Related articles and links |  1 of 5

John Stott turned 75 this year. He passed this milestone with his integrity unscratched, his vigor seemingly undiminished, his mind as luminous as ever, and his ministry still touching the far corners of the world. Not all reach this milestone; very few reach it with such honor; and fewer yet view their accomplishments with the humility of a John Stott.

Stott has been called "the most influential clergyman in the Church of England during the twentieth century" (David Edwards), and he has been one of the most prominent evangelical leaders of our time, too. As an evangelical leader, he views the world as a pastor. He has been preeminently a steward of God's truth and a herald of the biblical message. The leadership he has given has flowed out of his pastoral and biblical perspectives.

Local pastor, global leader

Today, pastors average between two and three years in their churches; Stott has just passed his fiftieth year of ministry at All Souls Langham Place in London, the only church he has served.

Stott's ministry at All Souls was marked by his conscientious, systematic preaching of the Word of God. "Every authentic ministry begins … with the conviction that we have been called to handle God's Word as its guardians and heralds," he wrote in his commentary on Thessalonians. "Our task is to keep it, study it, expound it, apply it, and obey it." And so he has.

But preaching the truth of God's Word in the Anglican world has not been easy. In the years immediately following World War II, evangelicals were considered a sectarian "party" and were not well positioned to reform the Church of England. Evangelicals were within Anglicanism ecclesiastically, but they kept themselves apart from its inner workings because of their theological convictions. That separation, Stott believed, was the major obstacle to effective engagement with the church's theology and practice.

Stott sought to change evangelical separatism through sponsoring two National Evangelical Anglican Congresses (1967 and 1977). The first congress, whose theme was the church (its nature, mission, and message), successfully re-engaged evangelicals with the Anglican church, signaling their intent to be loyal members. Evangelicals went into the first congress thinking of themselves as evangelicals who happened to be Anglican, but by the second congress a decade later, they had become Anglicans who just happened to be evangelical.

This success has not been without its ambiguities. Whereas a growing number of evangelicals have been appointed to bishoprics, evangelical identity today is hazier than it used to be. Was this inevitable if evangelicals were to become loyal Anglicans? Could this have been avoided if evangelical substance and passion had not declined? These are not insignificant questions. Evangelicals in American mainline denominations ponder the same dilemma: What are the benefits and costs of staying in, and what price should be paid for which gain?

Stott has played a large role, too, in the remarkable international growth of evangelicalism since World War II. The high-water mark in this resurgence of biblical Christianity was the Lausanne Covenant, the outcome of the International Congress on World Evangelization in 1974. Attended by representatives from 150 nations, the congress was described by Time magazine as "possibly the most wide-ranging meeting of Christians ever held." Stott was the principal drafter of the covenant, which was both a theological declaration and a summons to evangelism and social responsibility. The importance of the Lausanne Covenant remains undiminished for its evangelical cohesion, vision, and conviction, and no small part of this remarkable moment belonged to Stott.

next page... |  1 of 5

September 16 1996, Vol. 40, No. 10