Biography
The Rev. Dr. John R. W. Stott
John Stott was born in London in 1921 to Sir Arnold and Lady Stott. He was educated at Rugby School, where he became head boy, and Trinity College Cambridge. At Trinity he earned a double first in French and theology, and was elected a senior scholar.
John Stott trained for the pastorate at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. He was awarded a Lambeth doctorate in divinity in 1983 and has honorary doctorates from schools in America, Britain and Canada.
Conversion
Although John Stott was confirmed into the Anglican Church in 1936 and took part in formal religious duties at school, he remained spiritually restless.
As a typical adolescent, I was aware of two things about myself, though doubtless I could not have articulated them in these terms then. First, if there was a God, I was estranged from him. I tried to find him, but he seemed to be enveloped in a fog I could not penetrate. Secondly, I was defeated. I knew the kind of person I was, and also the kind of person I longed to be. Between the ideal and the reality there was a great gulf fixed. I had high ideals but a weak will. . . . [W]hat brought me to Christ was this sense of defeat and of estrangement, and the astonishing news that the historic Christ offered to meet the very needs of which I was conscious. (1)
On 13 February 1938, Eric Nash (widely known as ‘Bash’) came to give a talk to the Christian Union at Rugby School.
His text was Pilate’s question: “What then shall I do with Jesus, who is called the Christ?” That I needed to do anything with Jesus was an entirely novel idea to me, for I had imagined that somehow he had done whatever needed to be done, and that my part was only to acquiesce. This Mr Nash, however, was quietly but powerfully insisting that everybody had to do something about Jesus, and that nobody could remain neutral. Either we copy Pilate and weakly reject him, or we accept him personally and follow him.
After talking privately with Nash and taking the rest of the day to think further,
that night at my bedside I made the experiment of faith, and “opened the door” to Christ. I saw no flash of lightning …in fact I had no emotional experience at all. I just crept into bed and went to sleep. For weeks afterwards, even months, I was unsure what had happened to me. But gradually I grew, as the diary I was writing at the time makes clear, into a clearer understanding and a firmer assurance of the salvation and lordship of Jesus Christ. (2)
Local Influence
John Stott has attended his local church, All Souls, Langham Place in London’s West End (www.allsouls.org), since he was a small boy. Indeed one of his earliest life memories is of sitting in the gallery and dropping paper pellets onto the fashionable hats of the ladies below! Many years later, and following his ordination in 1945, John Stott became assistant curate at All Souls and then, unusually, went straight on to become rector in 1950. He became rector emeritus in 1975, a position which he continues to hold, and he still preaches there several times each quarter.
In the words of his biographer, Timothy Dudley-Smith “John Stott has provided a model for international city-centre contemporary ministry now so widely accepted that few now realize its original innovative nature.” Central in this model were five criteria: the priority of prayer, expository preaching, regular evangelism, careful follow-up of enquirers and converts, and the systematic training of helpers and leaders.
Soon after his appointment as rector, Dr. Stott began to encourage church members to attend a weekly training course in evangelism. A monthly “guest service” was established, combining regular parochial evangelism with Anglican evening prayer, and follow-up discipleship courses for new Christians were started in people’s homes. All Souls offered midweek lunchtime services, a central weekly prayer meeting and monthly services of prayer for the sick. “Children’s church” and family services were established, a chaplain to a group of Oxford Street stores was appointed, and the All Souls Clubhouse was founded as a Christian community centre. John Stott took parish visiting seriously; he once even disguised himself as homeless and slept on the streets in order to find out what it was like.
All Souls Church grew numerically during the 1950s and 1960s. John Stott continually pleaded with people not to dismiss other, closer evangelical churches just to be a part of the congregation at All Souls. Like one of his mentors, Charles Simeon of Cambridge, Dr. Stott turned down opportunities for advancement in the church hierarchy and remained at the same church throughout his ministry. His role as a wise, prayerful and caring pastor with an incredible ability to remember names and circumstances has been for many people his most significant contribution.
National Influence
When John Stott began his ordained ministry, evangelicals had little influence in the Anglican church hierarchy. Through personal initiatives such as the reinvented Eclectic Society, Dr. Stott sought to raise the sights and morale of young evangelical clergy. From a founding membership of 22 of his friends, the society grew to over 1,000 members by the mid 1960s. Out of this movement grew many initiatives, most notably the two National Evangelical Anglican Congresses of 1967 and 1977, which Dr. Stott chaired.
Dr. Stott was also chair of the Church of England Evangelical Council (www.ceec.info) from 1967 to 1984 and president of two influential Christian organizations, the British Scripture Union (www.scriptureunion.org.uk) from 1965 to 1974 and the British Evangelical Alliance (www.eauk.org) from 1973 to 1974. Dr. Stott combined his commitment to evangelism and his fostering of future Christian leaders by involving himself in the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (www.uccf.org.uk), where he was president four times between 1961 and 1982. He also served as a chaplain to the queen from 1959 to 1991 and received the rare honour of being appointed an Extra Chaplain in 1991.
John Stott often bemoans the anti-intellectualism apparent in some Christians. In contrast he stresses the need, in his words, “to relate the ancient Word to the modern world.” It was this conviction that led to his founding The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (www.licc.org.uk) in 1982 to “offer courses in the inter-relations between faith, life and mission to thinking Christian lay people.” He served as its first director and then as president from 1986 onward.
The key words in my thinking are “integration” and “penetration.” I think evangelical Christians, if one can generalize, have not been integrated; there is a tendency among us to exclude certain areas of our life from the lordship of Jesus, whether it be our business life and our work, or our political persuasion. That sort of integration is crucial to the Institute’s vision; the second is the penetration of the secular world by integrated Christians, whose gospel will be a more integrated gospel. (3)
David Edwards spoke of John Stott as, apart from William Temple, “the most influential clergyman in the Church of England” during the twentieth century, and Alister McGrath has suggested that the growth of post-war English evangelicalism was attributable more to John Stott than any other person.
International Influence
In 1970, Michael Baughen’s appointment as vicar of All Souls allowed John Stott to travel more widely. Since then, Dr. Stott has been able to spend about three months each year fulfilling speaking engagements abroad (with three further months spent at The Hookses, his Welsh writing retreat). He traveled regularly to the United States, and his prominence within North American evangelicalism was reflected in his role as Bible expositor on six occasions at the triennial Urbana Student Mission Convention arranged by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (www.intervarsity.org). John Stott’s links with students worldwide were strengthened by his leading of some 50 university missions between 1952 and 1977 in Britain, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and Asia, and he was vice president of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (www.ifesworld.org) from 1995 to 2003.
One of Dr. Stott’s major contributions to world evangelization was through the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization held at Lausanne, Switzerland. John Stott acted as chair of the drafting committee for the Lausanne Covenant, a significant milestone in the evangelical movement. As chair of the Lausanne Theology and Education Group from 1974 to 1981, he contributed strongly to the growing evangelical understanding of the relation between evangelism and social action. He was again chair of the drafting committee for the Manila Manifesto, a document produced by the second International Congress in 1989.
John Stott’s commitment to the renewal of evangelicalism in the worldwide Anglican Church led to his involvement in the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion (EFAC); from 1960 to 1981 he was honorary general secretary, and from 1986 to 1990 he served as its President. His desire to strengthen ties between evangelical theologians in Europe was a key force in the founding of the Fellowship of European Evangelical Theologians (FEET) in 1977.
Dr. Stott has had a particular wish to travel to countries in the Majority World. His concern for the world’s poor led to involvement in Tearfund (www.tearfund.org), which he served as president from 1983 to 1997, and also in Armonia in Mexico (www.armoniamexico.info) as patron. Through his contact with pastors in the Majority World, John Stott became increasingly convinced of the need to help in the provision of books and scholarships. This work has taken up much of his time in more recent years. He set up the Evangelical Literature Trust in 1971, funded largely by his own book royalties, in order to send theological books to pastors, teachers and theological students. In 1974 a bursary fund was established (as part of the then recently formed Langham Trust) to provide scholarships for intellectually able evangelical scholars from the Majority World to earn their doctorates, and then to return to their own countries to teach in theological seminaries. The Evangelical Literature Trust and the Langham Trust have now been amalgamated into the Langham Partnership International, directed by Dr. Chris Wright; Dr. Stott continues to be active as its founder-president.
Langham Partnership International now includes five national movements (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, China, New Zealand, UK & Ireland, and USA-John Stott Ministries). In addition, more than a dozen Regional Councils have been created so that Majority World church leaders can provide insight and direction for Langham’s ministry in their countries. Today three programs continue the efforts that John Stott pioneered more than 30 years ago. Langham Scholars, is directed by Meritt Sawyer, and provides Ph.D. training for up to 100 emerging leaders each year so they may serve in key leadership positions in seminaries, churches, and other ministries in their home countries. Pieter Kwant directs Langham Literature, which enables local church leaders to write and publish needed books and distributes tens of thousands of books to seminary libraries, students, and pastors each year. Langham Preaching is headed by Jonathan Lamb, and seeks to respond to requests to launch biblical preaching movements in countries around the world.
John Stott, in talking about the Langham Partnership International comments:
The church is growing everywhere of course, or nearly everywhere, but it’s often growth without depth and we are concerned to overcome this lack of depth, this superficiality, by remembering that God wants his people to grow. Now if God wants his people to grow into maturity, which he does, and if they grow by the word of God, which they do, and if the word of God comes to them mainly through preaching, which it does, then the logical question to ask is how can we help to raise the standards of biblical preaching? The 3 ministries of the Langham Partnership are all devoted to the same thing – either immediately or ultimately – to raise the standards of preaching through books, through scholarships and through Langham Preaching seminars.
Perhaps John Stott’s greatest international contribution has been through his writing, which is characterized as being clear, balanced, biblically based and intellectually rigorous. John Stott’s writing career started in 1954 when he was asked to write the bishop of London’s annual Lent book. Fifty years later, he has written over 40 titles and hundreds of articles and other contributions to Christian literature.
John Stott’s best-known work, Basic Christianity, has sold two million copies and has been translated into more than 60 languages. Other titles include The Cross of Christ, Understanding the Bible, The Contemporary Christian, Evangelical Truth, Issues Facing Christians Today, The Incomparable Christ, eight volumes in The Bible Speaks Today series of New Testament expositions, and most recently Why I Am a Christian. A comprehensive bibliography of his work was compiled by Timothy Dudley-Smith in 1995; a full booklist can be found here.
Such a prodigious literary output has been helped by unusual self-discipline and the unstinting support of Frances Whitehead, his secretary for nearly 50 years. John Stott never married, though according to his biography he came close to it on two occasions, and he acknowledges that with the responsibility of a family he could never have written, travelled and ministered in the way he has.
For all his ministry accomplishments, Dr. Stott maintains his avocational interests with exceptional passion. From an early age, he has been a keen bird watcher and photographer, taking his binoculars and camera with him on all his travels. He has seen around 2,700 of the world’s 9,000 species of birds; his book The Birds our Teachers, illustrated with his own photographs, was published in 1999. John Stott encourages all Christians to take an interest in some form of natural history and has been a strong supporter of A Rocha: Christians in Conservation (www.arocha.org) since its inception in 1983.
Billy Graham calls John Stott “the most respected clergyman in the world today,” and John Pollock described him as “in effect the theological leader of world evangelicalism.” John Stott’s biographer, Timothy Dudley-Smith, writes:
To those who know and meet him, respect and affection go hand in hand. The world-figure is lost in personal friendship, disarming interest, unfeigned humility—and a dash of mischievous humour and charm. By contrast, he thinks of himself, as all Christians should but few of us achieve, as simply a beloved child of a heavenly Father; an unworthy servant of his friend and master, Jesus Christ; a sinner saved by grace to the glory and praise of God. (4)
- Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: The Making of a Leader, vol. 1 (Leicester, U.K./Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1999), p. 89.
- Ibid., pp. 93-94
- Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott: A Global Ministry, vol. 2 (Leicester, U.K./Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 2001), p. 291.
- Timothy Dudley-Smith, “Who Is John Stott?” All Souls Broadsheet (London), April/May 2001.
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John Stott’s Legacy and Ongoing Ministry
For over 30 years, John Stott has been asking Majority World Church leaders: How can your brothers and sisters in the West be of assistance to you in a truly non-paternalistic way? Their response has been: Help our pastors preach and teach more effectively. Dr Stott’s response was to begin the ministries which are now united in the Langham Partnership International and which provides scholarships, literature and preaching workshops which have each been intentionally created to enable non-Western churches to grow in both numbers and in spiritual depth. Read More