“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.

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,

Amen.

Sermon Videos from Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, Vancouver to whom we are grateful from here

Well worth the time–watch it all.

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.

As I write these words, there have been four nights of rioting in various parts of the UK. When you read these words, will the situation have escalated ”“ or died down?

It has been fascinating to hear the different solutions that have been put forward. Perhaps more money needs to be spent in deprived areas, it is suggested. Perhaps police need more powers, or stronger methods of enforcement. Others suggest that families need to take more responsibility. All these things may be true. However, most of the comments on the riots ignore the basic diagnosis that Jesus gives us, because they focus on external solutions. Jesus makes it clear that the basic problem is an internal one ”“ within people: “For from within,” he says, “out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside,” (Mark 7v20-23).

The Christian diagnosis is that our hearts are infected by “sin” ”“ that little word with “I” in the middle.

Read it all.

…the implication that Jesus is making [in Matthew 11] by calling his yoke “easy” and burden “light” is that we are, all of us, apart from him, striving under a cruel yoke and a crushing burden. And maybe one way to say that, and to see it, is to say ”“ as Jesus elsewhere did ”“ that knowing the truth will set us free, and that lies, falsehoods, not only deceive, they enslave.

But to make any sense of that, we have to understand what freedom is. Our modern, evolved notion of freedom is largely, I think almost exclusively, negative. It is always freedom from something: freedom from moral or legal restraint, freedom from limit, from being told what to do. So, it’s “Keep your laws off my body,” or, “The government can’t make me buy health insurance,” to choose left and right examples.

But there is another and older idea of freedom. It conceives of freedom as a positive capability. It is freedom for. It has to do with understanding what sort of a creature I am, and then the pursuit of those good things to which my being, my nature, is ordered.

In other words, a fish is not more free if it decides to forsake the limits of water and flop up on the dock and go for a stroll; it is decidedly less so.

Read it all.

In the two months since North Carolina’s legislature laid off most of its prison chaplains, Betty Brown, director of prison chaplaincy services, has been crisscrossing the state searching for volunteers who can attend to the religious needs of Native American, Wiccan and Rastafarian prisoners.

State legislators had assumed volunteer ministries would jump in and help prisoners meet the ritual and devotional needs of their faiths. But so far, that hasn’t happened.

“It’s been tough locating volunteers for those faith groups,” said Brown, whose department lost 26 full-time prison chaplains as part of an effort to close a $2.6 billion state budget gap.

Read it all.

Judge David Turner, for twenty years a churchwarden at All Souls, spoke so well that some of us felt like applauding at the end. He began by recalling John’s written instructions when he went to the College of St Barnabas in 2006 whose carers were present and were warmly thanked. “I do not wish to cling to life. I have a living hope of a yet a more wonderful life beyond death. I do not wish to be unnecessarily hindered from entering it.” Today’s funeral was “supremely an au revoir moment….”

{He] recalled one particular meeting he arrived at at All Souls having been dive-bombed by a seagull on his way to the church. He went into the meeting still wiping the considerable mess off his suit and muttering “wretched seagull.” John responded: “ A herring-gull or maybe a black-headed gull, but a mere seagull it was not. Dear brother, you have been judged for your ignorance.” Cue laughter in the aisles.

Read it all.

Read and listen to it all.

Listen to it all if you so desire.

He was ordained as a Deacon in the Episcopal Church on June 11, 1959 at St. Phillips Church, Charleston, S.C., Reverend Furlow, in his 50+ years of ministry, served the following churches in the Charleston, SC area: Grace Episcopal Church, Chaplain to the Episcopal cadets at the Citadel, St. Jude Church in Walterboro, Sheldon Chapel in McPhersonville, Porter Gaud School, and Calvary Episcopal Church. In the Asheville, NC, area Reverend Furlow provided service to Christ School in Arden and Calvary Episcopal Church in Fletcher. He retired from the active ministry and the United States Naval Reserve Chaplain Corps in 1989. He was married to Jo Marie Harris on November 9, 1968 at Grace Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Read it all.

Guest speaker Alan Roxbugh said he would be educating the clergy about what they could do to go forward.

He said that, as ordained ministers educated at a seminary, most clergy “have been trained in a certain way”.

Dr Roxbugh said it was like his peers had been taught how to repair bicycles and, now the car had been invented, people were unsure what to do.

Read it all.

The myth about pastors, simply stated, is that we are helpers; that ours is a helping profession, counted alongside doctors and nurses and emergency responders and teachers and social workers.

Over and over again in my ministry, however, I am reminded that pastors are not helpers. We are not fixers or healers or solvers. We do not, cannot, provide help. Which may sound shocking, because people often turn to pastors for help … and pastors, in turn, like to think that they provide concrete help to others. But no, it is all a myth.

A story might add some explanation to my myth-busting….

Read it all.

You have concerns that most pastors can’t begin to fathom. How does working under such extraordinary conditions affect ordinary ministry?

So many of our brothers and sisters here in Baghdad have been killed, kidnapped, or tortured even in the last few months. Members of my staff have also been killed. Just this morning, I was trying to sort out post-hospital care for our former chief of security, who recently had a leg blown off.
We cope because the Lord is always with us. When you are where the Lord wants you to be, he always enables you to cope. Look at Daniel. He had not planned to come into exile in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. God still provided him with all that he required. He had not intended to be an interpreter of dreams, but God gave him the knowledge to do all that he needed and enabled him to serve with joy.
In the same way, I had no intention of coming to Iraq. But God brought me here 13 years ago, and now there is nowhere in the world I would rather be. Even in the midst of terror and persecution, we have the joy of the Lord.

Read it all.

Something of the regard in which he was held by Billy Graham surfaced at EUROFEST ”˜75 ”“ a 9-day Bible event involving thousands of young Europeans in Brussels. I was programme chairman, and the highlight among the seminars was expected in the session on ”˜Leadership’ to be led by John. However, before breakfast on the morning in question, I was rung up in my hotel by Mr Graham. “I’m concerned,” he said, “that John Stott has been assigned only one of several seminars to speak at. A man of his stature needs to be heard by us all. Would you mind if, at the close of the plenary Bible study this morning, I announced that the John Stott session is to be plenary, that everyone should be present – and that I will chair it myself?” Of course I agreed, and the announcement was duly made. “And,” added Mr Graham, “I want to make sure you all come with a notebook and pen. I too will be coming with my notebook and my pen!” And sure enough he did, scribbling notes throughout the talk, and whispering urgently for more paper as his own supply gave out. You could only be aware that in this, as in other congresses – such as at Lausanne and Amsterdam – Billy Graham and John Stott together were weaving a world-wide network of truth and trust among Bible believers everywhere. “John!” I enthused, “We had a great session with Sammy Escobar this morning!” It was the 1974 Lausanne Conference, and we were taking a break in the countryside. John was driving the car, with a Ugandan leader, Misaeri Kauma (not yet a bishop) in the front passenger seat. Michael Baughen ”“ by then All Souls Rector – and I were in the back. John had not been present at the meeting, and ”“ as he inevitably did when hearing a positive account of any gathering ”“ duly enquired, “And what were the particular emphases that Sammy was making?” I dug poor Michael Baughen in the ribs. “Go on, Michael, you tell him!”

Read it all.

[John] Stott’s transparent, personal approach extended deep into Africa, where David Zac Niringiye, assistant bishop for the Church of Uganda, met Stott during ministry training in the 80s. “When I think of my mentors, John Stott was very significant in encouraging me from the very beginning,” said Niringiye.

“I had just started working in Uganda when I met him at a conference in Nairobi, and a week later I went to hear him speak at the cathedral in Kampala. I was amazed when, upon greeting him, he not only remembered what ministry I worked for, but also my name.”

Read it all.

Stott was much in demand as a speaker on university campuses. Rather than resorting to emotional appeal, he made a reasoned case that let students encounter the Bible as a divinely inspired message with immediate relevance to contemporary life. He challenged his hearers to listen both to the word of God and to the world around them.

This “double listening” made him a leader and architect of evangelicalism. Invited by Billy Graham to address the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, he helped delegates to see preaching and social action, hitherto frequently contrasted, as equally important and interdependent aspects of the Gospel mandate. This was a defining moment in world evangelicalism, cemented in the Lausanne Covenant, a pivotal document owing much to his pen. Stott continued to broaden evangelical horizons for decades, insisting on responsible engagement with issues from medical ethics to ecology.

Read it all.

Read it all.

Check it out if you are so inclined.

The Rev. Mark Lewis is married. He also wants to become a Catholic priest. Lewis is the rector of St. Luke’s in Bladensburg, the first [Episcopal]… parish in the U.S. to seek to become Catholic under Anglicanorum coetibus, a process outlined by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 that allows groups of Anglicans to join the Roman Catholic Church without discarding their liturgical heritage. Raised Episcopalian, the 52-year-old Lewis entered the ministry 10 years ago and has two grown children. He will become Catholic with his parish in October.

Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?

Obviously, I am of the Catholic faith. Even as Episcopalians, we believed we were Catholic Christians. The Episcopal Church is a very broad church. In it you can have very evangelical people, and in it you can also have very high church Anglo-Catholics, of which I was one.

Why did you and your church convert?

I teach Catholic theology to my people. Once the apostolic constitution was announced, it opened a door that had previously been closed to us. I didn’t really want to sway them with my excitement, so we looked at it together: “Is this something that is really of interest to us?” We looked at the difference between being a Catholic in the Anglican tradition, and being a Catholic in the Roman tradition. And we realized as a church that we needed to be in communion with the Church of Rome.

Read it all.

I have my own personal remembrances of John, of course, having served closely with him as his Study Assistant nearly thirty years ago. My favourite picture of him is this one I took when we were on a bird watching holiday together in Portugal. We had a few moments before our flight left Faro, so, not wanting to miss an opportunity of spotting one more specie, we struck out for the airport perimeter. The grey flannel trousers and blue jacket, the posture and the intensity, the hushed ”˜Look there!’ at a beautiful avian display, this is a memory of John that I shall never forget.

I have often been asked what is the most significant thing I learned from John when I was with him. As I have moved through various stages in my Christian development, I have found my answer to this question changing. Where once I tried to emulate his self-discipline and homiletic style, today I remember his loyalty, integrity and humility. There was a moment in 1984 when he took issue with the Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, over provocative statements the bishop had made about Jesus’ resurrection. It is a mark of his respect and charity that John did not rush into print with a rebuttal, but rather sought a personal audience with Bishop Jenkins to make sure that he understood the bishop’s position and to give the bishop a chance to respond to his own concerns. John’s sense of fairness and the fact that he did not savour argument, did, on occasion, put him at a disadvantage. In a public debate with Bishop Spong he came off badly when Bishop Spong departed from the rules and left John unprepared to answer. John rued the event, but not because he had been treated so poorly. He was concerned that the audience had not been furnished with a sufficient defence of the truth as he saw it.

Read it all (and do not miss the picture).

John Stott was pre-eminently an evangelist to students around the world and in commentaries he wrote as a gifted expositor of the word of God. It is instructive to compare Billy Graham’s autobiography with Timothy Dudley Smith’s massive biography of John Stott. Billy Graham’s autobiography is graphic and revealing; by contrast John Stott’s biography is reticent and discreet. We learn much about John Stott’s bird watching, nothing about his role as Chaplain to the Queen and the names of individuals, high and low, whom he met and ministered to.

I count it a rare honour that he invited me to preach at All Souls, Langham Place. I also shared with him the platform at one of the great Urbana Conventions under the auspices of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship in America. John Stott stayed with me when conducting a Mission to Melbourne University. He was a memorable guest, delighting my children by teaching them the longest word in the English language, floccinaucinihilipilification!

Read it all.

“He was a very broad-minded evangelical,” said Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, which hosted Stott several times. “He was the kind of person who wanted to bring different factions together and emphasize what we hold in common.”

Stott believed that evangelism was not the only mission of Christians, a stance that some evangelicals criticized. He urged Christians not only to spread the gospel but to act on the Bible’s teachings by addressing social injustice in the world. He wrote and preached on climate change, global debt and other pressing issues facing contemporary society. Through the Langham Partnership he trained preachers, built libraries and helped 300 pastors from poor countries earn doctorates in biblical studies. They returned to their countries and became evangelical leaders, such as the Nepalese graduate who started a seminary in Katmandu.

“Evangelism and social action went together in the ministry of Jesus,” Stott told the Orange County Register in 1998. “So they ought to go together in ours.”

Read it all.

Listen to it all.

Listen to it all.

Fifteen years or so ago I purchased a copy of The Cross of Christ by John Stott. I’d heard his name, knew he was “famous” in evangelicalism, but had never read any of his writings. It took only a chapter or two in The Cross of Christ for me to be won over to Stott’s style of writing. He was intellectually rigorous but clear and accessible. More than that, though, I was drawn to the devotion that permeated Stott’s writing. It was contagious, the passion he had for Christ and His church. I wanted it to characterize my own spiritual life.

John Stott was 90 years old when he died in London on Wednesday. Surrounded by friends, Stott passed away listening to “Handel’s Messiah” and the reading of scripture. If there is such a thing as a good death, it sounds like a good death to me. In life and in death, John Stott’s was soaked in scripture and dedicated to Christ the Messiah.

Read it all.

Check it out; as of this posting there are 598 entries in the remembrance book and they make for moving reading.

The T19 Open Thread is here

There is clearly a deep anger among ordinary priests. This is reflected in the 550-plus membership of the fledgling Association of Catholic Priests. But where were those angry, articulate voices when the damage was being done, when Rome was directing this republic’s affairs and their brothers in Christ were violating the young and vulnerable? They were where they always were, says Hoban, “trying to do 1,001 things and trying to do them the best they can.”

So does that explain their silence? There are two “difficulties”, Hoban says. The first is the mistaken belief that a diocese is run by the bishop and the priests together. “The fact is we are totally excluded from any say . . . Priests are effectively disenfranchised.”

The other difficulty is loyalty. Priests live isolated lives. “The dynamic of our ministry is that friends are very few and far between, but there is extraordinarily strong loyalty among the clergy,” Hoban says. As well as that, “we were not people who would challenge the status quo. Those who would were weeded out in the seminary.” Then there is the perennial problem of being “at the bishop’s mercy” in relation to transfers and advancement. And thus the silence. Does it all sound a bit self-serving? “Yes, it’s fair to say that it was self-serving. That lack of moral courage.”

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What is the legacy of Keele? It is not the place of evangelicals in the church of England governance structures. Keele’s legacy was the global self-identity of orthodox Anglicans as evangelical. Evangelical Anglicanism developed in a dramatic way ”“ globally . I was General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion in the eighties. I saw this development before my eyes. While EFAC groups grew in England and North America and Australia, in Africa there seemed no need for them: for the Church of Kenya was evangelical; the Church of Uganda and Rwanda, fresh from the inspiration of the East African Revival was charismatic and evangelical. The Church of Tanzania had both evangelical and orthodox Anglo-Catholic roots.

Where there was biblical evangelical and orthodox faithfulness, the churches grew. Where these elements were not present, the church died, as in Japan. The result today is that two-thirds of the non-western Anglican Churches are biblically faithful Anglicans of the evangelical variety. This is the fruit of the identity and space forged for evangelical Anglicans in the Communion by the Keele Congress. Keele and its products validated the possibility of there being evangelical Anglicans in a liturgical Church that was seen as Catholic or liberal.

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For young evangelicals, and especially Anglican evangelicals, in their early years of discipleship and ministry, John Stott was a great encouragement. Here was a man who had devoted his entire life to ministry within the Church of England, but whose ministry was never to be contained in one denomination or country, because it was essentially Gospel ministry with a worldwide vision. His thinking was clear, his writings articulate and his judgements balanced. And, thank God, he has left a heritage in his writings, from solid Biblical commentary to deep theology and practical outworking of issues. He was a person of kindness, mannerliness and carefulness, not someone who was easy to get to know, but someone who, perhaps because of a degree of privacy and distance, was able to hold together and influence vast numbers of disparate evangelicals, and gain the respect of many beyond the evangelical fold.

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