Interview with John Stott  

Last year New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that if evangelicals chose a pope, they would likely select John Stott. His books and Biblical sermons have transfixed millions throughout the world. Christianity Today senior writer Tim Stafford interviewed him at his home in London and we are delighted to reprint the interview with their permission.

Q: As you see it, what is evangelicalism, and why does it matter?

A: An evangelical is a plain, ordinary Christian. We stand in the mainstream of historic, orthodox Biblical Christianity. So we can recite the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed without crossing our fingers. We believe in God the Father and in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit.

Having said that, there are two particular things we like to emphasise: the concern for authority on the one hand and salvation on the other. For evangelical people our authority is in the God who has spoken supremely in Jesus Christ. And that is equally true of redemption or salvation. God has acted in and through Jesus Christ for the salvation of sinners.

I think it’s necessary for evangelicals to add that what God has said in Christ and in the Biblical witness to Christ, and what God has done in and through Christ, are both, to use the Greek word, hapax — meaning once and for all. There is a finality about God’s word in Christ, and there is a finality about God’s work in Christ. To imagine that we could add a word to His Word, or add a work to His Work, is extremely derogatory to the unique glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Q: You didn’t mention the Bible, which would surprise some people.

A: I did actually, but you didn’t notice it. I said Christ and the Biblical witness to Christ. But the really distinctive emphasis is on Christ. I want to shift conviction from a book, if you like, to a person. As Jesus himself said, the Scriptures bear witness to me. Their main function is to witness to Christ.

Q: Part of the implication is that evangelicals are not to be a negatively inspired people. Our real focus ought to be the glory of Christ.

A: I believe that very strongly. We believe in the authority of the Bible because Christ has endorsed its authority. He stands between the two testaments. As we look back to the Old Testament, he has endorsed it. As we look forward to the New Testament we accept it because of the apostolic witness to Christ. He deliberately chose and appointed and prepared the apostles, in order that they might have their unique apostolic witness to him. I like to see Christ in the middle, endorsing the old, preparing for the new. And although the question of the New Testament canon is a complicated one, yet in general we are able to say that canonicity is apostolicity.

Q: How has the position of evangelicals changed during the years of your ministry?

A: I look back—it’s been 61 years since I was ordained—and when I was ordained in the Church of England, evangelicals in the Church of England were a despised and rejected minority. The bishops lost no opportunity to ridicule us. Now, over the intervening 60 years, I’ve seen the evangelical movement in England grow in size, in maturity, certainly in scholarship, and therefore I think in influence and impact. We went from being a ghetto to being on the ascendancy, which is a very dangerous place to be.

Q: Do you care to comment on the dangers?

A: Well, pride is the ever-present danger that faces all of us. In many ways it is good for us to be despised and rejected. I think of Jesus’ words, ‘Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.’

Going back to the hapax, it’s a very humbling concept. The essence of evangelicalism is very humbling. You have William Temple saying, ‘The only thing of my very own which I can contribute to my own redemption is the sin from which I need to be redeemed.’

Q: We have also seen an immense growth of the church worldwide, largely along evangelical lines. What do you see as its significance?

A: This enormous growth is a fulfilment of God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4. God promised Abraham not only to bless him, not only to bless his family or his posterity, but through his posterity to bless all the families of the earth. And whenever we look at a multi-ethnic congregation we are seeing a fulfilment of that amazing promise of God. A promise made by God to Abraham 4,000 years ago is being fulfilled right before our very eyes today.

Q: You know this growing church probably as well as any Westerner does. I wonder how you evaluate it.

A: The answer is ‘growth without depth’. None of us wants to dispute the extraordinary growth of the church. But it has been largely numerical and statistical growth. And there has not been sufficient growth in discipleship that is comparable to the growth in numbers.

Q: How can the Western church, which surely has problems of its own, fruitfully interact? Right now many churches are sending mission teams all over the world.

A: I certainly want to be positive to short-term mission trips, and I think on the whole they are a good thing. They do give Westerners an awfully good opportunity to taste Southern Christianity, and to be challenged by it, especially by its exuberant vitality. But I think the leaders of such mission trips would be very wise to warn their members that this is only a very limited experience of cross-cultural mission.

True mission that is based on the example of Jesus involves entering another world, the world of another culture. And that incarnational cross-cultural mission is and can be very costly. I want to say, please realise that if God calls you to be a cross-cultural missionary it will take you ten years to learn the language and to learn the culture in such a way that you are accepted more or less as a national.

Q: So there’s really no replacing the long-term missionary.

A: I think not.

Q: What about what some call the greatest mission field, which is our own secularising or secularised culture? What do we need to do to reach this increasingly pagan society?

A: I think we need to say to one another that it’s not so secular as it looks. I believe that these so-called secular people are engaged in a quest for at least three things. The first is transcendence. It’s interesting in a so-called secular culture how many people are looking for something beyond. I find that a great challenge to the quality of our Christian worship. Does it offer people what they are instinctively looking for, which is transcendence, the reality of God?

The second thing is significance. Almost everybody is looking for their own personal identity. Who am I, where do I come from, where am I going to, what is it all about? That is a challenge to the quality of our Christian teaching. We need to teach people who they are. They don’t know who they are. We do.

And thirdly is their quest for community. Everywhere, people are looking for community, for relationships of love.

These things about our humanity are on our side in our evangelism, because people are looking for the very things we have to offer them.

Q: And therefore you’re not despairing of the West.

A: I’m not despairing. But I believe that evangelism is through the local church, through the community, rather than through the individual. That the church should be an alternative society, a visible sign of the kingdom. And the tragedy is that our local churches don’t seem altogether to manifest community and these other things.

Q: Biblical preaching has fallen on hard times in many places. There’s a lot more interest in telling compelling stories. What do you say to a pastor who is desperately trying to hold his congregation’s attention, and really doesn’t have the confidence that enables one to just preach from a Biblical text?

A: It’s the same issue in the Majority World as it is in America. Churches live, grow and flourish by the Word of God. And they languish and even perish without it.

So Langham Partners International has three basic convictions. Conviction one is that God wants His church to grow. One of the verses I like best is Colossians 1:28-29, in which Paul says we proclaim Christ, warning everybody and teaching everybody in all wisdom, in order that we may present everybody mature in Christ. There’s a plain call to maturity, to grow up out of babyhood.

Second, they grow by the Word of God. I suppose you could concede that there are other ways by which the church grows, but if you take the New Testament as a whole, it’s the Word of God that matures the people of God.

Which brings me to the third conviction, that the Word of God comes to the people of God mainly, though not exclusively, through preaching. I often envisage on a Sunday morning the amazing spectacle of people of God converging on their places of worship all over the world. They’re going to medieval cathedrals, to house churches, to the open air. They know that in the course of the worship service there will be a sermon, and it should be a Biblical sermon, so that through the Word of God they may grow.

To see a preacher enter the pulpit with the Bible in his hands and his heart, or for me to enter the pulpit with the Bible in my hands and my heart, my blood begins to flow and my eyes to sparkle for the sheer glory of having God’s Word to expound. We need to emphasise the glory, the privilege of sharing God’s truth with the people.

Q: Where do we evangelicals need to go? We’ve been through quite a trip in the last 50 years. Where next?

A: My immediate answer is that we need to go beyond evangelism. Evangelism is supposed to be evangelicals’ specialty. I am totally committed to world evangelisation. But I would like to look beyond evangelism to the transforming power of the gospel, both in individuals and in society.

With regard to individuals, I’m noting in different expressions of the evangelical faith an absence of that quest for holiness that marked our forebears, who founded the Keswick movement, for example, and the quest for what they sometimes called Scriptural holiness, or practical holiness. Somehow holiness has a rather sanctimonious feel to it. People don’t like to be described as holy. But the holiness of the New Testament is Christlikeness. I wish that the whole evangelical movement could consciously set before us the desire to grow in Christlikeness.

Regarding social transformation, I’ve reflected a great deal about the salt and light metaphors, the models that Jesus himself chose in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount. ‘You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.’ It seems to me that those models must be said to contain four things.

First, that Christians are radically different from non-Christians, or if they are not they ought to be. Because in ‘you are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world’ Jesus sets over against each other two communities. On the one hand there is the world, and on the other hand there is you, who is the dark world’s light. Jesus implied that we are as different as light from darkness, and salt from decay.

Second, the salt and light metaphors teach that Christians must permeate non-Christian society. Salt does no good if it stays in the salt shaker; it has to penetrate. Light does no good if you hide it under a bed, or under a bucket. It has to permeate the darkness. So both metaphors call us not just to be different, but to permeate society.

The third, the more controversial implication, is that the salt and light metaphors indicate that Christians can change non-Christian society. I want to argue that the models must mean that, because both salt and light are effective commodities. They change the environment in which they are placed. If you put salt on fish or meat, the bacterial decay is hindered. If you turn on the light, something happens, darkness is dispelled. So both salt and light are effective. They change the environment.

Fourth, Christians must retain their distinctives. Jesus said the salt must retain its saltiness, and the light must retain its brightness. And if they don’t retain these they cannot affect society.

My hope is that in the future evangelical leaders will assure that their social agenda will include such vital but controversial topics as halting climate change, eradicating poverty in the world, abolishing armouries of mass destruction, responding adequately to the AIDS pandemic, and asserting the human rights of women and children in all cultures. I hope our agenda does not remain too narrow.