‘2021 marks one hundred years since the birth of John Stott, an English Anglican who impacted evangelical Christianity in the 20th Century more than any other individual.’
Supported by several publishers, a new website has been launched by Langham Partnership – John Stott 100 Years – focusing on the literary legacy of John Stott.
2021 marks the centenary of John Stott’s birth. There’s a website here, looking at his life and impact, with links to some of his sermons, and an accompanying blog here.
As part of this, my friend Mark Meynell has just announced the launch of The Stott Legacy podcast, with the first two episodes already available.
Mark notes that during the next 12 months, he will be ‘chatting with individuals from around the world, from all kinds of backgrounds and cultures, about how their lives have been impacted by John Stott’.
The podcast is available via the usual channels, as well as via an associated website here.
This is the first full-ish review I’ve seen of Alister Chapman’s new book of John Stott – Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
Hansen notes that Chapman writes ‘with an appreciative but critical posture’, pursuing a narrower goal (compared to other biographers) ‘of portraying Stott as motivated by godly ambition to lead a global revival of basic Christianity’. According to Hansen, ‘we learn more from this critical evaluation of his unexpected triumphs and excruciating failures than from merely laudatory obituaries’. Chapman helps us remember Stott ‘as immensely gifted, dedicated, and ambitious for God's glory’.
Taking his cue from recent books on John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Collin Hansen reminds us that ‘when we venerate the saints of yesteryear as titans of faithfulness, without paying proper attention to their sins, we elevate them to a status only God possesses’.
‘Yes, we can – indeed, must – draw inspiration from their examples of steadfast faith when many others abandoned the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ. But we must also remember them for who they really were, imperfect men whose visions clashed, and learn from their mistakes.’
Alister Chapman’s book on John Stott has just come out – Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
There is a 20-minute video (here) of Chapman being interviewed by Peter Sanlon at Oak Hill Theological College.
At one point, Chapman says:
‘One of the things I really admire about Stott is that he had a vision when he went to All Souls in 1950 to reach the entire parish. By the end of the 50s, he realised they were having a very negligible impact on the working classes of the parish. What I find so impressive is the way that Stott at that point didn’t just shrug his shoulders and say, “Oh well, it doesn’t really matter, the church is packed on a Sunday morning and we’ve got hundreds of highly educated people coming.” He saw this as a big problem, and he worked hard to try to find ways to reach out to these people who hadn’t been to university, who were in his parish, who he wanted to see converted.’
Mark Meynell, he of Quaerentia, has started a page gathering links to online and published resources by and related to John Stott, which is well worth checking out.
[I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’ from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, written to coincide with the London memorial service of thanksgiving for the life of John Stott.]
This day, Friday 13 January 2012, sees the London Memorial and Thanksgiving Service for the life of John Stott, held at St Paul’s Cathedral.
John will be remembered for many things, highlighted in the range of tributes already offered. Just one of those, key to LICC’s Connecting with Culture reflections, is his call to ‘double listening’ – listening to the word and listening to the world.
Already in the first edition of Issues Facing Christians Today, published in 1984, John wrote of his conviction to begin with ‘God’s Word written’, along with ‘a second commitment... to the world in which God has placed us’. And that double commitment was played out across a range of global, social, and personal issues. But it was in his 1992 book, The Contemporary Christian, that he laid out the concept of ‘double listening’ as ‘indispensable to Christian discipleship and Christian mission’.
And so he wrote of listening ‘carefully (although of course with differing degrees of respect) both to the ancient Word and to the modern world, in order to relate the one to the other with a combination of fidelity and sensitivity’. For John, this was a way of carefully treading the line between irrelevance to the world on the one hand and accommodation to the world on the other hand.
As such, it lay at the heart of his vision of preaching Scripture, training leaders, and making disciples. Our submission to God’s word and our location in God’s world mean that paying attention to both is essential for authentic Christianity.
But we don’t do so as a cheap evangelistic ploy. John insisted on the need to empathise with the way the world is experienced by our fellow human beings. Listening involves understanding the world’s needs, acknowledging its fears, hearing its questions, and loving its people. Love, of course, goes with genuine listening – living out our love for God and our love for our neighbours in the realities of the world in which God has placed us. The challenge, then (to borrow terms from Andy Crouch’s Culture Making), is to listen not only as an occasional ‘gesture’ but as a characteristic ‘posture’.
John expounded the topic of double listening in his books, but he exemplified it in a life of ministry and mentoring, and encouraged others through exposition of the word and exhortation to be salt and light in the world, for God’s own glory.
Links
LICC’s John Stott tribute site.
John Stott, The Contemporary Christian: An Urgent Plea for Double Listening (Leicester: IVP, 1992).
The US memorial service for John Stott took place last week in Wheaton, where Tim Keller spoke from Hebrews 13:7, ‘Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith’. Keller gave five ways to imitate Stott’s life and faith, as summarised here by Eric McKiddie.
1. Be convicted by his kingdom vision.
2. Be taught by his cultural learning curve.
3. Be chastened by his leadership controversies.
4. Be instructed by his great innovations.
5. Be empowered by the knowledge of his present glory.
Alister Chapman, who has a forthcoming book on John Stott due out next year, has a short piece at The Huffington Post on Stott’s impact on American evangelicalism.
Christianity Today posts a piece by John Stott – adapted from a sermon on Matthew 5:13-16 – on four ways Christians can influence the world:
• through power in prayer
• through the power of truth
• through the power of example
• through the power of group solidarity
After a few weeks away from internet access, I’m catching up on a few items from the world of Blogdom, including the following from Q Ideas:
Pseudo Salvation: When Science Can’t Save Us
Our advances in science and technology have overcome many of the challenges that our forebears were unable to meet. Our lives are paved with unthinkable convenience, and we expect our engineers to continue providing solutions for the world’s problems. Matthew T. Dickerson, however, says that we must be careful where we place our hopes of redemption.
The Legacy of John Stott: On Listening to the Word and the World at the Very Same Time
The late Reverend Dr. John Stott will be remembered as one of the most influential religious leaders of the 20th century. From evangelical think tanks to third world activists to the world’s leading newspapers, there have been many who celebrated his intellectual prowess, his tender kindness, and his insistence that faith must be both theologically orthodox and socially engaged for the common good. Steven Garber reflects on a few of his personal memories and the legacy this great man has left.
Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
Community in the Time of Culture Wars
Disagreements continue to fracture the Church’s relationships. How do we balance diverse opinions without breaking with biblical orthodoxy and without causing disunity? Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma suggests that we humbly “pursue the love that is the beginning and end of all things” and live out our allegiance to Christ as the head of the Church.
Is our faith more than going to church, feeling God’s love, and telling others about the forgiveness offered by Jesus? Here are two books that emphatically say, “Yes.” Byron Borger reviews The Hole in Our Gospel and Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
If we can demonstrate healthy sexuality as a Church, what unlimited redemption is possible for our starving, sex-crazed culture? Tim Keller outlines a compelling and orthodox sexual ethic, and the proper role of singleness and marriage within the Church.
Borders bookstore is closing all of its doors – does that mean that we are closing all of our books? Josh Reinders reexamines the industry’s numbers and finds that the e-book apocalypse may be false prophesying the print world's doomsday.
The news of John Stott’s ‘promotion to glory’ (as one dear friend of his phrases it) is already all over Facebook and Twitter, and I wanted to add my own notice – and thanks to God – here. We can expect lots of reflections and tributes over the next few weeks and months, including from the place where I seek to be gainfully employed, London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, founded by Uncle John in 1982.
Christianity Today have already posted a piece by Tim Stafford.
Alister Chapman, Associate Professor of History at Wesmont, has a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press on John Stott. His faculty page indicates it is due some time in 2011, but I can find no sign of it so far on the OUP site.
Meanwhile, there is a short piece by him here on what he calls ‘the educated evangelicalism of John Stott’. Stott was popular in the United States, according to Chapman, because he was a ‘highly educated’ evangelical. While there was and still is a ‘populist strain’, Stott’s primary appeal was to ‘university-educated evangelicals who wanted something more intellectually robust than the fare on offer at their evangelical churches, people who wanted a faith that could stand tall in the modern, educated world’.
Those closest to the situation on the ground in the UK will be in a better position than I am to judge Chapman’s view that ‘things were not always so rosy back home’, and that (in spite of Stott’s attempts to engage with the working classes in the vicinity of his parish), ‘All Souls was primarily a church for the educated, who listened to Stott’s learned preaching, classical music and the Queen’s English with gladness’.
Chapman goes on to explore Stott’s university ministry (because ‘he believed it had great strategic importance for the spread of the gospel in society) and the establishment of his global reputation around the world.
Towards the close of his piece, Chapman draws inspiration from Stott for his own institution, that it might be ‘an educational institution that is also deeply evangelical’. Even though he admits he doesn’t know exactly what this would look like, ‘Stott’, he says, ‘should be a real help to us, for he was thoroughly evangelical, thoroughly educated, and unapologetic about both of these things’.
In addition to containing The Cape Town Commitment, the latest International Bulletin of Missionary Research (available here, via a free subscription) carries three articles on the Lausanne Movement:
Robert A. Hunt
The History of the Lausanne Movement, 1974–2010
C. René Padilla
The Future of the Lausanne Movement
Robert J. Schreiter
From the Lausanne Covenant to the Cape Town Commitment: A Theological Assessment
The below summaries are taken from Jonathan J. Bonk’s editorial...
‘The Manila Manifesto was the work of a task force chaired by John R.W. Stott, who, more than any other individual, was charged with ensuring that strategy-preoccupied American evangelicals were grounded in biblical and not mere folk theology – a continuing concern voiced by René Padilla in his article in this issue.’
‘Robert Hunt’s lead article skillfully traces the history of the Lausanne movement from its early beginnings, highlighting the social and theological milieus within which its principal animators – one an American, globe-trotting evangelist and the other a British evangelical Anglican respected for the no-nonsense exegesis of his biblical teaching and commentaries – lived and moved. Much could be said about the key role played by the century’s most widely recognized evangelist, Billy Graham. Without the vision, integrity, and charisma of this remarkably ecumenical yet resoundingly evangelical man, there would be no Lausanne movement. But no less significant was his modest confrere and friend John Stott, who tended to the movement’s theological and biblical foundations. Infusing the movement with a global, nonsectarian evangelical orientation, he ensured that it was more than simply a rubber stamp of American evangelicalism.’
‘For his article, Roman Catholic theologian Robert Schreiter enthusiastically accepted our challenge to tell readers whether – based on a comparative study of the Lausanne Covenant (1974), the Manila Manifesto (1989), and the Cape Town Commitment (2010) – there was evidence of theological movement in the Lausanne movement; and if so, what kind of movement it was. I think you will agree with the editors that his assessment as a sympathetic, well-informed outsider will serve as a basic template for constructive evaluation of the Lausanne movement for years to come.’
