Given at the John Stott Memorial service at St Paul’s Bloor St Toronto on 18 March 2012. I will be giving a paper titled “John Stott Theological Educator” at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Milwaukee on 15 November at a John Stott tribute along with Alister Chapman, Andy LePeau, Greg Scharf, and Carl Trueman
As I state in my biography of C Stacey Woods, John Stott arrived in Canada for the first time on 10 November 1957. He and Wilber Sutherland, who had met him when his boat, the SS United States, docked at New York, had taken the overnight sleeper from New York. Wilber Sutherland as General Secretary of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship of Canada had invited John Stott to come to Canada to conduct evangelistic meetings in several universities, an invitation which was subsequently broadened to include the United States.
The next day. here at the University of Toronto, John Stott began his memorable North American tour. He went on to the Universities of Western Ontario and Michigan, spent Christmas with the Billy Graham family in Montreat, and then resumed his Canadian tour, starting at Winnipeg and on to UBC, concluding in February at McGill for a weekend. There a future moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada was converted. The impact of his visit was long-lasting and gave a strong boost to InterVarsity’s student ministry. His lectures, under the title “Christianity Is Christ,” were published as Basic Christianity and made his name familiar across Canada and around the world.
Stott’s next exposure to Canadians came with his visit to Urbana Illinois in 1964. For five of the next six Urbana’s, as the
InterVarsity missionary conference grew from five thousand to nineteen thousand (including several thousand Canadians), he was the featured attraction. His morning Bible readings provided a model for Biblical exposition. I remember vividly Urbana 70 and his exposition of John 14-17. He began in 1964 with II Corinthians chapters 4 through6 and ended in 1979 with Romans 1 through 5. The inspiration for those attending from Canada was energizing and ultimately incalculable.
At the first Lausanne congress John Stott arranged to meet me in an assembly room to discuss an invitation that I, on behalf of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada of which I was president at the time, had extended to him to speak at a Christian Leadership Seminar to be held at York University the following June. His choice of a room to meet elicited his comment that “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” a proverb that I have found very useful subsequently. Over 1500 people crowded York University on that occasion, as Stott was teamed with Donald McGavran and Stephen Olford.
L to R, Centre row: Mel Donald, Marj Long, JRWS, John White, ADM,Gordon Stewart
The final invitation to John Stott to come to Canada I extended, this time as General Director of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, was on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. He came to address a four day national staff conference at Geneva Park in Orillia in January 1979. The staff had not been altogether in one place for over a decade and John Stott made the meetings very memorable.
John Stott played a pivotal role in the creation of Regent College in Vancouver and spoke at four summer schools. He was also, as Timothy Dudley Smith says in his biography, invited to be the Principal. Regent became the inspiration in 1979 for the London Institute and it was during those years that the Langham Trust was brought into being here in Canada, as a part of his vision for graduate theological education in Majority World countries, and the encouragement of expository preaching. In Canada the Trust was started as a Vancouver organization with John Cochrane one of its initiators. Gradually the center of gravity moved to Toronto where an active Langham Trust board today strengthens Stott’s earlier initiatives.
Stott’s goodbye visit to Canada was in April 1998 when a series of farewell meetings here in Knox Church, Avenue Rd. congregation and at Tyndale Seminary were thought to be his final appearances in Toronto. At seventy-eight it was not anticipated we would see him again but he returned on at least three more occasions, the last in 2004.
At least three things John Stott taught Canadians: (1) The value of expository preaching ministry which he modeled and encouraged and was in sharp contrast to the usual Canadian pulpit fare. (2) The discipline of a focused life in contrast to our more relaxed and casual approach. His razor-sharp intellect challenged easy complacencies and compromises. (3) His strategic thinking, constantly strategizing, using limited resources to the best advantage, and always with a global vision, in contrast to our too often narrow focus and the pursuit of short-term goals.