John Stott: good and faithful servant

(translated from the Japanese)

I was sad to read last week about the death of Dr. John Stott, called to go home to the Lord on July 27, at age 90. For more than 60 years Dr. Stott was a major figure in worldwide evangelicalism. He was also a Church of England priest. And he's one of the reasons why, today, evangelicalism and Anglicanism are not mutually exclusive ideas.

(The reason I use the English term "evangelicalism" is that the Japanese expression, literally "gospelism movement," carries a lot of baggage. Evangelicalism emphasizes personal conversion, salvation by faith, Christ's atoning death, and active evangelization. At one point I would have thought this was simply the basics of Christianity, but in the adrift at sea Anglican world, the basics are no longer the basics...)

Reading Stott's book "Basic Christianity" was one of the things that brought me back to faith in Jesus Christ in my 30s. Through that book, touching on the heart of the faith, I glimpsed the depth, the power, and the intellectual appeal of Christianity and the Bible.

It was in reading Stott that I sensed, for the first time, that to conform my life to the Bible would be, not the grim constraining grind I had come to imagine, but rather the fountain of deep joy and a sense of purpose.