Preface to the fiftieth-anniversary edition
Preface to the fiftieth-anniversary edition
Every three years a mission is held in Cambridge University, and one such took place in November 1952. Invited to be the chief missioner, I knew that my responsibilities would include giving a series of eight evening addresses in Great St Mary’s, the university church. I also understood that a university mission would present a wonderful, if daunting, opportunity to lay before the university a systematic unfolding of the gospel, including the divine-human person of Jesus, the significance of his death and the evidence for his resurrection, the paradox of our humanness, made in God’s image but fallen and rebellious, the possibility of a new birth into a new life, the challenge of personal commitment and the cost of discipleship.
This foundation outline proved to be the first of fifty university missions, beginning with Cambridge, Oxford, Durham and London, continuing with so-called ‘red brick’ universities, then crossing the Atlantic for missions in American and Canadian universities, continuing in Australia and New Zealand, and culminating in a number of missions in the universities of Africa and Asia.
Of course the gospel outline developed as it reflected local situations and as repetition encouraged improvement. But out of this foundational material Basic Christianity was born. It has been used worldwide, both to lead people from many different cultures and situations to Christ, and to establish young Christians in their faith. For example, a major general wrote:
I was brought to the foot of the cross by your Basic Christianity which I was reading (in 1965) at 40,000 feet in an RAF aircraft! I have never ceased to be grateful and have passed on very many copies...
And a young woman wrote:
When I was in the sixth form at school (way back in 1971) I was searching for God whoever He was, and [for] a life with meaning and purpose...A Christian teacher at school, knowing of my search, lent me Basic Christianity. I devoured the book! I was so excited for even though I had been confirmed I had never really understood the basic tenets of Christianity. I did not even really understand why Christ died.
But the publishers (IVP) and I have naturally wondered how best and most appropriately to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Basic Christianity.
It was obviously necessary to update the language, not least by use of a modern translation of the Bible, and to respond to sensitivities relating to gender. We are grateful to David Stone for taking care of these sensitivities. In many ways a new book seemed to be needed, or at least a radical revision of the original. But I feel I have already, in Why I am a Christian (IVP, 2004), made my own contemporary statement of the gospel and do not feel the need to write another, even if I could. Besides, Basic Christianity is something of a period piece. It reflects the cultures of its own day and needs to be allowed to remain itself. We hope and pray that God will use it as he has done in the past, all over the world.
I end with the words of a young man who wrote to me in 1988 as follows:
I regard myself as having a somewhat insecure and rootless background. My mother is Brazilian, of Italian extraction, and my father is English. In 1980 – still going through a severe adolescence - I went to Argentina. It was near the end of my time there that I experienced a marvellous change within me. I started to thirst to know the truth, whatever it might be. I read Basic Christianity...the words seemed to bounce out at me from the page. I felt convinced I’d discovered the truth although as yet I didn’t know that Jesus was God and that he was calling me to an intimate relationship with him. It was only later that year when I was back in England...that I finally made a personal act of surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ.
John Stott
December 2007