Like many others, I was a fan of John Stott. The first I knew of John Stott was when I was a youth minister at the Trent Church of Christ in Dexter, Oregon. I was attending Northwest Christian College and had come across his book Basic Christianity. The text was a great one to use in preparing lessons for the youth.
Then in 1973 (and also in 1976) I went to the Urbana Missions Conference where Stott was the Bible lecturer. His lectures were fantastic! In 1974 Stott helped write (he actually did most of the writing) the influential Lausanne Covenant. He wrote commentaries and he wrote books on missions.
The September 2011 issue of Christianity Today paid tribute to John Stott, and I wanted to share a quote from the article by Tim Stafford. Stott “relished the world around him in all its variety. Perhaps nothing showed this so obviously as his lifelong love for birdwatching, which biographer Timothy Dudley-Smith says bordered on an obsession. In his later decades, Stott spent a great proportion of his time traveling, much of it in third-world (he called them “majority world”) countries. Time for birds was always included.” One of my favorite books is the one written by Stott on birds and the Bible.
Stott was a proponent of holistic mission. He did not separate the Great Commission from the Great Commandment. They go hand in hand. To do one without the other is to ignore much of the Bible.
Rest in peace, John Stott.
