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In time there was a similar recovery of evangelical strength in numbers and influence on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as in America evangelicals united in a host of new organizational initiatives in youth work, mission, education, and evangelism, so also in Britain there were similar ventures. Douglas Johnson and Martyn Lloyd-Jones helped to strengthen the fledgling Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now UCCF). In 1939 IVF established a Biblical Research Committee that led to the founding of Tyndale House in Cambridge in 1944 as a major resource to support postgraduate research in theology. The IVF publishing program (later IVP) launched authors such as J. I. Packer, Michael Griffiths, Michael Green, and John Wenham, and produced the massive New Bible Dictionary and New Bible Commentary. The expository preaching of John Stott at All Souls and Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel began to build up large congregations.
Barclay fills in the story of this recovery from his own recollections, and he seeks to cover developments in the whole of Britain among all denominations. Barclay is a scientist and former General Secretary of the UCCF, and Inter-Varsity Fellowship figures largely in his account. He makes clear that the situation for evangelicals in Scotland and Wales was not always the same as in England.
With the first volume of Dudley-Smith's biography of Stott, we look out at these same developments from London and the Church of England. But Stott was indeed at the center of the evangelical recovery. In 1952 Stott began his wider ministry as a university missioner, leading evangelistic missions first at Cambridge, then at London, Oxford, and Durham. In 1956-57 he led missions at nine universities in North America, including McGill, Harvard, and Yale. By the end of the 1950s, he had also traveled to Australia and South Africa to lead university missions. Stott's evangelistic lectures at these universities were the basis for his Basic Christianity, published in 1958 (more than two million copies sold; reprinted more than a hundred times and translated into over 50 languages).
In 1952 Stott also began to teach other ministers his program for parish evangelism. He had instituted a pattern at All Souls that proved remarkably effective. He established a lay training school and generated an army of "commissioned workers" for evangelism. These lay people would then be employed as counselors at monthly guest services (with a "continuation service" afterward for those who responded to the invitation). Converts were then followed up in other meetings ("At Homes" and "Nursery Classes"). Stott prepared a slide show, with a taped narrative, "Mobilizing the Church for Evangelism," to disseminate this strategy for parochial evangelism more widely. As he traveled to do university missions, he also met with clergy and theological students to train them in evangelistic strategy.
What is striking in all of this is what Dudley-Smith calls Stott's "teutonic thoroughness" and what seemed to some "an obsessively careful management of his time and diary." Stott has always been a gracious, personable man, but there was an almost military quality of personal discipline and organizational leadership in these leaders who grew up during the war years. Dudley-Smith's biography makes plain that Stott was not only gifted in evangelism, expository preaching, and theological writing: he has also been a genius at strategy and organization. With his secretary Frances Whitehead, he ran a small conglomerate of evangelical institutions and spinoffs out of the Rectory at No. 12, Weymouth Street. Like Billy Graham at the helm of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Stott could as well have run a successful multinational corporation.
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