all souls church
From the window of our room in our London Hotel, we could see All Souls Church, the congregation where theologian John Stott grew up and ministered for his entire life. Stott’s father was an agnostic, but his mother was raised Lutheran and chose to take her son to this Anglican church. Built in Langham Place, at a key position on Regent Street, the congregation celebrated its 200th anniversary on the first Sunday of our London vacation.
John Stott was a very influential figure in Christendom. He was a pacifist and was ordained an Anglican priest, eventually pastoring All Souls, first as a curate, then as Rector and finally as Rector Emeritus. In the 1960s he founded the Church of England Evangelical Council to bring together the many strands of Evangelicalism. He became one of the great apologists for the Christian faith, writing over fifty books, Bible studies and commentaries. Two of his most widely read and powerful books are “Basic Christianity” and “The Cross of Christ.”
Some of his most famous quotes are:
“Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not
softened by love.”
“We must be global Christians with a global vision, because our God is a global God.”
“The overriding reason why we should take other people’s cultures seriously is because
God has taken ours seriously.”
“Every heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth, without allowing the other truths
to qualify and balance it.”
“Envy! Envy is the reverse side of a coin called vanity. Nobody is ever envious of others who
is first not proud of himself.”
Nowadays, Evangelicals in America have veered toward a desire to see the US as a “Christian nation”, a “New Jerusalem”, with a fervor that could be called Christian nationalism. I seriously doubt that John Stott would have supported such American-centric notions. And lest you are tempted to think that the church in England is “dead”, both Sunday services that Dave and I attended at All Souls were packed full of worshippers. And the Advent service that we tried to attend at St. Paul’s Cathedral on our last night in London was so full that we and many others were turned away.
If you haven’t read John Stott lately, or ever, you might make that one of your Advent practices.
Love, Liz
