I was interested to learn that when John Stott died on 27th July, he was surrounded by friends and the Music of Handel’s Messiah. Many people – including myself – regard him as the most important evangelical leader of his generation.
Fifty years ago some evangelicals tended to treat the social gospel with caution and a distraction from the task of evangelism.
It was John Stott who more than anyone else helped reverse this. As a London pastor, Stott increasingly recognised the need for evangelicalism to reclaim its heritage of engagement with the social issues of the day. As he told an interviewer years later, “In the early 1960s, I began to travel in the Third World, and I saw poverty as I had not seen it before. It became clear to me that it was utterly impossible to take that old view. As I read and studied and meditated, my vision of God grew and I came to see the obvious things: that God is not just interested in religion but in the whole of life – in justice as well as justification.”
Stott was deeply influential in the Lausanne Covenant which set the agenda for the international evangelical movement and gave the opening address on the nature of biblical evangelism.
‘Here then are two instructions, ‘love your neighbour’ 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 out responsibility to love him. But no. The Great Commission neither explains, nor exhausts, nor supersedes the Great Commandment….If we truly love our neighbour, we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally, if we truly love our neighbour, we shall not stop there.’
Questions:
- Has a John Stott book or sermon impacted your life?
- What is the best way for Christians to tackle social issues today?
londoninternetchurch
Peter Delaney
lyndamkeen
Revd Roger Hoath
