The first volume of the official biography of John Stott, by Timothy Dudley-Smith, is published by IVP. EN interviewed the subject and the author of the biography...
EN: John Stott, you came to Christ through the work of E.J.H. Nash (Bash) while you were at Rugby School in the 1930s. And the book gives the impression of you as quite an idealistic youth. What was it about the Lord Jesus Christ that led you to surrender your life to him?
JS: Well, I always said that I was very well aware of two things about myself in those far-off days. One was that I was separated from God. I, like most people of those days, believed there was a God. I had no idea what he was like. But if he existed, I was cut off and estranged from him. I tried to find him. I used to attend the services in the memorial chapel at Rugby. I used to read religious literature and try to pray, but I could not get through. Secondly, I was defeated. As you rightly say, I had high ideals of the kind of person I wanted to be. I was also weak-willed. There was a gap between the ideal and the reality.
So it was with that background that E.J.H. Nash spoke to me about the death and resurrection of Jesus: that He had died to turn my estrangement into reconciliation, and that he had risen to turn my defeat into victory. And the correspondence between Christ's offer and my need was too great, it seemed to me, to be a coincidence.
Influences
EN: The book is subtitled: 'The Making of a Leader'. Can you tell us what you think are the major influences which shaped and prepared you for leadership in the church?
JS: IVP chose the book's subtitle - I accept no responsibilities for it! But in answering the question, I would certainly begin with Bash's Iwerne camps, because my early days as a Christian were immersed in the camps. My first feeble faulty steps in personal evangelism were there. Then there would be Bash's influence, no doubt his prayers too. He wrote to me once a week for five years. He was amazingly faithful. I owe a great deal to that early nurture.
TDS: It was a characteristic of Bash that he was not content simply to see the people he had brought to the Lord rest there. He wanted to see them become mature, able not only to win others, but to build them up. He also had an unerring eye for spotting leadership potential.
JS: I would go on to add those very painful two years at Cambridge which are recorded in the book.
EN: Yes, you had a painful struggle with your father while you were at Cambridge over your ordination and your pacifism - what did that experience teach you?
JS: That toughened me up as a Christian because I stood very much alone. We were a very united, affectionate family and to be split in this way was particularly painful. On the other hand, the CICCU, the Christian Union of Cambridge, became a surrogate family for me. But the other thing (backtracking for a moment) which contributed to my outlook, was being head of the school at Rugby. There I was precipitated into all sorts of things like writing editorials for 'The Meteor' (school magazine), organising the whole of the school sports, and chairing the committee of heads of school houses. So that introduced me to the difficulties of administration.
Another factor would be reading theology at university and having to face the considerable challenge of liberal theology, with very little by way of biblical academic literature to help me.
Leadership and vision
EN: While you were studying for the ministry during the early 1940s, did you have any sense of being prepared to fulfil a special role for the church in the coming post-war years?
JS: No, I would not put it like that. What I think I had was that I had learned both from Iwerne and the CICCU, namely, methods of evangelism which I longed to see experienced in the local church. These principles of evangelism were new to me and I had not seen any attempt to repeat these experiences in the local church, which I had come to believe in biblically.
EN: You obviously had a lovely relationship with the people of All Souls. If you were asked to divulge the four most important principles which have guided your ministry there, what would they be?
JS: Well, one would be regular evangelistic meetings. I got used to those at Cambridge. Every Sunday night for 8 weeks in every term there was an evangelistic service with an opportunity for people to come to Christ. So at All Souls we began these monthly evangelistic services called 'The Guest Service'.
Secondly, there was an elaborate programme of follow-up and counselling. Thirdly, would be lay-training, the development of an annual training school of 12 weeks with an exam at the end! Fourthly, which I suppose I should have begun with, there was expository preaching.
EN: There are thrilling descriptions in the book of your university missions and the Billy Graham crusades during the 1950s. There was a lot of scorn from intellectual churchmen towards evangelicalism then. How did you handle that?
TDS: I believe there was a strong element of defensiveness in it from an academic coterie, who were sincere, I'm sure, in what they thought they were doing. But I guess they didn't much like to see what, after all, they saw as their profession - they did call themselves ministers of the gospel - hitting the front pages of the secular newspapers in a way they would never have achieved in years. Such things were dismissed as 'simplistic'.
JS: Mind you, there was a lot of ignorance. I think we had a certain self-confidence, because they had not really listened to Billy.
TDS: I was editing Crusade magazine. We had the correspondence in The Times about 'fundamentalism' over a long period. And John wrote a lengthy and still very valuable article on fundamentalism, saying what it is and what it is not, and then setting out the basic principles that make us believe in the inspiration and authority of Scripture.
But about four months later, John wrote similarly on evangelism, because Billy was coming under attack, and so indeed were evangelicals, for the kind of evangelism which looks for a response and expects conversions. It was the time when 'brainwashing' was becoming a familiar term, and the psychiatrists were saying that conversion could be just a manipulation of personality.
So in 1956 we put both of John's articles together and produced the booklet Fundamentalism and Evangelism which was sent to every bishop and went through many reprintings, both here and in America.
Evangelicalism?
EN: With that background, comes a broad question - what has gone right for evangelicalism since the 1950s and what has gone wrong in your view?
JS: What has gone wrong is that I still think there is an anti-intellectualism that is endemic to some forms of evangelicalism. Not least in some areas of the charismatic movement there is the suggestion that the great hindrance to our development as Christian people is our minds, and we have to unscrew them and throw them away. But I am persuaded that our reason is an essential part of the Godlike humanness that we bear, and that anti-intellectualism is a blight on the Christian landscape.
I always admire Dr. Douglas Johnston, the first General Secretary of IVF, who had the vision of capturing the C of E particularly for the gospel. He started the Tyndale Fellowship at Tyndale House with its library in Cambridge. He recognised that we could never win the country unless we could win the arguments.
TDS: The other side to that penny is what has gone right. While there still remains an anti-intellectualism, the groundwork has been laid for the intellectual battle on which, in the end, a credible evangelicalism is going to assert itself. The groundwork has been laid, by things like Tyndale House, in a way that has not been seen since before Darwinism.
EN: This is a question which many ordinary Christians will relate to. Was your father a Christian? How did you cope with his death?
JS: I have no knowledge that he ever became a Christian. I know that he read parts of Basic Christianity. And I know that after we were reconciled at the end of the war he came two or three times a year to a service at All Souls. So, there is no evidence that he did come consciously to Christ. But of course, I have hoped that he may have done so. I heard about his death when I was in Australia. How did I cope with it? I believe in the justice and the mercy of God. I know that whatever has happened to him and will happen to him will be perfectly consonant with that justice and mercy and I find my rest in that.
Denominationalism?
EN: Some Christian commentators speak about us facing a 'meltdown' of the denominations in the future. Do you think that is true? What effect will it have on evangelical unity?
JS: Let me begin by saying that I have never been a strong believer in denominations. I believe that the Church of England is not really a denomination, but it is the church of the English people. Historically, we date ourselves not from the matrimonial problems of Henry VIII, but to the first coming of Christianity to these shores in Roman times. I wish that the churches in England could come together to form 'the Church of England'. I don't want denominations to continue, if only we could secure a unity that is consonant with truth.
EN: How does that square with your intervention from the chair after the call of Dr. Lloyd-Jones at the 1966 EA meeting, which to some could look fairly denominational?
TDS: You'll have to wait for the second volume of the biography. There is quite a section on that!
JS: Could I just add one thing. Archbishop George Carey, for example, says that we are Anglican first and evangelicalism is a tradition. I put it the other way round. Evangelicalism is the truth and Anglicanism is the tradition. I am an Evangelical first (the noun) and an Anglican second (the adjective).
EN: Hookses, your cottage in West Wales, has been your retreat for writing. In the 1950s and 60s, an evangelistic book was a good thing for ordinary people. What about now when people do not seem to be readers?
JS: I still want to urge them to read. It is a means of grace, like prayer and fellowship and the Lord's day. It is a divinely given means of grace through the history of printing and people neglect it at their peril. It is a great tragedy that there are so many people who can read but don't.
EN: Lastly, if there is one lesson from your experience as a Christian you would like to pass on to a coming generation, what would it be?
JS: I think I would want to say, the power of biblical preaching. In different parts of the world I have seen churches change under the influence of the Word. Of course, it is the Word in the power of the Spirit. The Word is the sword of the Spirit, so it is ludicrous that we should ever separate them. The power of the Word in the Spirit is dramatic and leads individuals and churches into maturity in Christ. I have seen this constantly with my own eyes.
This extract from the biography recounts an 'Experiment with homelessness' from the late 1940s when John Stott was a young curate at All Souls.
Harry Mossop, the tramp referred to in his early parish diary, came to lunch at least once on Christmas Day, and John Stott cooked eggs and bacon for both of them in the basement kitchen at 1 Queen Anne Street. It was the memory of such visits that later prompted him to start a system of Old People's Welfare Visitors, perhaps 50 or 60 of them at one time, regularly caring for the old and housebound of the parish.
Such contacts with Harry Mossop and others like him inspired John Stott, comparatively early in his time as curate, to experience for himself a glimpse of the life lived by the vagrants and homeless on the streets of London. He decided, therefore, that for a couple of days he would 'disappear' from home, friends and parish, and tramp the streets, to discover for himself at least a little of what it meant to be one of London's underclass.
Feeling rejection
I wanted to feel what it was like to be rejected by society. So I put on some very old clothes. I let my stubble grow for several days. We had identity cards in those days, so I put mine in my shoe, and then I started wandering about near the river and the Embankment, where the tramps were. My first night was spent under the arches of Charing Cross bridge, surrounded by tramps, men and women whose only covering apart from their clothes was newspapers. I didn't sleep very much, it was very hard on the pavement, the tramps were all coming and going; some of them were drunk and made a lot of noise, and it was very cold. I don't remember what month it was, but I have an idea it was October or November, the beginning of winter. So I was very thankful when the sun came up, and it was a lovely day. I remember I walked through the East End of London, and because I'd had very little sleep, I lay down in the sunshine on a bombed site, among the rosebay willowherb, and fell asleep. However, before that, at dawn when the shops were beginning to open, I went to a number of ABC teashops - I had deliberately taken no money with me - where one of the employees would be cleaning the steps outside. I asked if they could give me a job, for a cup of tea, or for a breakfast, but none of them would. I began to feel very rejected.
In the doss house
That night I went to the Whitechapel Salvation Army doss house and queued up for a bed. I remember that the Salvation Army officer who was at the window where you booked in, was rather brusque or impatient, not to me, but to somebody else. So, forgetting who I was meant to be, forgetting my role, I said to him: 'As a Salvation Army officer, you ought to be trying to win that man for Christ - and not talking to him like that', and he looked at me very sharply, wondering who on earth this was - I think I tried to do it in a Cockney accent! But anyway, I got a bed. It was in a dormitory, with no cubicles and no privacy. It was a dreadful night; many men were coming in during the night drunk and shouting, and one or two of them were obviously mentally disturbed. So I again got very little sleep, and by the morning after this, I'd had enough. I really had begun to feel like an outsider, a castaway.
So I then went to Toynbee Hall, and I dropped in there, I think, and asked for breakfast. The man who interviewed me was immediately suspicious - probably my accent wasn't good enough - and I think he said something like: 'The show's up ! You'd better tell us who you are'. By then I was quite glad to do so. I didn't tell them I was a clergyman, but I got out my identity card and showed it to them. So they gave me breakfast, and I went back to 1 Queen Anne Street and found the Dukes. They had a strong social conscience and were very interested in my experiment, for what was really only 48 hours.
