Keeble.
a. His life is an example for all of us who aspire to be preachers of the gospel.
b. His work and legacy continues until this day in every place where the word of
God is preached.
c. Let us take a look at the life and work of Marshall Keeble and the lessons that we
can learn from this man of God.

DISCUSSION
I. EARLY LIFE
A. Childhood, school and baptism.
1. Marshall Keeble was born December 7, 1878 in Rutherford County,
Tennessee, in a small community about two and a half miles from
Murfreesboro.
2. His parents Robert and Mittie Keeble were both born into slavery. The
surname Keeble formerly belonged one of the most important aristocratic
families of the Antebellum south.
a. It is reported that the grandfather of Marshall Keeble was the valet
of “Major” Keeble during the civil war.
3. When Marshall was 4 years old his family moved to Nashville, TN. They
lived on High Street North, now Sixth Avenue North.
4. His father made a living for his family working as a street cleaner driving
a dump cart. Marshall remembered his father with great affection:
 a. From him he learned the importance of responsibility and hard
work.
b. “When the snow lay deep and he was a small boy, his father would
carry him on his back to church and school”.
5. Keeble never went beyond seventh grade and never received any formal
education for his preaching. Once he said “I studied the Bible and the people
and how to relate the Bible to the people. That’s all”.
a. Even with his lack of education he was able to address college
audiences in Freed Hardeman, Abilene Christian College and other
places.
b. Scholars and students would be delighted in hearing an
uneducated man preaching the pure gospel of Christ.
6. He was baptized by Preston Taylor, in the Gay Street Christian church at
fourteen years of age.
B. Marriage and jobs.
1. Before dedicating his life to preaching he worked in different secular jobs
to help support his family.
2. He worked first in a bucket factory and then in a soap factory.
3. He married Minnie Womack, the daughter of the great preacher S. W.
Womack in 1896. A graduate of Fisk University. She was a great blessing in
the ministry of Marshall Keeble. They had 5 children two of which died in
infancy.
4. Marshall and Minnie opened a small grocery store in Nashville before
Marshall would start his life of preaching.

II. MINISTRY
A. Along with “Aleck” Campbell, S. W. Womack and G. P. Bowser, Keeble left the
Christian church and joined the Jackson Street church of Christ.
1. From the start of the work he started to preach, and soon enough in 1914
he decided to dedicate his life to be a full time preacher.
2. Womack and Campbell were his great teachers in how to preach, and
despite being unable to receive formal education, he dedicated his time to
study the works of Lipscomb, Hardeman, H. Leo Boles and was a constant
reader of the Gospel Advocate.
 3. He soon was preaching all over the south. He did not need a place; he
would go around the African American communities preaching the gospel to
anyone who would listen. Many converts that came to Jackson Street were
made in these preaching trips of Campbell and Keeble.
4. The first meeting held by Keeble was near Centerville, Tennessee, where
25 people were baptized into Christ. This was an encouraging experience for
this young preacher of the gospel.
5. From this point on, he did not stop preaching the gospel even for a day!
He felt a tremendous need to preach the gospel to his people. Just in 1916 he
reported to the Gospel Advocate these numbers: 365 sermons, 118 baptisms,
47 restored, visited 65 sick people, visited 36 places and traveled 7,000
miles.
6. In 1918 he planted the first congregation of African Americans in
Henderson, Tennessee, during a 3 week meeting where 84 people were
baptized, despite the opposition of black Baptists who accused Keeble of
“tearing up their churches”.
B. His ministry into the 20’s and 30’s.
1. During these decades Keeble was dedicated to be nothing but a preacher,
he would travel all around the country setting “on fire” houses, tents and any
other place where he would preach the gospel.
2. He preached with passion, boldness and without fear. One of the best
representation of this is in a meeting in Summit, Georgia, in 1926 when
people of the Ku-Klux-Klan appeared during the meeting. He faced them
without any fear and calmly answered this man. The encounter ended
peacefully.
3. Some of his most famous meetings were in Tampa, Florida in 1927,
where 99 people were baptized, in St. Petersburg, Florida where 92 baptisms
took place and the two Valdosta, Georgia meetings in 1930 and 1931, in
which 163 and 166 people were baptized.
4. The sermons of the las meeting at Valdosta were transcribed and
published in 1931 by the Gospel Advocate and distributed among the
African American churches of Christ.
5. Shortly after the World War I Keeble set up a tent meeting in Whitehaven,
TN just outside Memphis. His message on the nature of the church of Christ
made some people “awfully angry”. About 27 miles east in Collierville,
people chased Keeble out of the town. They informed white officials that
Keeble wanted to make a race war, but the officials disregarded the
accusation. He ten received threats of physical harm.
 6. The popularity of Keeble as an evangelist was so big that when holding a
meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1934, that ran for 30 days and
congregated 1,500 people, there was a train from Nashville to the meeting
advertised as “the Keeble train”.
7. In 1939 during a meeting in Ridgely, Tennessee, a man that came forward
during the invitation of Keeble, struck him in the face with brass knuckles.
8. In 1932 tragedy struck Keeble’s life, Minnie, his wife, passed away.
Keeble married again in 1934 to Laura Catherine Johnson.
C. Nashville Christian Institute.
1. One of the goals in the mind of Keeble and other African American
preachers as G. P. Bowser, was the creation of a Bible school for African
Americans.
2. Plans were made since early in the 1920’s with the Jackson Street School
then moved to Silver Point, but none of them came to live long enough.
3. In 1939 plans for the Nashville Christian Institute were starting to
materialize with the economic help of the city of Nashville and in 1940 the
school opened its doors. Later in 1942 it was accredited by the Tennessee
board of education.
4. The plan for the academic program was to teach, above all things, the
Bible. Other courses on English, public speaking and math were also
offered.
5. Keeble was serving in the Board of directors although his attention was
not fully on the school because he was away in meetings all the time.
However, in 1942 he was made the first President of the Institute despite not
having any academic degree.
6. Thanks to the economic contributions of A. M. Burton the school could
have a better building than the deteriorated one with which they started.
7. The Nashville Christian Institute started its lectureships in 1944.
8. Keeble during the 40s and 50s would take preaching students of the
school with him to the gospel meetings in order to train them in the field.
9. From this institute hundreds of African Americans were trained and many
of them became preachers. It is calculated that 2750 people were converted
by preachers coming from this school.
10. It was a school that in all its short existence, was struggling to survive,
but the results that it gave made many people realize the importance of
supporting it financially.
 11. Because of the increasingly adverse circumstances, the NCI closed its
doors on June 2, 1967.
D. Mission trips around the world and passing.
1. In the last years of his life Keeble had the opportunity to travel around the
world to preach the gospel.
2. In 1962 Lucien Palmer and he made a trip over Europe, the “Holy Lands”
and ended in Nigeria where Keeble preached and converted in the night
before his return 55 people.
3. At the end of the meeting he was made honorary chief of their tribe.
4. A second journey was made to Nigeria where Keeble spent his time
training and talking to the Nigerian preachers. After Nigeria they went to
Ethiopia, India and then Korea. Keeble preached and converted people in all
these places.
5. After this incredible life of service to the Lord Marshall Keeble passed
away on April 20, 1968 at 90 years old. The funeral services were conducted
on April 25 in the Madison church of Christ.
6. The time to receive his reward came for this hard fighting soldier, who
gave his entire life to preach the gospel to his people.
III. LESSONS TO LEARN
A. Keeble loved the Bible.
1. He never took for granted its power and put in it all his trust. One of his
most famous saying was “The Bible is right. You go home and fuss all
night. The Bible is right. You can walk the streets and call Keeble a fool, the
Bible is right. You can go home and have spasms, the Bible is right”.
2. He had such a high view of Scripture that he would say that nothing that
is not written had any value, just as nothing that is done for God out of what
Scripture says has any value.
3. “I never intend to go to my Master representing something that is not in
the written Word of God. I want to go there with a name I can found on the
pages of the book of inspiration”.
4. Keeble would never settle for something less than what is written in the
word of God, and he would never go one bit outside of what is written in the
word of God. Even if this would mean to face opposition and persecution he
would defend until the end the even the smallest piece of truth.
5. As Edward J. Robinson wrote: “Armed with the torch of the pure gospel
… Keeble roamed southern communities, theologically setting ablaze the
 house of black Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals and others, leading them
into the fold of churches of Christ”.
B. Keeble loved the church.
1. If he would not settle for anything less than the Word of God, he would
not settle for anything less than the only true church of God.
2. He would contend until the end for the nature of the one church, pure in
teaching, worship and practice.
3. He never compromised any aspect of what the church of Christ has to be
in order to be right with God.
4. He often would say “If I knew my church was not in the Bible I would get
out of there immediately”.
5. Against the argument for the use of instrumental music in the church that
states that there will be music in heaven he would respond: “I suggest that
you had better wait until you get there and then use it”. And he added
concerning Revelation 19:11 that a horse is also mentioned there “but you
don’t ride him in the church”.
C. Keeble loved his fellow men.
1. The only motivation for preaching the gospel was love and care for his
African American brethren.
2. He preached the good news to his people in the midst of a society that
oppressed them, segregated them and condemned them to a life of poverty
and need.
3. He together with G. P. Bowser, Aleck Campbell and S. W. Womack were
the carriers of the only message that could break the racial and
socioeconomic wall of partition in the United States.
4. The gospel is the only way for reconciliation to be possible. Marshall
Keeble was a man who made possible a racial reconciliation in this country,
someone beloved by African Americans and Caucasians and, by the end of
his life, by people all around the world.
D. Keeble relied on God.
1. He did all of this, he was able to baptize over 50,000 people because was
not in himself or any other man, but in God.
2. He trusted that God would make a way for him to continue preach the
gospel and bring many unto Christ.
 3. In sermon recorded on tape and available online, he states that when God
raised Lazarus from the dead he had call him by name “because if he would
not had call him by his name the whole cemetery would have got up and
walked”. He knew that he was serving a powerful God and a powerful Lord.
4. On another occasion he said “I have had to rely upon God, he is the only
one I had. The white man did not like me because of the color of my skin.
The black man did not like me because of my religion. Now… who else did
I have?”.
5. He knew that despite all the adverse circumstances of his life, he could
always rely on a God that was always there by his side.
CONCLUSION
1. We have seen the life and work of one of the greatest gospel preachers ever to walk on
this earth:
a. His early life in which he got near the Lord.
b. His ministry in which he worked for the Lord.
c. His lessons that years after his passing keep on encouraging us to be more like
Christ.
2. As Eric Owen stated: “The world is better and heaven is more populated because
Marshall Keeble lived, may such be said of us all one day”.