Crucial questions for evangelicals

In 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that if evangelicals chose a Pope, they would be likely to select John Stott.

Stott, who is 85, has been at the heart of evangelical renewal in the UK. His books and biblical sermons have transfixed millions throughout the world, and he has been involved in many important world councils and dialogues, not least as chair of the committee that drafted the Lausanne Covenant (1974) and the Manila Manifesto (1989), defining statements for evangelicals.

For more than 35 years he has devoted three months of every year to travelling the globe, with a particular emphasis on the churches of the Third World. He is, then, ideally suited to comment on evangelicals’ past, present and future.

Tim Stafford interviewed him at his home in London. This article is a reduced version of Stafford's interview published in Christianity Today and used with exclusive permission.

What is evangelicalism?

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

JS: I’d like to begin by saying that an evangelical is a plain, ordinary Christian. There is nothing peculiar about evangelicals. 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. We’re just plain ordinary Trinitarian Christians.

Having said that, there are two particular things on which we like to lay our emphasis: the concern for authority on the one hand and salvation on the other. For evangelical people our authority for what we believe and why we believe it is in the God who has spoken supremely in Jesus Christ and in the full biblical witness to 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 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: Can you expand a bit on the importance of finality—this word hapax and how it speaks to our day?

JS: My main concern is to defend and magnify the unique glory of Christ. So I sometimes say we can talk about Alexander the Great, Charles the Great and Napoleon the Great, but not Jesus the Great. He is not the Great, he is the Only. There is nobody like him. He has no peers, no competitors. And it’s for the sake of his name, for the glory of his name, that I want to hold fast to this uniqueness.

It doesn’t mean that we’ve nothing more to learn. In my book Evangelical Truth I tried to bring together two adverbs, on the one hand hapax and on the other hand mallon. Hapax is the once for all. Mallon is more and more. So although God has no more to say than he has said in Christ, we have much more to learn as the Holy Spirit enables us to grasp more and more of what God has once for all revealed in Christ and what he has done for our redemption. We can enter more fully into this redemption that he has made possible. But we cannot add to it.

Third World Christianity

Q: You have devoted so much of your time to the growing church in the Third World. You know it probably as well as any Westerner does. I just wonder how you see it.

JS: 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.

JS: 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, which is based on the example of Jesus, involves entering another world, the world of another culture. And this incarnational cross-cultural mission is and can be very costly. Whereas I am afraid that in some short-term mission trips there is not much costliness. 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.

Reaching secular society

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?

JS: I think we need to say to one another that it’s not as pagan as it looks. And it’s not as 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, their own significant identity. Who am I, where do I come from, where am I going to, what is it all about? That I think 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. They are human beings made in the image of God, although that image has been defaced.

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

The importance of preaching

Q: Do you want to talk about preaching?

JS: I never tire of doing that. I’m an impenitent believer in the importance of preaching. Of course, that’s biblical preaching.

Q: What do you say to a pastor who is desperately trying to hold his congregation’s attention, feels he is competing with all kinds of media sophistication, and really doesn’t have the confidence that enables one to just preach from a biblical text?

JS: If it is true, as Jesus said, quoting Deuteronomy, that humans live not by bread only, but by every word out of the mouth of God, if that is true of individuals, it is equally true of churches. Churches live, grow and flourish by the word of God. And they languish and even perish without it.

So what we have come to call ‘the Langham logic’ consists of three basic convictions, responding to the current scene of growth without depth. Conviction one is that God wants his church to grow. There are ample texts in the NT in which the apostles call on the congregations to grow up. 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. And the apostles often accuse the churches of still being in the infant stage. God wants his people to grow.

Secondly, 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 which matures the people of God.

This 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 the 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. There’s this great movement toward the worship centre, and 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.

If God wants his people to grow, which he does, and if they grow by the word of God, which they do, and if the word of God comes to the people of God mainly through preaching, which it does, the logical question to ask is, what can we do to raise the standards of biblical preaching? It’s in answer to that logical question that the three programmes of the Langham Partnership International (scholarships, literature, and preaching seminars) have developed.

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, well then 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.

Evangelical future?

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

JS: My immediate answer is that we need to go beyond evangelism. Evangelism is supposed to be evangelicals’ specialty. And that’s fine. 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 which marked our forebears, who founded the Keswick movement, for example, and the quest for what they sometimes called Scriptural holiness, or practical holiness. I believe we should come back to it. I think a very healthy attitude is to see holiness as Christ-likeness. 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 Christ-likeness. I think the best description of Christ-likeness is Galatians 5.22-23, the fruit of the Spirit. It seems difficult to find any better portrait of Jesus himself than we get there. I wish that the whole evangelical movement could consciously set before us the desire to grow in Christ-likeness and to have that as their goal for the individual.

Regarding social transformation, I’ve reflected a great deal on 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.

Firstly, 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 are the dark world’s light. Jesus implied that we are as different as light from darkness, and salt from decay.

Secondly, 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 indicate this infiltration or permeation. That is the call, 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.

Now we have to think carefully. This is not to resurrect the social gospel. It is not to claim that we can perfect society. But we can improve society. Jesus through his disciples has had an enormous influence.

Fourthly, Christians must retain their distinctives. Salt must retain its saltiness, and the light must retain its brightness. And if they don’t they cannot affect society. But if we maintain our brightness and our saltiness, then we can have this influence on society, and make it more pleasing to God.

My hope is that in the future evangelical leaders will ensure that their social agenda will include such vital but controversial topics as halting climate change, eradicating poverty, 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.

An interview with John Stott

What is evangelicalism?

Third World Christianity

Reaching secular society

The importance of preaching

Evangelical future?

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