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The most conspicuous public trend in Stott's ministry overall has probably been his increasing concern for and involvement with the Third World. In moving from the Sixties to the Seventies, his biographer documents the changing contours of the ministry, as the university missioner mutated into the global traveler from "Australia to the Arctic." Such a ministry could only develop if things changed at All Souls', and this happened when Michael Baughen was installed as vicar there, just before Christmas in 1970. It signaled the birth of a new era, but not of a new man, save in the sense of one daily renewed. For we are still with the Stott of youth, who gave himself completely to Christ, the Stott of Cambridge days, whose self-discipline was legendary, the Stott of the Sixties, evangelist, pastor and teacher, his parish now increasing and self decreasing in the service of his Lord.
The middle years of life have been called "the exhausted years," at least for that defiantly unstottonian breed which has lapsed into marriage and the family business.5 Readers who accompany him on his travels at this time of life will wonder why they were not such years for John Stott too; they will find it exhausting to keep up with him, while the man himself goes on relentlessly. (The pace does not slacken very much even when variously plumed and speckled birds fly in and out of these pages duly noted, photographed, and reported in writing by their pursuer.)
The best-known fruit of this period is the work with the Lausanne Congress and movement, a time and a context which saw Stott's leadership in international evangelicalism evidently consolidated.6 Behind the hopeful scenes there could be painful differences, not just on theological questions about the relation between evangelism and social action, but also on questions of leadership and strategy, involving a degree of tension with Billy Graham at one stage. However, any awkwardness seems to have been short-lived and quickly dealt with, leaving the relationship between the two men warm and strong as ever.
Theological differences arising between Stott and some other evangelicals over "Lausanne" issues were in time compounded by the suspicion, even the charge, that he had broken with authentic evangelicalism in questioning the belief that hell consists in unending penal torment for the wicked.7 Indeed, this controversy belongs to the late Eighties and Nineties, and not to the Seventies. But even if we do not collapse into a single constituency all evangelicals who have theologically disagreed with Stott, the profile of Stott as an "erstwhile evangelical" was taking some sort of shape in the Lausanne years of his establishment as an international leader.
In relation to the question of hell, a particularly sad tale unfolds, more painful for his subject than his biographer tells. Theological disagreements are there to be overcome, if we can manage it, but the church can grow through them where there is mutual respect, acceptance, love, and appropriate trust. Growth is stymied and fellowship marred when people conscientiously committed to Scripture and completely surrendered to Christ as Lord are regarded as bordering on the traitorous when they break rank (or threaten to) on the duration of future punishment. But I must underline that it is only a proportion of those who have dissented from Stott on this question that has consigned him to the ranks of the unfaithful.
During the decade when this began to brew, the decade of the Eighties, as the unstinting traveling continued, the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity was launched under John Stott's directorship. Alongside concern for Christian leadership in the Third World and for the poor, his conviction had grown that we must "penetrate culture for Christ," and the establishment of the institute was designed to enable folk to think Christianly about all the business and all the spheres of life.
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