The Stott Legacy

Dr Laura Yoder

Laura Meitzner Yoder is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Wheaton College in the US, and holds the John Stott Chair of Human Needs and Global Resources. She did a PhD at Yale in Forestry and Environmental Studies and has years of experience involved in environmental projects in South East Asia and Latin America. This includes work in Indonesia in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and teaching in Thailand and Bhutan. As it happens, she was a member of All Souls Langham Place as an older teenager, because her parents sent her to London to study for A levels. So she had several encounters with John Stott as a young woman. Little did she know then that she would end up working on the manuscript of a major work undertaken by Prof Sam Berry and left unfinished when he died. This was a compilation of everything his long-standing friend John Stott had written or taught about the environment and natural world, from a surprisingly extensive archive of material. The result of Berry’s and Yoder’s work was published in October 2021 with the title John Stott on Creation Care.

• Laura’s home page at Wheaton College
• More on John Stott on Creation Care
• More on A Rocha, the Christian conservation movement that Stott was involved in.

Ted Schroder

Ted Schroder was the last of a very select group of people - curates at All Souls Langham Place appointed by John Stott. He started in 1967, and it was while he was there, that Michael Baughen was appointed as Vicar in anticipation of him taking over from Stott as Rector in 1975. Originally from New Zealand, he came to study in Durham and was identified by John as someone who could break the cultural mould at All Souls. Since moving on in 1971, Ted served as Chaplain at Gordon College in Massachusetts and subsequently in several churches in the USA. Married to Antoinette, they have two daughters and four grandchildren. He retired in 2018 and has dedicated his time to writing and blogging.

 

He has recently published an introduction to Stott’s theology called John Stott - a summary of his teaching (published by Piquant Editions)

Bp Robert Aboagye-Mensah

Dr Robert Aboagye-Mensah is a theologian and scholar, pastor and leader, a thinker for the church and the public square. His career culminated in his being appointed as the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church in his native Ghana in 2003, a post he held until 2009. But he has vast experience of ministry in various parts of the world, including seasons in The Gambia, and teaching at All Nations in the UK, and being a research Fellow at Yale Divinity School in the US. He has served in various roles with the World Council of Churches and has published several works. But through it all, a constant thread has been that of John Stott.

Prof Jerram Barrs

Jerram Barrs has taught apologetics at Covenant Theological Seminary in St Louis since 1989 and just a few years ago was made the inaugural holder of the Francis Schaeffer Chair of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture. He was born in the UK and studied at Manchester University.

He was involved in the original L'Abri Fellowship in Huémoz in Switzerland with the Schaeffer family and in 1971 was one of the founding members of the English L'Abri and founding pastor of the International Presbyterian Church in Liphook, Hamphshire, nearby. He has written and taught widely ever since, and in particular, got to know John Stott through their public debates and discussions on Just War and Pacifism.

Stott asked him to be one of the first board members of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC, formerly known as Christian Impact) in the 1980s.

Dr Corey Widmer

Mark Meynell chats to Corey Widmer, from Virginia USA, who was John Stott’s study assistant for three years in the late 90s. For many years, John had a study assistant, usually a young university graduate, and often they were from the states.

Corey is now the lead pastor of a church and recently completed a PhD. He sees Stott as having a great impact on not just his preaching but also his engagement with current social issues.

Listen to the episode for many stories and reflections from someone who worked extremely closely with John Stott and saw different aspects of his life and ministry.

 

Links:

• Book reviewed this episode: The Radical Disciple
• Article Corey wrote to commemorate John Stott’s centenary (Missio Alliance)

Produced by Langham Partnership UKI. For more about John Stott's centenary visit the dedicated website.

Jeremy Vine

To those in the UK, Jeremy Vine needs no introduction. He’s a veteran journalist who started out in local radio and newspaper reporting. He was for several years the BBC Africa correspondent based in Johannesburg, and has since become very familiar, as presenter of flagship programmes like BBC’s Newsnight and Panorama. He currently juggles hosting two daily broadcasts, one on BBC Radio 2 and the other on Channel 5 TV. This is quite apart from the fun he has hosting quiz show Eggheads. But most significantly for our purposes, he knew John Stott well when starting out on his career, and counts him as one of his heroes. He even visited John in the last weeks of his life. So I was really grateful that Jeremy carved out the time to speak about the impact John Stott had on his life.

 

- Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2

- Jeremy Vine on Channel 5 

- His memoir is 'It’s All News To Me' (Simon & Shuster, 2013)

Dr John Dickson

John Dickson is a man of many talents. He was the frontman for a band in the 80s and 90s; he’s an ancient historian and theologian, having done a PhD in ancient history and had teaching posts in his native city, Sydney Australia, at Macquarie University and University of Sydney’s Department of Jewish Studies; more recently he had a visiting role in the University of Oxford classics department.

He is also an ordained anglican minister and has led a church in Sydney. But as if that wasn’t enough, he was the founder of the Centre for Public Christianity and is a writer and media presenter, currently known for his excellent Undeceptions podcast. He is passionately concerned to communicate the Christian gospel to sceptics and to that end, has written a number of successful and helpful books.

Yet the primary reason for getting him onto our podcast is that when asked to describe his churchmanship (especially when visiting the USA), he describes himself as ‘a John Stott evangelical’. So naturally, this amongst other things was the focus of our conversation.

For more information

• Some of John Dickson’s books:

* A Doubter’s Guide to Jesus * A Doubter’s Guide to The Ten Commandments * A Doubter’s Guide to the Bible 

• John Dickson’s Undeceptions Podcast  
• The Centre for Public Christianity

Dr Ruth Padilla deBorst

Ruth Padilla de Borst knew John Stott from her childhood since he was a frequent visitor to the family home in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America. In fact, the main photograph for the episode’s image shows John celebrating his 80th birthday with the Padilla family in 2001. Ruth's father, the late and much missed René Padilla, became an important colleague and close friend of John’s, in part through their participation in IFES student ministry across Latin America and especially through the Lausanne Movement. John was instrumental in getting René a place in the main speaker programme at the 1974 Lausanne Congress and the latter didn’t pull his punches in what was one of the most significant addresses of the entire event.

 

Ruth is a noted theologian and missiologist in her own right. A former Langham Scholar, she lives with her husband James in a community in Costa Rica (Casa Adobe), while leading and contributing to a wide range of institutions and initiatives.

 

• To read René Padilla’s original 1974 Lausanne address, click here.
• An introduction to Casa Adobe in Costa Rica
• CETI (Comunidad de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios) the institution Ruth leads (in Spanish).
• INFEMIT - the International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation

 

Ria Pasaribu

After many years working with university students in Perkantas, the Indonesian member movement of IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students), Ria Pasaribu went on to join the staff of OMF (Overseas Missionary Fellowship). Yet, ever since childhood, she had had a deep commitment to her country’s poorest people, a concern which led her to doing social work studies as an undergraduate.

 

After years of gaining experience in other organisations, she was eventually able to start up her own: Indonesian Care. This exists to be a catalyst for Indonesian churches to wake up to the needs on their doorstep and to channel their members into viable and constructive projects. Over the last decade and a half, this has led to extraordinary opportunities, including partnerships with the office of the Governor of Jakarta, an astonishing feat in what is the world’s most populous Muslim nation.

 

And some of the biggest influences on her vision and ministry? John Stott’s books Christian Mission in the Modern World (1975) and Issues Facing Christians Today (orig. 1984).

 

- Indonesian Care - the website is in Bahasa Indonesia but use Google Translate to get an idea!

- Perkantas - the Indonesian IFES movement

Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson is Lead Pastor at Memorial Presbyterian (PCA) in St Louis, Missouri, a church he has served in various capacities for nearly 20 years. He is also a church historian, who completed a PhD in Historical Theology through St Louis University. But the reason he finds himself at the centre of various church political storms is that he is described, variously, as a gay or same-sex-attracted celibate Christian, a situation which sees him the target of attacks from conservatives and liberals alike within and without the church. 

 

His new book Still Time To Care (out next month), traces the various approaches to homosexuality taken by evangelicals over the last 50 or 60 years and is both fascinating and chilling (in equal measure). Its most encouraging aspect, however, is the thread he draws between the complimentary, careful stances of four key leaders: Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer, C.S. Lewis, and John Stott. So Mark met up with him in St Louis back in June to discuss the impact of Uncle John in particular.

 

• For more about Memorial Presbyterian, St Louis.
• For Greg’s new Book Still Time To Care