Elizabeth Catherwood, the globally loved Vice-President of IFES 2003–2011, went to Heaven on 26 January 2026, not long after celebrating her 98th birthday the previous October. The notice of her death was transmitted by IFES worldwide.
Starting with her lifelong devotion to IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) may be an unusual opening, but it is deliberate. She was of course the daughter of Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the maternal great-granddaughter of Evan Phillips and the beloved wife of Fred Catherwood. But she was a remarkable figure very much in her own right. What comforts those who knew her truly well is that now in the presence of the Lord whom she served so faithfully for decades it was not her earthly descent or marriage that made her so prominent, but her use of the many and great gifts that God gave her – and now she knows it eternally!
She was born in Wales on 26 October 1927, and although she only lived in Wales the first 11 years of her life, she always identified very fully with her Welsh heritage, still able to sing her favourite hymns in Welsh to the end of her life. Aberavon in the Great Depression was a place of much poverty and unemployment and that sense of growing up with deprivation never left her. She was strongly a Lloyd-Jones, in resemblance, in her considerable intellect, her profound pastoral insight, her amazing ability to speak without notes for an hour while captivating her audience, her utter enthusiasm and gift of encouragement, and in her lifelong devotion to IFES, a movement which she would tell students was in her family DNA.
