Former vicar of All Souls Langham Place in London, and a key leader among evangelicals worldwide, John Stott died at 3.15pm yesterday (27 July) in his retirement home at St Barnabas College.
He was surround by family and close friends. They were reading the Bible together and listening to Handel's Messiah before slipping away in his sleep.
John leaves behind a massive legacy. Much has already been writen in the last 12 hours about the man, so I feel my own small contribution here will be extremely poor by any standards.
However, I can still fondly remember him coming to our college in the early Nineties and speaking at Chapel. Being theological students he expected much from us and only spoke from his New Testament Greek. Incredible! It was one of the few times I can even remember that happening. I just sat there colouring in the pages of my Good News BIble. But he was not a dry academic scholar, he was a man who was in love with the Lord, more than the words he studied.
For over seventy years he has remained an influential and redoubtable figure on the landscape of post-war Christianity, often arguing for the place of Bible-based faith among his Christian Liberal colleagues when at times he was a lone voice.
He had the most amazing skill to reason and articulate at a level most could people could understand, he did not just write for fellow scholars. The simplicity of his well-crafted arguments showed the depth of his studies. They came with such confidence. He depature has surely left a gaping hole in our lives. However, we do have the most amazing library of books left behind penned by him over the years.
Doug Birdsall, executive chairman of the Lausanne Movement, put his global influence in context: "John Stott impacted the church around the world in many ways. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to articulate clearly and to defend robustly the evangelical faith which he always understood to be biblical faith, grounded in the New Testament. Evangelicalism was to Stott an expression of historic, orthodox Christianity...
"Everywhere John Stott travelled to teach, he encouraged 'double listening'. This was a listening to the voice of the Spirit of God through his Word, and listening to the voice and the needs of our broken world."
A memorial website has already been set up at http://www.johnstottmemorial.org/
Well done, good and faithful servant. Enjoy eternity with the one that saves.
ASD
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