Anglican theologian and author John R.W. Stott died today in London. He was 90.
Stott wrote and thought and spoke with great clarity and his books were influential and widely respected among American evangelical Christians. And those who had the privilege of spending time with him know that he was also, in person, a gracious and lovely man.
I spent a decade as a member of the staff of the nonprofit parachurch organization Evangelicals for Social Action. Stott’s writing and influence were enormously important for our work. In many ways, John Stott gave the churches we were trying to reach permission to listen to what we had to say. “Social action” was something viewed with suspicion by many evangelicals, but Stott had the stature, the patience and the passion to convince them that it was something to be embraced rather than avoided. His book Christian Mission in the Modern World greatly helped to make our mission much easier.
Timothy Dalrymple has a good remembrance of Stott here.
And Christianity Today’s obituary of John Stott is here.
This is from the latter, written by Tim Stafford, describing a single incident in which Stott laid out a case for something he spent decades teaching evangelical Christians. In 1974, evangelicals from all over the world were gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, for what was called an “International Congress on World Evangelization.”
… the relationship between evangelism and social concern was an emotional hot button. According to some, Christians were called to preach the gospel, full stop. For others, particularly those in countries where poverty and injustice were inescapably obvious, such a stance amounted to callous indifference to people. Lausanne could easily have divided between these perspectives.
Stott had been asked to give the opening address on the nature of biblical evangelism. He began with characteristic humility, calling for “a note of evangelical repentance.” And he spoke head-on — with a lucid exposition of Scripture — to the issue on people’s minds.
“Here then are two instructions, ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘go and make disciples.’ What is the relation between the two? Some of us behave as if we thought them identical, so that if we have shared the Gospel with somebody, we consider we have completed our responsibility to love him. But no. The Great Commission neither explains, nor exhausts, nor supersedes the Great Commandment. What it does is to add to the command of neighbor-love and neighbor-service a new and urgent Christian dimension. If we truly love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.”
Stott was, as Stafford says, a gentle and diplomatic speaker and author. But he was also adamant that love for our neighbor must never be regarded as a means to an end, as a strategy in service of evangelistic efforts. His gentleness and diplomacy were a bit strained when it came to combatting that notion, as he wrote in Christian Mission:
In its most blatant form this makes social work (whether food, medicine or education) the sugar on the pill, the bait on the hook, while in its best form it gives to the gospel a credibility it would otherwise lack. In either case the smell of hypocrisy hangs round our philanthropy. And the result of making our social program the means to another end is that we breed so-called “rice-Christians.” This is inevitable if we ourselves have been “rice evangelists.” They caught the deception from us.
Our “social work,” Stott argued, should be an end in itself, an independent, uncontingent, unconditional “expression of unfeigned love.”
Much of John Stott’s long, faithful life could be described in just that phrase — an expression of unfeigned love. We were blessed to have him.
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