Preface to the Revised and Expanded Edition
PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
I well remember buying Christian Mission in the Modern World in 1975, as a theological student in the midst of my doctoral studies on the Old Testament and ordination training at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. It came in the wake of the excitement generated by the reports of the first Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 and its epoch-making Lausanne Covenant. Many of us as younger British evangelicals were taking courage from the resurgence of evangelical theology, in the face of the liberalism still dominating university theology departments. At the same time we were animated by the recovery of the historic evangelical social conscience, committed to an understanding of mission that included engagement with the social, economic, political and cultural realities of our day. And John Stott was our hero and mentor in both those realms. Had he not stood up to robustly defend a biblical, evangelical understanding of mission and evangelism in World Council of Churches gatherings? Was he not already urging us to be salt and light in society, to penetrate our culture rather than withdraw from it? This book, in its five pithy chapters, seemed to capture those concerns and fuel our zeal.
I had read many of the books he wrote in the 1960s, had relished the Bible readings he gave as a visiting speaker at the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union and the lectures with which he enriched gatherings of the Theological Students’ Fellowship, and had heard him preach at All Souls Church, Langham Place. But I did not meet John Stott personally until 1978, at the National Evangelical Conference on Social Ethics, which he chaired and at which I had been invited (as a fresh young Anglican curate with a doctorate in Old Testament ethics) to give one of the morning Bible expositions. Our initial contact there led to ongoing friendship, culminating in our years of working together after he invited me to take on the leadership of the ministries he had founded within the Langham Partnership in 2001—years that included the pleasure of sometimes sharing with him his writing-retreat cottage in Wales, The Hookses, where I now sit to write this preface.
So it was with a great sense of personal debt as well as enormous privilege and not a little unworthiness that I accepted the invitation of the John Stott Literary Executors and InterVarsity Press to work on a revised edition of Christian Mission in the Modern World, to be released in the fortieth year since its original publication, with a request to relieve the book of some of its more dated material and to add some reflections of my own on each of the chapters. Just a word about each of those aspects of the task.
In revising John Stott’s own chapters, I scrupulously avoided modifying his meaning at any point. I have removed references to debates of the 1960s and early 1970s that are long since lost in time and significance, along with some (but not all) of the names and writings of the sparring partners with whom Stott engaged, and the detailed history of some particular controversies. Even with that trimming, it is important for the reader to be aware that whenever Stott uses words such as recent, current or contemporary—he was writing in the context of the 1960s and 1970s. Knowing that Stott himself approved of the more gender-inclusive language that became more common in the 1990s and onward, I revised the predominant use of man and men that was still understood and accepted generically in the 1970s.
In preparing my own reflections, I was aware, first of all, that this book was created out of a series of five lectures that he had given in various venues, and in any lecture it is impossible to say all there is to say on any given topic. Readers need to be aware, therefore, that if they want a full understanding of the mind of John Stott on, say, “salvation,” they need to graduate quickly from reading chapter four of this book to exploring the breadth and depth of The Cross of Christ.
Beyond that, I have tried to do three things, within limits of space and even greater limits of my own expertise. First, where John Stott himself continued to think and write on the topic of each chapter, I point that out with quotations and references wherever possible. Second, since each topic has continued to generate ongoing theological and missiological debate, I have tried to give some sense of where those debates have moved in the decades after 1975. One feature of the book that struck me again and again was how farsighted Stott was. At point after point, he mentions issues (sometimes only in passing) that have become significant or controversial matters in later years. By adding endnotes with whatever bibliographical information I could muster at a number of points, I hope this revised edition of the book may be a helpful primer for students in some areas of mission studies. And third, I have taken the liberty of sharing my own reflections, sometimes developing Stott’s own line of thinking, sometimes diverging from it, and sometimes quoting at length from what I have written elsewhere. Where I do find myself expressing a point differently (or daring to disagree!), I like to think that were I to have the opportunity to discuss the matter with the author, we would come to a happy convergence of thought. That was often our experience when we did have such opportunities.
It is my pleasure and privilege to enable this fine little classic of John Stott to have a fresh lease of life, praying as I’m sure he did that it will strengthen faith, feed minds and energize biblical mission.
Chris Wright
March 2015