John Stott

Life

Stott was born in London, England, in 1921. As a schoolboy he was converted through the ministry of the Rev. E. J. H. Nash, and he went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1945. That same year he began serving as a curate at All Souls Church, Langham Place, in London, and from 1950 to 1975 he was the church's rector (its senior priest). After stepping down, he remained at the church as rector emeritus. From 1959 to 1991 he was an honorary chaplain to the Queen. He never married. In 2007 he retired from public ministry and lived in a community for retired clergy until his death in 2011 at the age of 90. Although in Anglican usage he would be called a priest, Korean Protestants commonly refer to him as a "pastor."

Ministry and Achievements

• Pastoral ministry: At All Souls Church he devoted himself to prayer, expository preaching (preaching that explains a biblical text passage by passage), regular evangelism, discipleship training for new believers, and the training of lay leaders. Beginning in the 1950s, he cooperated with Billy Graham's evangelistic crusades in Britain.
• Lausanne Movement: At the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne in 1974, he led the drafting of the Lausanne Covenant. He also played a major role in producing the Manila Manifesto in 1989. He held that biblical principles should apply not only to the individual soul and the church but to society as a whole. This conviction is reported to have influenced the Lausanne Movement's approach of addressing evangelism and social responsibility together.
• Institutions: In 1974 he founded the Langham Partnership to help train church leaders in the developing world, devoting the royalties from his books to this work. Beginning in 1967, he served for seventeen years as chairman of the Church of England Evangelical Council.
• Writings: He wrote more than fifty books. Basic Christianity (1958) is reported to have sold more than 2.5 million copies. The Cross of Christ (1986) is regarded as his principal theological work. The Radical Disciple, published in 2010, was his final book.
• In 2005 the American newsweekly Time named him one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World."

Influence on the Korean Church

More than thirty of his books have been translated into Korean, most of them published by IVP, the publishing arm of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of Korea (IVF). For this reason, some observe that he became more widely known among Protestants than within the Anglican Church of Korea, even though it belongs to his own tradition. He first visited Korea in 1993 for the IVF national conference. During his visits in 1993 and 1999, he is reported to have attended the IVF national conference and the World Assembly of the IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students). On these occasions he reportedly warned that many Christians had fallen into materialism and urged them to live simple and generous lives. Some also credit his evangelical outlook with considerable influence on Korean Protestantism. Ahead of the Fourth Lausanne Congress, held in Korea in 2024, an anthology of his writings was published in the country.

Assessment

Supporters regard him as a representative of an evangelicalism that is faithful to Scripture while also intellectually balanced. Billy Graham described him as the most respected clergyman. In 2004 The New York Times wrote that if Protestants were to elect a pope, Stott would be the leading candidate. Among those who knew him, he was affectionately called "Uncle John."

He was also the subject of criticism and controversy. In 1966 he clashed publicly with the Free Church leader Martyn Lloyd-Jones over the future direction of evangelical Anglicans. Stott chose not to leave the Church of England but to work for the renewal of the evangelical tradition within it. He also expressed support for annihilationism (the view that the unrepentant are not punished eternally but are ultimately destroyed) with regard to the punishment of hell, which drew criticism from some evangelicals. For more on this subject, see the article Heaven and Hell.