Ten years on from Sept. 11, national unity, usually a compensation for the rigors of war, has been a casualty of wars of dubious choices. Ten years after 1941, and in more recent decades, the nation, having lost 400,000 in the unavoidable war that Pearl Harbor announced, preferred to remember more inspiriting dates, such as D-Day.
Today, for reasons having little to do with 9/11 and policy responses to it, the nation is more demoralized than at any time since the late 1970s, when, as now, feelings of impotence, vulnerability and decline were pervasive. Of all the sadness surrounding this anniversary, the most aching is the palpable and futile hope that commemoration can somehow help heal self-inflicted wounds.
Mr. [Jürgen] Stark’s resignation, nearly three years before his term was up, is widely viewed as another fissure in the edifice of European unity, which has suffered as wealthier countries like Germany have been asked to underwrite poor performers like Greece.
“It’s a very bad sign,” said Daniel Gros, director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “It means that the split within the E.C.B. that we thought was far down the road is here now.
“It puts a shadow over the E.C.B. and risks financial markets asking, ”˜How long can they go on buying these Italian bonds?’ This indicates that the answer is, ”˜Not as long as I had thought.’ “
The arrival of a foreign dignitaries to our shores is usually preceded by a fanfare and in some cases a carefully worded announcement full of diplomatic ”˜flourishes’ to allay any misgivings the locals may have about hidden agendas and territorial posturing by the said visitor. It was thus with interest that I read the syrupy bulletin issued to inform us that Katherine Jefferts-Schori, leader of a notorious North American brand of Anglicanism was invited to address the Synod of Bishops of our church later this month. This particular brand is not only increasingly apostate, it is both irrelevant to Africa and impotent in the face of the challenges the African church faces. Eager to cement relationship with the Anglican leadership in Southern Africa, and in the face of very severe objections, these false prophets are taking full advantage of the opportunity to distribute largesse and sow their teachings….
[Alasdair MacIntyre’s]…minatory warning was: “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” That was a scary thing to hear from one of the world’s great philosophers. I soon began to hear it from other leading intellectuals also, such as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah. That is what I heard in the echoes of 9/11: that all great civilisations eventually decline, and when they begin to do so they are vulnerable. That is what Osama bin Laden believed about the West and so did some of the West’s own greatest minds.
If so, then 9/11 belongs to a wider series of phenomena affecting the West: the disintegration of the family, the demise of authority, the build-up of personal debt, the collapse of financial institutions, the downgrading of the American economy, the continuing failure of some European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and integrity that has brought once esteemed groups into disrepute, the waning throughout the West of a sense of national identity; even last month’s riots.
These are all signs of the arteriosclerosis of a culture, a civilisation grown old. Whenever Me takes precedence over We, and pleasure today over viability tomorrow, a society is in trouble. If so, then the enemy is not radical Islam, it is us and our by now unsustainable self-indulgence.
The Paris-based organization expects the economies of euro-zone powerhouse Germany and fiscally troubled Italy to contract. Germany’s gross domestic product is set to fall 1.4% in the fourth quarter on an annualized basis, leading the weighted average GDP of the three biggest euro-zone economies to fall 0.4%, according to the OECD’s interim economic forecasts.
The forecasts suggest Italy’s GDP will fall 0.1% in the third quarter on an annualized basis before barely returning to growth at 0.1% in the fourth quarter.
“Growth is turning out to be much slower than we thought three months ago, and given the high uncertainty, the risk of a period of negative growth … has gone up,” OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan said.
The ruling is “a clear rejection of eurobonds”, said Otto Fricke, finance spokesman for the Free Democrats (FDP) in the governing coalition.
Above all, the court ruled that the Bundestag’s fiscal sovereignty is the foundation of German democracy and that Article 38 of the Basic Law prohibits transfer of these prerogatives to “supra-national bodies”.
By stating that there can be no further bail-outs for the eurozone without the prior approval of the Bundestag’s budget committee, the court has thrown a spanner in the works and rendered the EFSF almost unworkable.
Switzerland is once again at the top of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report, followed by Singapore, which has overtaken Sweden, then Finland with the US now in fifth place, slipping two slots since last year.
The report was published Wednesday morning 7 September by the Geneva-based organization that organizes an annual meeting of world business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland every January. The full report is available online.
Japan remains the top Asian country, at number 9 and China has advanced one place to number 26. Slovenia and Montenegro had steep falls of more than 10 places, while Sri Lanka rose by an impressive 13.
To dissuade the owners of electric cars from recharging their vehicles at peak times, and encourage them to do so in the wee, small hours of the morning instead, some electricity companies are introducing off-peak pricing for electric cars. Off-peak pricing is a common way of persuading people to run appliances such as washing machines at times of low demand. It is, though, a rigid arrangement that cannot respond to fluctuations in the requirement for power. Far better, reckon Alex Rogers and his colleagues at Southampton University, in England, for car owners to be represented in their interactions with the local power supplier by agents that can negotiate a deal on their behalf. These agents would bargain with one another, and with the power company, to charge the cars in an area in the most efficient way. The twist is that the agents Dr Rogers proposes to recruit for the task are not people, but computer programs.
The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, aka super Congress or super committee, is Congress’s answer to its own inability to break the hold of partisan gridlock that took America to the brink of default on Aug. 2, prompting the first-ever downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.
The panel, which on Thursday holds an organizational meeting open to the public, has a sweeping mandate to propose cuts to spending and entitlements and recommend tax reform by Nov. 23. Congress must vote the package up or down ”“ no amendments or filibuster ”“ by Dec. 23, or trigger a $1.2 trillion package of automatic spending cuts, equally divided between defense and domestic spending.
“Never has Washington had an all-or-nothing panel that is empowered and backed by a firm timeline like this one is,” says John Ullyot, a public-affairs consultant in Washington and former GOP Senate staffer. “The starter pistol will fire right after Labor Day.”
[John] 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.
Most Americans had not lived with…vulnerability until 9/11, says Mathew Schmalz, a religion professor at Holy Cross University in Massachusetts who once lived in Karachi, Pakistan.
“We had this sense of specialness and invulnerability that 9/11 shattered,” he says. “Given that a large section of the world’s population deals with random violence every day, one of the outcomes of 9/11 should be a greater feeling of solidarity with people who live in cities like Karachi in which violence is a part of everyday life.”
Recognizing that vulnerability, though, is difficult for some Americans because of how they see their country, Schmalz and others say.
“The crisis is not over. Not just in Europe is it not over, it is also not over in other regions of the world,” he said, adding the United States had an “enormous” debt problem and lacked the structures to get the problem under control.
Provincial Secretaries from around the Anglican Communion met in Mexico from 25 August to 1 September 2011 for the seventh in a series of informal meetings started in the 1980s.
The conference programme was designed to further the professional development of the participants, who are each key administrators within their respective Provinces. It provided space for exploring the particular challenges and opportunities facing individual Provinces, sharing lessons learned from experience over the past few years and strengthening knowledge and understanding within the Communion.
Representatives from 25 Provinces…and from the Church of Ceylon attended. Four were unable to attend at the last minute because of illness or visa difficulties and a number of others sent regrets and best wishes. Around half of those present had moved into their present roles since the last meeting of Provincial Secretaries in 2007.
The Chinese have long understood that America’s sea control in the western Pacific has been the military foundation of its strategic primacy in Asia, and that the US Navy’s carriers are the key. They have therefore focused the formidable expansion of their naval and air forces over the past 20 years on trying to deprive the US of sea control by developing their capacity to sink American carriers. In this they appear to have been strikingly successful, to the point that US military leaders now acknowledge that their sea control in the western Pacific is slipping away.
But for China, depriving America of sea control is not the same as acquiring it themselves. Its naval strategy has focused on the much more limited aim that strategists call ”sea denial”: the ability to attack an adversary’s ships without being able to stop them attacking yours. These days, sea denial can be achieved without putting ships to sea, because land-based aircraft, long-range missiles and submarines can sink ships much more cost-effectively than other ships can. This is what China has done.
As President Barack Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man.
If that sounds bleak, it’s because it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was softened in many families by the increasing number of women who went to work and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men. The portion of men holding a job””any job, full- or part-time””fell to 63.5 percent in July””hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year””and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.
For the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street.
But this has been a hard sell to an increasingly skeptical public. As Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission back in May 2010, “I was never able to explain to the American people in a way in which they understood it why these rescues were for them and for their benefit, not for Wall Street.”
The American people were right to question Mr. Paulson’s pitch, as it turns out. And that became clearer than ever last week when Bloomberg News published fresh and disturbing details about the crisis-era bailouts.
On the death of Earnshaw-Smith the churchwardens made strong representations to the Crown, as patron, that their young curate should succeed him. For the next 25 years John Stott produced at All Souls a model of the life and witness of a local church which was copied eagerly across the world. He developed his own gifts as pastor and evangelist, preacher and expositor. It is hard now to realize how innovative was his approach, even while making every allowance for the privileged position held by such a church.
Soon he found himself responding to urgent invitations to employ these gifts on a wider canvas. His university missions, starting with Oxbridge but extending to many continents, showed how fruitful was his prayerful determination to reach the heart and will by first engaging the mind. It was while conducting a string of such missions in North America that he spent one Christmas with Billy Graham and his young family, cementing a relationship of mutual affection and respect that was to bear fruit in their partnership in Lausanne Movement, and prove lifelong.
Scripture was the basis of his teaching. To him preaching began with exposition and moved on to application in its God-given role of proclaiming Christ, calling to repentance and faith, and building up the church as a mature, worshipping, witnessing and serving fellowship. Half-reluctantly, faced with the pressures of the day, faithful exposition led on to a defence of the faith, and so also to proclaiming Biblical standards of morality and behaviour, courageous and indeed painful as such a role often proved to be. If forced to choose, he would style himself an evangelical who was also an Anglican; but he held steadily and with affection to the Biblical foundations of his Church, resisting calls (such as in the famous debate with his friend Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones) to leave. He resisted, too, with equal firmness what he saw as unbalanced emphases in the neo-Pentecostalism of the day.
… let me say that in English: the European Union is cracking up. The Arab world is cracking up. China’s growth model is under pressure and America’s credit-driven capitalist model has suffered a warning heart attack and needs a total rethink. Recasting any one of these alone would be huge. Doing all four at once ”” when the world has never been more interconnected ”” is mind-boggling. We are again “present at the creation” ”” but of what?….
As for America, we’ve thrived in recent decades with a credit-consumption-led economy, whereby we maintained a middle class by using more steroids (easy credit, subprime mortgages and construction work) and less muscle-building (education, skill-building and innovation). It’s put us in a deep hole, and the only way to dig out now is a new, hybrid politics that mixes spending cuts, tax increases, tax reform and investments in infrastructure, education, research and production. But that mix is not the agenda of either party. Either our two parties find a way to collaborate in the center around this new hybrid politics, or a third party is going to emerge ”” or we’re stuck and the pain will just get worse.
I will tell you something you may not hear elsewhere. You live at a wonderful time in a wonderful country. I feel as strongly as anyone that everything could be much better, and ought to be better. But one of the pleasures of my self-defining life, my life as writer and teacher, is that I have read history, and I have traveled to and talked with people in those regions of America considered by many in this country to be alien territory. I have taken from history an awareness of the human tendency toward destructiveness and bitter violence. We share this tendency, certainly. But, in terms of our national life, we have cultivated an ethic of civil peace which has allowed for the flourishing of a great many wonderful communities and institutions. At the moment this ethic is under great stress, a fact that makes it all the more important to acknowledge it and recognize its value….
It is easy to be disappointed, exasperated, with our religious culture, with blandness here and intemperance there, with fads and hypocrisies and a general failure to inculcate tradition. So it can come as a surprise to learn that on balance America gives religion a good name, that religion is associated through us with ethical seriousness among other things, and that its importance among us is considered by many to be enviable.
For those of us who are religious in any way or degree, the fact that much of the world, and certainly the secularized Western world, looks to us to see how religion is lived out, implies responsibility of a very high order….
The next time you walk into church, or your synagogue or mosque, say a little thanks to God for our founding principles. There’s a lot for which to be grateful, after all, and the freedom to worship is among our greatest blessings.
But a new report by Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life has revealed a disturbing pattern: Nearly a third of the globe’s population ”” 2.2 billion people ”” live in countries where religious persecution increased between 2006 and 2009.
A shadowy Islamist insurgency that has haunted northern Nigeria ”” surviving repeated, bloody efforts to eliminate it ”” appears to be branching out and collaborating with Al Qaeda’s affiliates, alarming Western officials and analysts who had previously viewed the militants here as a largely isolated, if deadly, menace.
Just two years ago, the Islamist group stalking police officers in this bustling city seemed on the verge of extinction. In a heavy-handed assault, Nigerian soldiers shelled its headquarters and killed its leader, leaving a grisly tableau of charred ruins, hundreds dead and outmatched members of the group, known as Boko Haram, struggling to fight back, sometimes with little more than bows and arrows.
Now, insurgents strike at the Nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic law in near-daily assaults and bombings, using improvised explosive devices that can be detonated remotely and bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Western officials and analysts say. Beyond the immediate devastation, the fear is that extremists bent on jihad are spreading their reach across the continent and planting roots in a major, Western-allied state that had not been seen as a hotbed of global terrorism.
All good brands need a mission statement or a manifesto. Warren’s breakthrough to a mass audience came in 2002 with The Purpose Driven Life. His book describes itself as a “40-day spiritual journey for Christian living in the 21st century”. Though he rejects descriptions of it as a “self-help book” for the religious, it is reminiscent of the genre, with its folksy prose and short chapters. It reassures those with busy lives that they can converse with God “while shopping, driving or working” and that everyday tasks can be devoted to God including “taking out the trash”.
Warren says: “There’s not a new idea in [it] that hasn’t been said in 2,000 years of history. It’s been said all before. If I had a 15-word sentence, how could I say it in nine? How can I say it in five?”
Warren’s revolutionary tactic was to bypass bookshops and market the book directly to evangelical America, through its churches. It became a classic word-of-mouth success: it has sold more than 30m copies in the US, been translated into more than 50 languages and generated sequels.
“The other thing that John was concerned about was to banish apathy from the hearts of those to whom he ministered. Starting with his own congregation at All Souls, Langham Place in London and extending to all the congregations to whom he ministered quite literally all around the world.
Banishing apathy, what did that mean in positive terms? It meant that John summoned us to learn our faith and not be sloppy in terms of our doctrine, and equally not to be sloppy and casual in terms of our service of the Lord whom we love and honour as our Saviour.”
[We are grateful to a T19 reader for providing this unofficial transcript. Please let us know if there are any improvements which can be made.]
Unofficial Transcipt of the Sermon the Rev Canon Dr JI Packer preached at a memorial service for the Rev John Stott on Friday 5th August 2011 at the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, Vancouver, Canada
Part 1
For a moment, let us pray together:
Gracious Father, we ask you to open your word to our hearts and our hearts to your word, that we may understand what you have done and what now, in your strength, we must seek to do, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.
In the letter to the Hebrews Chapter 13, verses 7 and 8 read as follows:
“Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be led away by diverse and strange doctrines”
John Stott was the most modest of men; compliments embarrassed him. He would shrug them off and try to change the subject just as quickly as he could. If he could have briefed me in advance for this message that I am to give now, he would most certainly have said to me: ”˜focus on Christ, don’t focus on me.’
Well this text helps us to do just that. It is the word of a pastor, at the end of a weighty pastoral letter that he has written. He is suffering, this pastor, from a two-fold anxiety. He is concerned on the one hand about the hostility that his addressees are facing, you see they are converted Jews and the Jews who were not Christians were hostile to them, hated them one might say and they were making life very difficult for them, saying I suppose: ”˜you come back to the Synagogue with us or else.’ Well, they had to live through that and there was in addition, not just hostility around them, but apathy within them. The writer has spoken of that once or twice, calling them to pay attention to the Gospel message, telling them that by now in their discipleship they ought to be teachers, and in fact they are still babes needing milk ”“ they’re not learning, they’re not advancing, they are sluggish, they are stuck! And he is burdened about that too, and as a good pastor so he should be.
Well, into a situation where that is the condition of the people he is addressing, he writes: ”˜remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God’. Remember who they were ”“ clearly they belong to the past history of this congregation. One supposes that the people of whom he is writing are dead now. The verb in the next clause should be translated ”˜those who used to speak to you the word of God.’ ”“ implication: they have been taken from you so that their ministry to you has ceased to be, but remember them, and remember the ministry they fulfilled. ”˜Consider the outcome of their way of life’, consider what it added up to for them, ”˜and imitate their faith’.
And that leads him straight into verse 8 ”˜Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.’ What’s the link? Clearly in his own mind the link is that Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today and forever, was the burden of the ministry of the word of God which these leaders had fulfilled when they were with the congregation. He’s your Lord, says he to the church, just as he’s my Lord, he is our Lord and he doesn’t change, and he wants to be everything to us that he was to them. He’s the same yesterday, today and always will be and this of course is actually what the writer has been affirming and elaborating all the way through the letter.
If you know the letter to the Hebrews, cast your mind back: chapter one Jesus is proclaimed as divine; chapter 2 he is proclaimed as human and as saviour; chapter 5 and on he is proclaimed as high priest; chapter 8 he is proclaimed as bringing in the new covenant, the better covenant, better that is than Old Testament believers knew; chapters 9 and 10 he is proclaimed as the new high priest who brought in the covenant by sacrificing himself at the Father’s will; and now he reigns at the end of chapter 4, and in a number of other places the writer has referred to the Lord Jesus Christ as being now on the throne in the power of his atoning death and resurrection, and one day he will return bringing salvation to those who look for him, ”˜though coming to judge and therefore to be feared by those who are not already his disciples.
It all works out to what he said in chapter 10, just let me read you a bit of it: – Chapter 10 verse 12:
When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying,
“this is the covenant that I will make with them after those days declares the Lord, I will put my laws in their hearts and write them on their minds”
then he adds,
“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
Where there is forgiveness of these there is no longer any offering for sin.
Therefore brothers ”¦ [I jump down now to verse 22] let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience’ ”“ let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful, [he will keep his word to us] and let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
That is the summary of the message of Jesus Christ who is the same today as he was yesterday and will be forever, and the writer’s concern is that the folk he is addressing don’t lose any part of this message. He wants them to live in the energy and joy of the full Gospel, and he doesn’t want them to change, or allow people around them to change any part of the message because that would move them to a false Gospel.
And those concerns get us straight to John Stott whose ministry we celebrate this evening for there too, if ever, was a man concerned with every breath he took that everyone to whom he ministered should enjoy the fullness of the full Gospel in its truth and in its power, and should not change any part of it, because that would mean exchanging the true Gospel for a false one. And throughout the years of his ministry these were the two concerns that he pursued tirelessly and powerfully in just about every sermon that he preached and every book that he wrote.
Positively, we could say, his ministry was concerned to lead us into the fullness of faith, and so into enjoyment of the fullness of Christ and negatively, he was as concerned as anyone ever has been to counter hostility to this Gospel and, yes, he faced hostility just as all of us today still face hostility. Today it calls itself liberalism, but the essence of liberalism is that something different is believed about Jesus from what you have in the New Testament. Something different is affirmed therefore, about Christian discipleship from what you have in the New Testament. And one of the things that marks our liberal friends over and over again is, how can I say it, pride, is that the word to use, obstinacy perhaps is the word that I had better go for, obstinacy in holding on to these false notions and declining to come back to the true ones. Says the writer: ”˜don’t be led astray by diverse and strange teaching’; but that alas is what has happened to many people in our church today, and we all of course know it very well.
Well all through the Anglican Communion when John started his ministry that was going on and well, John stood as a faithful witness against it.
Part 2
Then the other thing that John was concerned about was to banish apathy from the hearts of those to whom he ministered. Starting with his own congregation at All Souls, Langham Place in London and extending to all the congregations to whom he ministered quite literally all around the world.
Banishing apathy, what did that mean in positive terms? It meant that John summoned us to learn our faith and not be sloppy in terms of our doctrine, and equally not to be sloppy and casual in terms of our service of the Lord whom we love and honour as our Saviour.
John himself as we all know was, well, I call him a 15-talent man of God. 10 the number in our Lord’s parable really doesn’t seem enough. John Stott one sometimes felt could do anything and everything in ministry. He had all the gifts that make up a teacher and a carer and a unifier. He lived in a way which displayed the freedom of self-discipline. I am thinking there of the kind of freedom which in a different department of life a solo pianist or violinist will display. He or she has accepted the self-discipline of learning to master the instrument. Now he or she is able, if one may put it this way, to relax with the instrument and with the sort of inner ease to make it sound and sing out all the music that is there in the notes and which as a soloist the musician wants to convey.
Well, that is a picture an illustration of what I mean by freedom with self-discipline at its heart and you saw that in John as a preacher and teacher and influence in the church. And the self-discipline that lay at the heart of it was a discipline of constant Bible study, constant prayer, constant self-watch and constant refusal to go wild – John never went wild. John observed his own discipline so that he might always be at his best for ministry. And well we know, all of us I am sure, know something about the quality of that ministry, marked as it always was by love and wisdom in whatever form the situation demanded.
I remember back in the early 1950’s, when I was casting around actually, for a church in which to serve as an assistant to start my ministry, I wrote a letter to John to enquire whether there might be a position for me on his staff. Well there couldn’t have been more of love and wisdom in the letter he wrote back to me. What he had to say to me was, absolutely not”¦ [laughter] but the way that he said it and expressed it, you might have thought he was congratulating me on something, But that was John, always with wisdom he showed love, and people loved him for it. Over and above the admiration that they felt for his gifts, they loved him for his Christ-like character.
Oh yes he was a wonderful person, and let me just list some of the things in which he excelled:
During his 25 years as Rector of All Souls, Langham Place in London, he pioneered something which, and I can tell you because I was part of the scenery at that time, something which just wasn’t happening in other evangelical churches: John trained the congregation in ministry – he did! And so the folk in the congregation became that much more able in their witness, and that much more useful to their Lord. And he made All Souls a centre of evangelism, and it was very fruitful evangelism all the time that he was there.
His ministry extended to the Church of England as a whole. I am thinking back now to the years in which he was Chair of the strategising body called the Church of England Evangelical Council; the years in which he chaired the council of an institution that I was deputed to manage called Latimer House; and I am thinking of the way in which he chaired the first and most fruitful National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele University in 1967, a congress which put English evangelicalism pretty much on the map, whereas for the previous 50 years, those who were not evangelicals had got into the habit of ignoring it ”“ it wasn’t on their map. But after Keele, evangelicalism was on everybody’s map. And at Keele, John was the leader, the moving spirit, the person through whom the change was brought about.
And his influence did not stop of course with the Church of England. All through the Anglican Communion, he functioned as what we might call an unconsecrated bishop, a senior pastor, who pastured the pastors, who expounded the Bible, who encouraged, celebrated, who envisioned, advanced, and shared his vision so that others came to share it too.
Yes, that was John. And the Langham Organisation exists now as a continuance of all of that. And you don’t need me to tell you I don’t think, the Langham Organisation, the Langham Trust is a very powerful player in the world evangelical fellowship, powerful that is at clergy level, because the key activity of the Langham Trust is to provide scholarships that bring clergy to universities where they will get evangelical instruction, and so become weighty figures when they return to their own part of the world. Well that, I am sure you knew, was a major part of John’s ministry for the last 30 years of that ministry.
And then he was a university evangelist. There were very few English speaking universities in the world, quite literally, where John Stott did not at one stage or another manage a mission, and John’s missions were very fruitful missions evangelistically, which is why the organisers of Christian ministry in the universities lined up in order to book him up and to get the blessing on their own campus.
And then of course he was an educator. He wrote nearly 50 books not counting pamphlets. He lectured on contemporary issues. He founded the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He encouraged the study by evangelicals of social ethics, problems of communal behaviour in society, which evangelicals for well 50 years, something like that, had been neglecting. John insisted that we get educated in these matters.
And then in world mission – the largest [what shall I call it?] – the largest sphere of all. John was throughout his ministry the close friend of Billy Graham, and as he had been the pioneer at Keele in 1967 for evangelical Anglicans, so he was the pioneer at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation, at which the declaration, which still to my mind is the classic evangelical declaration on the agenda for world mission – that agenda was produced, and it is common knowledge that John virtually wrote it himself, just as then straight away he wrote a book expounding it, and as he continued to expound its themes as long as his ministry lasted.
Well I just mention these things. Again I expect you knew something about all of them. I haven’t time to go into them but you can see perhaps from the words I use that I want to celebrate each single one of them. I want to say John was magnificent in all these spheres ”“ a 15 talent man of God: who loved the Bible and believed in its trustworthiness and expounded it accordingly; who loved the Lord Jesus and believed in the Gospel that proclaimed salvation in Jesus and leads us into the life of communion with Jesus and experience of the power of Jesus.
Thank God for John, that’s what we are doing this evening. Well I say it explicitly: thank God for John right now and don’t stop thanking God for John. He was one of the supreme gifts of God for the renewal of the church in the 20th century. And don’t hesitate to take to heart the words of our text: ”˜consider the outcome of the way of life of those who spoke to you the word of God and imitate their faith’.
Yes, for John, the Bible was supreme; Christ was supreme. I say to you, in the Lord’s name, imitate both those emphases: they are truth; they are wisdom; there’s power in them; they are there for us to follow.
Part 3
It is a joy to be able to say incidentally that since John’s ministry ended about 10 years ago, the things that he started and the vision which he communicated, those things have continued and gained power in the Anglican Communion. If I just say GAFCON, you will know what I am talking about. The Lord’s people, Anglican people, all round the world, are one feels coming to life, a mighty army in these days. And I am sure that as John lived out his last days, in his retirement home, he knew all this, and rejoiced in it.
It is a wonderful privilege to start something that goes on and grows after you have given to it all that you are able to give. I believe that the kingdom zeal – if I may use that phrase – of evangelicals all around the world, and most certainly Anglican evangelicals, has been greatly increased through John’s ministry. I think that his vision for a renewed church, which was there right from the very start of his ministry – that vision has been picked up and is being maintained and is still exciting people, just as it began to excite people when John expounded it.
Yes, John, by the Grace of God, started something, something wonderful, something rich and comprehensive, and evangelical – if I may say it this way – evangelical to its fingertips.
And, now it’s for us to pick up the torch, and in our own situations, our own churches, our own districts, our own homes, and wherever we go, it’s for us to carry on what John began.
One last thing, John had an amazing gift of friendship, and I am going to leave you with this thought, a thought which sometimes I think pricks rather painfully in evangelical consciences when it is mentioned, ”˜friendship’. Do people find us friendly? In our churches Sunday by Sunday, do people wander in and find themselves ignored at coffee time, or do they find us friendly? Do we make friends easily, do we work at it until we can make friends easily, or do we allow ourselves, for whatever reason, to stand apart: ”˜We are the evangelicals, we are special, we are different, so we don’t come too close to you, and we don’t expect you to come too close to us.’? I see something satanic about that attitude. I beg you, brothers and sisters, take your cue from John Stott, one of the friendliest men I have ever met, and show friendship in Christ as part of your witness and your work for the Saviour.
And so, God enabling us, following up John’s vision, and the things which he began, we go on. Yes, I trust so, God grant it,
For those of you following the site with testimonies to the way in which the Lord used John Stott in their life, note that the number is now over 1,000 and rising and that a recent entry is from Elder Fu Xiangwei, the Chairman of the National Committee of the TSPM of the Protestant Churches in China, and the Rev. Gao Feng, the President of the China Christian Council. You may find that site over there–KSH.
“The short-sale ban really smacks of desperation,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “That’s their plan for solving the euro debt crisis? I mean, this isn’t going to buy them much time.”
The crisis in Europe, Mr. Rogoff said, goes far beyond falling stock prices and has more to do with the state of banks there, including banks in Italy and France. He said the sovereign debt problems were an extension of the stress on the system created by the banking crisis.
Lord God, we live in disturbing days:
across the world,
prices rise,
debts increase,
markets are in turmoil,
jobs are taken away,
and fragile security is under threat.
Loving God, meet us in our fear and hear our prayer:
be a tower of strength amidst the shifting sands,
and a light in the darkness;
help us receive your gift of peace,
and fix our hearts where true joys are to be found,
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
No amount of jaw-jawing from the ECB (or from the G-7, which yesterday put out an odd statement calling the rise in euro-zone bond yields not “warranted”) can make investors buy Italian debt. Mr. Trichet continues to act as if the markets are having an attack of the vapors, from which they’ll recover presently. But no rational person or institution is going to start buying sovereign debt from heavily indebted, stagnant, deficit-running countries as if the past 15 months had never happened. The lamp has been rubbed, the genie has escaped, and no amount of un-rubbing will put him back in the lamp.
Whatever one thinks of the credit-rating agencies””and we aren’t admirers””it serves no good purpose to shoot the fiscal messengers. Friday’s downgrade by Standard & Poor’s of U.S. long-term debt to AA+ from AAA will be the first of many such humiliations if Washington doesn’t change its economic and fiscal policies.
The downgrade of the United States long-term debt to AA+ from AAA has global implications, said Alessandro Giansanti, a credit market strategist at ING in Amsterdam.
“We can see that this may force the U.S. to move more aggressively to cut spending,” he said, something that could drive the already weak economy into recession and weigh on the economies of all of its trading partners. “That’s the main driver” of the stock market declines, he said.
