John Stott Decides to Retire

John Stott Decides to Retire
World renowned theologian and evangelist The Rev. Dr. John Stott has made the decision to retire from public ministry at the age of 86. Stott, who has been called by the Rev. Billy Graham “the most respected clergyman in the world today,” will formally retire after fulfilling one final speaking engagement in July 2007, according to an announcement made by John Stott Ministries (the U.S. movement of the Langham Partnership International), the ministry Stott founded to equip churches around the world.  He will be moving from his flat in Bridford Mews, London, where he has lived for more than 30 years, to a retirement community for Anglican clergy in the south of England which will be able to provide more fully for his present and future needs. John has made this decision with the strong belief that it is God’s provision for him at this stage.

QUESTION:  Has John Stott influenced your ministry?

 

Sunday 29th April 2007
John Stott to retire from public speaking ministry

Here’s the text of an announcement from the Langham Partnership –

“John Stott would like his many friends around the world to know that, having reached the age of 86 in April, he has taken the decision finally to retire from public ministry after fulfilling one final speaking engagement at the upcoming Keswick Convention in July.

He will also be moving home from his flat in Bridford Mews, London, where he has lived for more than 30 years, to a retirement community for Anglican clergy in the south of England which will be able to provide more fully for his present and future needs. Dr Stott has made this decision with the strong belief that it is God’s provision for him at this stage.

Dr Stott will greatly value your prayer for him in the challenges and opportunities involved in this transition. John Stott is also happy to reassure his friends that the Langham Partnership International (or John Stott Ministries, in USA), is well prepared to continue its work, even after his retirement.

Chris Wright took over the leadership of the organisation from John Stott in 2001, and there is now a strong team of international programme managers and other staff and volunteers all over the world making sure that the work develops strongly into the future.”

 

Rev. Dr. John Stott: Retirement and Move

John Stott would like his many friends around the world to know that, having reached the age of 86 in April, he has taken the decision finally to retire from public ministry after fulfilling one last speaking engagement at the upcoming Keswick Convention in July.

He will also be moving from his flat in Bridford Mews, London, where he has lived for more than 30 years, to a retirement community for Anglican clergy in the south of England which will be able to provide more fully for his present and future needs. John has made this decision with the strong belief that it is God’s provision for him at this stage.

Dr. John Stott’s retirement means that he no longer intends to engage in public speaking ministry. He continues to hold the titles that express his honored role in several contexts, including: Founder and Honorary President of the Langham Partnership International; Rector Emeritus at All Souls Church, Langham Place; and Extra Chaplain to the Queen. Dr. Stott intends to continue to correspond and receive visitors, but for some time he has declined to accept public or recorded interviews.

John will greatly value your prayer for him in the challenges and opportunities involved in this transition. He is also happy to reassure his friends that the Langham Partnership International (or John Stott Ministries, in USA), is well prepared to continue its work, even after his retirement.

Dr. Chris Wright took over the leadership of the organisation from John in 2001, and there is now a strong team of international programme managers and other staff and volunteers all over the world making sue that the work develops strongly into the future.

About the Langham Partnership
Langham Partnership International exists to help churches in the Majority World grow in maturity and be equipped for mission. We provide books and training for Christian leaders and pastors to help them diligently study, faithfully preach and relevantly apply the Word of God. Langham Partnership provides these resources through three programmes: Langham Literature; Langham Preaching; Langham Scholars.

A Bishop Speaks

John Shelby Spong

John Stott: A Fundamentalist in Sheep's Clothing? The Anglican leader has decided to retire. What he needs to recognize is that his evangelical ideas retired long ago

In 1992 on a July night in Vancouver, I debated human sexuality with a man named John Stott before an audience of more than 2,000 people. The debate was videoed and played across the English-speaking world. Who is John Stott? He is probably England's best known and most published evangelical Christian. So I read with a bit of nostalgia a recent notice that floated across the wire services announcing that this 79-year-old single man had finally decided to retire.

John Stott struggled all his life to make his dated version of Christianity relevant to the modern world. That is not easy since he, like all evangelicals, starts with the assumption that the Bible is "revealed truth." For John Stott, the proper method for settling questions for Christians is to search the Bible's pages for answers. Revealed truth for him is timeless, and thus Holy Scripture provides eternal solutions for all contemporary issues--an argument made by fundamentalist Christians.

John Stott would not be happy being tightly linked with fundamentalists. They are too strident, too unlearned to suit him!

Hubert Humphrey once called Ronald Reagan "George Wallace with perfume." In a similar fashion, John Stott might be called "Jerry Falwell with perfume." Stott is sophisticated enough to know the literal Bible is filled with land mines, so he steps delicately around those places in Scripture where women are defined as the property of men, where polygamy is affirmed, where menstruation is regarded as a source of uncleanness, where slavery is viewed as an acceptable social institution, and where capital punishment is prescribed for such offences as being disobedient to one's parents, worshiping a false god, or being a homosexual.

Yet all of these things are present in the Bible Stott calls "the revealed truth of God." One wonders what he means by the use of both of those words "revealed" and "truth."

When challenged, Stott's pious smile disappears and his soft voice becomes edgy and rejecting. He suggests that anyone who disagrees with him disagrees with the revealed will of God. He seems never to have heard of Bible 101.

The Bible was written between 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E. It makes assumptions that modern men and women cannot make unless we turn off our minds to the expansion of knowledge over the last 400 years. The Bible reflects the three-tiered universe of the pre-Copernican world. It defines God as a supernatural being, living above the sky, capable of invading this planet earth in miraculous and not always moral ways to accomplish what is called his divine will.

This God strikes the Egyptians with a series of devastating plagues, which include murdering the firstborn son of every family of that nation. Is that moral behavior? This God then opens the Red Sea for the Jewish people to escape and closes the Red Sea to drown the Egyptian pursuers. It is not a very pleasant view of God if you happen to be Egyptian.

John Stott and the evangelicals base their understanding that the male is to be the head of the family on the words of a patriarchal social order written 2,000 years ago when women were not educated and not regarded as equal in the sight of God. Might we ask whether they have confused "revealed truth" with "prejudiced sin"?

Evangelicals like John Stott oppose divorce based on what they call "clear biblical teaching." Yet that clear teaching is predicated on the inferiority of the woman. It was not until the 20th century that women won the legal right to leave abusive marriages. Does "revealed truth" compel a woman to place herself in harm's way, or, if she manages to escape, does it then condemn her to a life of loneliness when she finds the courage to walk away from an abusive husband? I do not think so, and I would not care to worship a God who was presumed to suggest that such was "revealed truth."

John Stott and his evangelical friends are vehemently opposed to any acceptance of homosexuals because they are condemned, or at least their behavior is, in the revealed truth of Holy Scripture. That is nothing but a claim of uninformed ignorance. There is almost no scientist today who thinks sexual orientation is either chosen or changeable behavior. Is it appropriate for anyone to make judgments on sexual orientation today based on the ancient book of Leviticus, or the story of Sodom from Genesis, both of which were written more than 2,500 years ago?

That was the same world that also defined epilepsy and mental illness as demon possession, that believed muteness was caused by the devil tying the tongue of the victim, and that did not know of the existence of germs, viruses, tumors, or heart attacks, just to mention a few contemporary diagnoses. All sicknesses and cures in the "revealed truth" of the Bible were expressions of divine punishment or blessing. The biblical world would never have understood our experience today that antibiotics work just as effectively on sinners as they do on saints. The writers of the Bible thought God brought rain, floods, drought, and heat waves as punishment for sin. Only television evangelist Pat Robertson still seems to think that way, for he not only was said to have prayed a hurricane away from his Virginia television empire, but to have warned the people of Orlando, Florida, that they were at risk of a hurricane for passing a gay-friendly city ordinance. Does John Stott think "revealed truth" is found in that mentality?

When fundamentalists and evangelicals come to the Christ story, the stakes go up dramatically, and the claims for the "revealed truth" of the Bible become excessive. But biblical scholars note the disparities in both the story of Jesus' birth and of his resurrection. They also note that both the virgin birth and the resurrection, understood as physical resuscitation, do not even enter the Christian story until the ninth decade of the Christian era. But John Stott does not face these insights, for they would contradict his "revealed truth" theory.

John Stott tells the story of the crucifixion of Jesus in terms of God demanding the sacrifice of his son. He will wax eloquent about the sin of human life, its fall from grace, its need for rescue and restoration to a pre-fallen status. It will all be so clear. Yet post-Darwinian thinking suggests there never was a fall into sin because there never was a righteous pre-fallen human status, either in history or in mythology.

Rather, evolution teaches us that life has emerged and evolved over billions of years. Human beings are incomplete creatures who need to be empowered. We are not fallen creatures, lost in sin, who need the bloodshed of a human sacrifice of the son of God in order to have the price of our sins paid to a judging deity. What a grotesque idea this "revealed truth" is. I am repelled by those images.

John Stott is quoted as saying that "the great tragedy of the Church today is that evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary, but not biblical." It is a nice try, a clever, evenhanded approach, but it does not work. It is not biblical to read the Bible in a superstitious, ill-informed manner. It is not biblical for John Stott to justify every prejudice, to whitewash chauvinism, racism, homophobia, and a not-so-subtle hatred for everyone who does not affirm the evangelical value system.

"Revealed truth" turns out to be evangelical propaganda. John Stott surely must know that the claim of "revealed truth" is sustained only where critical biblical scholarship is denied. The value of the Bible is not found in its supernatural claims, but in its story of people walking through history and seeing that every life, not just the members of their tribe, bears the image of the Holy God.

The Bible tells us that in the life of Jesus, who is perceived as a God presence, every life is loved, even those who reject, betray, deny, and kill the God-bearer. Finally, the Bible suggests that every life is called into the fullness of his or her humanity by the life of the Spirit. That is our destiny--to be our deepest, fullest, most complete selves in all of our wondrous diversity. That is the truth that keeps breaking through the barriers of Scripture, that the John Stotts of this world continue to confuse with the revealed will of God.

John Stott's Christianity and the fundamentalist, evangelical tradition he espouses will finally do nothing except justify the human divisions between the saved and the unsaved. That religious stance will ultimately victimize every person who does not reside inside the definition of the Bible as "revealed truth," as Stott interprets it.

So John Stott has decided to retire. What he needs to recognize is that all of his major ideas have also retired long before him. Perhaps they will now be happy together.

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