Uncle John
Hi Dojo readers!
As many of you know, I’m currently on a sabbatical from all theological/biblical/ministry-related blogging in order to focus on renewing and restoring my own relationship with God and to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit in my life…But I have to make an exception in light of the recent passing of one of my personal heroes of the faith, Rev. John R.W. Stott.
John Stott, or “Uncle John” as he was affectionately known to millions of believers around the world, was the greatest Preacher/Scholar of the 20th century.
I won’t attempt to write a summary of his life–interested readers should check out the piece on his life and legacy by Christianity Today.
Rather, I want to offer a thank you to Uncle John for all his contributions and for embodying the absolute BEST of what it means to be “evangelical.” John Stott was to preaching what Billy Graham has been to evangelism, and it’s an absolute shame that he is not just as well known.
If you have never read Stott’s little book “Basic Christianity“, stop reading this, go to Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Cokesbury or Alibris and get a copy immediately! Go, I’ll wait…
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Now, having done that, spend the next few days reading this deceptively simple book and letting it shape (and hopefully re-shape) your notions of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. (Note: at my Dad’s church in Americus, GA, this book is given to every first time visitor free of charge as a welcome gift…I wish more churches would do this!!)
As a lifelong bachelor, Stott penned one of my favorite quotes of all time, and one that has been a comfort and encouragement to countless single Christians over the years:
“Most of his boyhood friends were probably married by the time they had reached thirty, but not him. He had friends of both sexes, but no wife or children. He was able to relax in other people’s homes, but he had no home of his own. He knew what it was like to care for an aging parent, but he never knew the joys and challenges of being a parent himself. He know who he was, where he was going, and how he wanted his career to develop, but he also knew what it was like to be considered different, a threat to other people, and a misfit. He was a healthy young man with all the sexual urges and temptations that human beings experience, but he never had a wife with whom he could be sexually intimate. He knew how to laugh, how to hold his own in heated debates, and how to play with little children, but there were times when he cried and sometimes he felt very lonely and alone. Usually we don’t think of him in this way, but Jesus was a single adult.” [-John Stott, cited in Bob Vetter and June Vetter, Jesus was a Single Adult (Elgin, Ill.: David C. Cook, 1978).]
In addition to his writings, John Stott left a massive legacy among the Christian world…yet he was remarkably humble and soft-spoken. A true gentleman.
While not everyone agreed with his theological conclusions on every issue (he was one of the first evangelicals to embrace Annihilationism, for instance–which played a significant part in the recent Rob Bell “Love Wins” controversy), John Stott was universally held in high esteem among his fellow theologians, scholars and preachers. He was committed to, as Darrell Bock pointed out, BALANCE. Not wishy-washy compromise…but true Biblical balance. (The kind of balance that so many of us Christians have such a hard time achieving…as I have discussed HERE.)
At the news of his death, Christians from all over the world have come forth to share just how much John Stott, Uncle John, meant to them and how they were influence by him. There are too many to list at this point (though Robert Sagers has compiled a number of them), but I wanted to share a few with Dojo readers that I found especially good:
To this day I have zero interest in watching a preacher take his stand on top of the (closed) treasure chest of Bible sentences and eloquently talk about his life or his family or the news or history or culture or movies, or even general theological principles and themes, without opening the chest and showing me the specific jewels in these Bible sentences.
John Stott turned the words of Bible sentences into windows onto glorious reality by explaining them in clear, compelling, complete, coherent, fresh, silly-free, English sentences.
For Stott “all true Christian preaching is expository preaching. . . ”
“Exposition” refers to the content of the sermon (biblical truth) rather than its style (a running commentary). To expound Scripture is to bring out of the text what is there and expose it to view. The expositor [pries] open what appears to be closed, makes plain what is obscure, unravels what is knotted, and unfolds what is tightly packed.” (Between Two Worlds, 125ff)
Yes! This is what I was starving for and didn’t even know it. Amazing! Someone is telling me what these sentences mean! Someone is making light shine on these words. It is shining so bright, I can’t sleep in this light! I am waking up from decades of dull dealing with God’s word. Thank you. Thank you. I could care less if you tell me any stories. I want to know what God means by these words!
And of course what God means is staggeringly important and glorious and horrible and tender and rugged and shocking and ravishing and relevant. And implications are crashing down on me every minute, and my heart is churning with shock and wonder and fear and hope and sorrow and joy and cries for help. This is what I have been waiting for all my life. Thank you, John Stott, for telling me what these words mean.
In those days, I knew I could not preach. But I knew that this is the kind of preaching I wanted to hear — and if a miracle happened, and I ever became a preacher, the kind I wanted to do. The expository kind. The articulate kind. The coherent kind. The clear kind. The shove-your-face-in-the-text kind. The iron-clad-argument-from-conjunctions kind. The blow-the-gloom-of-ignorance-and-doubt-away kind. The no-nonsense-utterly-realistic-tell-it-like-it-is kind.
So, John Stott, I’m glad you preached and wrote Men Made New just like it was. I’m glad you preached the way you preached. And when you heard your “Well done,” yesterday in heaven, I don’t think Jesus meant, “Except for the illustrations.”
Stott meant a lot to me, and in several respects.
First, he modeled intelligent preaching, preaching that implied that both preacher and congregation were intelligent people who were concerned to understand difficult and important matters, and that patient and skilled interpretation of the difficult and important texts of the Bible was not only possible, but to be expected from sermons on every occasion. Preachers I have heard since then, and that’s the majority, who fail to interpret the text intelligently, fail to treat their audiences as intelligent people, and fail to express themselves intelligently, earn either my pity (if they can’t help it) or my contempt (if they can). But they do not get a pass: John Stott showed us what could be done, and we ought to do it, even if few of us can do it so well.
Second, he showed that smart and educated people could be evangelicals and remain evangelicals. In my young adult years, many upwardly mobile evangelicals were hitting the “high road,” so to speak, on their way to Anglo-Catholicism, Catholicism, or even Orthodoxy, but Stott–whose church services at All Souls Langham Place were like InterVarsity meetings with robes–was irrefutably sophisticated and unapologetically low-church evangelical.
Third, Stott demonstrated Christian liberty. At an InterVarsity conference I attended once in Toronto, the worship leaders insisted that everyone put up their hands in praise, wave them about, and generally move their bodies in ways I found distinctly uncongenial to worship. Stott was the main preacher and after several sessions in which he conspicuously refused to participate in this way, came to the microphone, blessed the worship leaders for their enthusiasm, and said simply, “I don’t find it helpful to raise my hands during public worship, so I don’t. But that is just me, and I mean no disrespect to those of you who do.” Nicely put, lesson learned, let’s move on.
Nicolas Kristof’s Op-Ed piece in The New York Times:
For many evangelicals who winced whenever a televangelist made the headlines, Mr. Stott was an intellectual guru and an inspiration. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, who has worked heroically to combat everything from genocide to climate change, told me: “Against the quackery and anti-intellectualism of our movement, Stott made it possible to say you are ‘evangelical’ and not be apologetic.”
Lastly, I’ll share a regret that I have about Stott from my own personal life.
In the Summer of ’03 I spent 3 weeks studying early Methodist history and renewal at Cambridge University via a study abroad course through Asbury Theological Seminary. After finishing the course in Cambridge, I had a day to myself in London before flying back home.
I was by myself (the friend I was going to stay with ended up having to have emergency surgery, but managed to find me a place to stay with a friend of his who was gone all day, but who opened his flat to me so I didn’t have to cart my luggage around all over the city all day!)…so I decided to walk around and see some of the sights of London.
The place I wanted to see most was, in fact, All Souls Church. All Souls was John Stott’s church where he was Rector Emeritus and where he preached on a regular basis. I was hoping he’d be there so I could meet him.
When I got there, a nice little receptionist greeted me.
“Hi, I’m a student from America and it’s my last day in London. I wanted to stop by and see of Rev. Stott was in.”
“No, I’m afraid he’s not in today. But he might be at his flat. Would you like me to call him?”
Now this is where I wish I could go back and relive this moment. I would’ve said, “That would be fantastic! I just want to meet him, shake his hand and talk to him for a few minutes. I want to ask him what advice he would give to a young single scholar-in-training that he wished someone would’ve given him at my age!”
Instead, what I said was “Oh no, that’s okay. I don’t want to bother him at home. Thank you anyway.”
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I missed my chance to have tea with the greatest preacher in the history of modern evangelicalism.
But the good news is that I’ll get my chance one day. When Jesus “comes to judge the quick and the dead” and “makes all things new” I believe I’ll get a chance to make that visit with Uncle John.
Until then, may he rest with the Lord in peace, knowing that he ran the race with integrity and left an impact on millions and millions of his brothers and sisters around the world who will miss him greatly…despite never getting to have tea him.
JM
John Robert Walmsley Stott
April 27th, 1921 – July 27th, 2011
Categories: Biblical Scholarship, Blog, Church History, Ministry
[…] being thoroughly Calvinistic in his theology, he doesn’t make it his emphasis. Along with John Stott, (the “Dean of evangelical Pastors!”) is one of the greatest theologians of the 20th […]
by James-Michael Smith's Disciple Dojo – JMSmith.org » Reformed/Calvinist scholars and Preachers I really like on Oct 31, 2011 at 4:50 pm