BRUCE C. WEARNE reflects on the impact of John Stott…
Let me add my tribute to the contribution made by John Stott who has died recently aged 90.
John Stott made his mark by developing, maintaining and promoting a spiritual discipline in which Christian leaders (whatever their denomination) would take up the difficult and exacting task of listening carefully to the up-and-coming generations of Christians – at home and abroad. In this way he led by example and then with quiet and persistent percolation sought to make a coherent, public and widely accessible response so that as many who might hear or read his views would benefit and grow in grace.
“His contribution has in large part been an unstinting giving of himself in one-on-one listening and absorbing and then responding. He has certainly been a great encouragement to many.” |
I met Stott once and spoke one-on-one with him for about half-an-hour. That was in January, 1971, at the Australian Intervarsity Fellowship Conference in Canberra. He was lecturing on Christ Jesus the “foot-washing servant” of His disciples. He listened to what I had to say about the way Christians of my own generation were drifting and giving up their faith. He took on board my expression of concern that for too many Christian students university studies had become a pragmatic means to a materialistic end. More Bible studies and more prayer meetings were not able to challenge the deep-down spiritual compromise that was being played out in interVarsity circles.
At that stage I had been reading his books for seven years. In my library I keep one of the first Christian books I ever read as a young Christian. It was Stott’s Your Confirmation. This was the study manual used by the curate in our local Church of England parish confirmation class – it has a cover with an English country lane lined with a dry-brick fence that winds itself away into the distance. Yes, I guess it would be true to say that I learned about the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a church context in which an English form of what we now call Anglicanism was still very much in evidence. I’m glad I had Stott’s simple though not simplistic “CofE” explanation of the Christian life. I guess I came to concentrate on that rather than the English cultural forms.
In the expanding outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, our new Church of England parish was named after St Edward the Confessor King, the last King of the House of Wessex (1003-1066), and South Blackburn (this is Australia in 1965!) was the southern part of a wider Blackburn parish with another church named after St Alfred who defended Anglo-Saxondom against the Vikings (848-899) at the other northern end. St John’s Blackburn was at the centre. Clearly, the English born Archbishop of Melbourne at the time saw some value in putting such ancient Anglo-medieval symbolism on the map of Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Nevertheless, I have never ever heard any churchman explain this nomenclature nor has anyone to my knowledge ever tried to explain this incredibly eccentric and obscurantist ecclesiastical policy. What did they think they were doing? When one reflects upon these things an evident contrast develops between that Anglo-medieval symbolism and Stott’s undecorated but plainly written approach to explaining the Christian life. My sentiments were well and truly on the side of Stott’s “plain Christianity”.
Stott’s book was written to bring the Gospel to churched British Anglicans. Perhaps the book’s cover is not as far from the experience of its UK readers as the son of Ethelred the Unready was from us growing up in Blackburn South on the other side of the world. In this book Stott is addressing young people who, as he interprets them, are traditionally (nominally) Christian – and I guess that means that they had parents and especially fathers who were prompted to keep a grip on reality during the war years by regular attendance at church parades, and in so doing they confirmed their traditional Christian allegiance – or something like that. The book implies that the readers might have a vague belief in God but little knowledge of the Scriptures and no great awareness of their own need for God’s mercy. Your Confirmation goes through the Apostle’s Creed and works on the assumption that those reading it, having been brought up with some association with the church, now need to have some coherent statement of what this faith means in their daily lives. In that sense the book is classic Stott, working within the Anglican framework to formulate an Evangelical (Prayer Book) account of the basic rudiments of the Christian faith for daily life.
Your Confirmation is effectively a manual to give those going through the Anglican rite of confirmation a more or less coherent picture of (what Stott then took to be) the “backbone” of Anglican church membership – that is, as found in the 39 Articles. In that sense it provides a more or less English Christian and evangelical account of what it means to take one’s place with other members of the church in living out of the faith that the church professes. But we were not then living in an English context, even if Blake’s Jerusalem could be listed as one of the hymns to be sung in Sunday morning worship. Incredible!
But in my retrospective 2011 view Your Confirmation was sufficient to encourage a young Christian like myself to begin to understand the religion of the Prayer Book, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount and the 10 Commandments. But now I ask: was this perspective powerful enough to prevent the secularisation that was already evident in our lives as a cohort of Anglican confirmation candidates? I don’t think so. The members of that confirmation class may have been confirmed but it seems to me that this was really the end of Sunday School for many of them. I would like to be shown to be wrong but I suspect that for many confirmation was the beginning of the end for many as far as any Christian profession was concerned.
Stott’s book can not be the reason for the ongoing secularisation of course and I suspect that what I was then experiencing with my peers as a young Christian, Stott was also beginning to wrestle with in his London ministry at All Soul’s Langham Place. His 1984 book Issues Facing Christians Today might be a more appropriate book for a confirmation class syllabus. And indeed his subsequent books have attempted to challenge the persistent drift away from the faith, particularly among people of my generation brought up with some attachment to the church.
At the time I found the writings of Michael Griffith’s Consistent Christianity and Take My Life to be much more “practical” and helpful in actually addressing the daily challenges and hurdles to Christian profession that was the lot of members of Inter-School Christian Fellowship in those days.
In that sense we can say that Stott began addressing “issues” out of a recognition that the church of Jesus Christ was evidently losing ground. That sense has been around ever since 1965 when I was confirmed. In fact, I experienced that declension in the immediate aftermath of the actual confirmation service. It was as if we were inducted into something or other where it was not really the “done thing” to talk seriously about following Jesus Christ.
But the problem is indeed deeply structural. The church finds itself almost completely at a loss to know what to do when the discipleship of its recently confirmed members is confronted by the rampant forces of secularisation – in the media, in education, in industrial relations, in literature, film and art, on the sporting field – let alone in the way in which churches are administered.
In that respect many keen Christians of my generation found the writings of Hans Rookmaaker and L’Abri to be a breath of fresh air enabling them to avoid the constrictions of a neutralised/ neutralising ‘churchianity’ that presumed that the cultural forces outside the church sphere were simply religiously neutral. And as I think about it, my own subsequent “post-Confirmation” life as a Christian seems to have some parallels with Stott’s post-Your Confirmationconcern to take account of “social issues” outside of a church context.
John Stott took life outside the church very seriously indeed and he knew it was not religiously neutral. But the little book Your Confirmation was really too silent or vague about all the major “social issues” that were then for us coming onto our social horizon at school, in the work-place, in the media, on the playing field. After writing that book and over a very productive career as a publicist and lecturer we have seen Stott remaining persistently open to the “issues of the day” that have to be confronted with Biblically-enriched understanding.
It is worth reflecting upon the fact that Anglicanism’s structural instability as a church “but halfly reformed” did not stop John Stott’s ministry which, as I have said, was one in which he carefully listened to and sought to give a coherent response to all of the many issues facing Christians today around the world. His contribution has in large part been an unstinting giving of himself in one-on-one listening and absorbing and then responding. He has certainly been a great encouragement to many. Let us thank God for this inspiring ministry and take up the same spiritual discipline.
