Ranked by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the most 100 influential people in the world, John R.W. Stott (1921–2011) was a towering figure of twentieth-century evangelical Protestantism. His pre-eminence within this branch of Christianity was such that some have remarked he could be the pope of evangelicals.

There are many facets to Stott’s legacy — including his statesman-like role in global evangelicalism, his prolific output of books, his revitalisation of evangelicalism within the Church of England, and his 65-year ministry at All Souls, Langham Place in London. With this year marking the fiftieth anniversary of his seminal work Christian Mission in the Modern World, I want to focus on the role Stott played in reviving evangelicalism’s rich tradition of social engagement in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Stott was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge where he graduated with a double first in modern languages before his ordination as a priest in 1946. While baptised and confirmed in the Church of England, it was the preaching ministry of Eric Nash (1898–1982) that had the most formative influence on the shape of his evangelicalism.

A defining feature of Stott’s evangelicalism was the proclamation of a holistic gospel, with its emphasis on redeeming both the human soul and body. In contrast to earlier generations of twentieth-century evangelicals who had eschewed social action and moral reform to focus almost exclusively on evangelism, Stott helped reawaken evangelicals of their responsibility to be “salt and light” in the world by engaging in mercy ministries, social reform and moral activism as essential corollaries to proclaiming the Christian gospel. 

A rich history of evangelical social engagement

Throughout much of what historians have termed “the long nineteenth-century” — stretching from at least the 1789 French Revolution to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 — evangelical Protestantism bore abundant fruit in both the proclamation of the gospel and the amelioration of social ills.

The period was not only the age of the Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society, with their mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth. It was also the era of charitable enterprises including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), Barnardo’s, the Salvation Army, the YMCA and YWCA, and the numerous City Missions — all founded by evangelical Protestants. 

This was the age of the anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect; Hannah More, who devoted her life to education and philanthropy; Thomas Buxton, who continued Wilberforce’s abolitionist cause; Richard Oastler, who led the charge for factory reform; Thomas Guthrie, the founder of the “Ragged School” movement for poor children; Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Tory statesman who phased out child labour; George Müller, who cared for more than 10,000 orphans during his lifetime; Josephine Butler, who campaigned for women’s suffrage and the abolition of child prostitution; and William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. Each of these individuals combined a zeal for proclaiming the gospel with a heart for ministering to the poor and needy in their midst.

For such evangelicals preaching the good news of Jesus Christ went hand-in-hand with liberating slaves, phasing out child labour, affirming racial equality and the rights of indigenous peoples in the British colonies, educating the poor, elevating the dignity of people living with a disability, caring for orphans, eradicating animal cruelty, protecting women from sexual exploitation, and sanctifying marriage and family life. 

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, exemplified this dual focus on body and soul in evangelical activism with his conviction that the body was created by the same God who also made the soul. This was lived out by the iconic Baptist preacher C.H. Spurgeon who founded an orphanage in conjunction with his preaching ministry at London’s Metropolitan Tabernacle. For such evangelicals throughout much of the long nineteenth-century, the well-being of body and soul were symbiotic and thus the proper object of Christian mission.

The great reversal

The decades following the Great War, however, witnessed a disintegration of the synthesis between evangelism and social action among many evangelicals. From the 1920s, a bifurcation of sorts became apparent in Protestantism, at least in the Anglosphere, where Protestants of a more liberal persuasion dedicated themselves to mercy ministries and social action while the more conservative evangelicals largely retreated from these vocations to focus more exclusively on evangelism, teaching and preaching. To be sure, there were many interwar evangelicals who still held the two strands together, but as historians David Moberg contend, there was a “great reversal” of evangelical social responsibility in the period between the First and Second World Wars.

There were multiple reasons for this reversal, which John Stott himself appreciated. First, there was the preoccupation on the part of evangelicals to defend the “faith once delivered to all the saints” from what they saw as the incursions of theological liberalism. This was most evident in the publication of The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth in America during the Great War, from which the term “fundamentalism” derived. With the authority and inspiration of scripture perceived as being under assault, evangelicals devoted themselves to defending biblical inerrancy.

Second, there was the evangelical reaction against the advance of the social gospel. Articulated by the likes of Walter Rauschenbusch and Richard T. Ely, the social gospel stressed the importance of remedying social ills and the unjust structures of society as the primary responsibility of the Christian. Large numbers of evangelicals, however, regarded this as a distraction from the pre-eminent calling to preach the gospel and teach the scriptures.

Third, the diabolical carnage of the Great War induced a pervasive pessimism among many evangelicals that the world was irredeemably depraved and that social engagement to ameliorate evils would be largely in vain. This contrasted with the sunny optimism of the high Victorian age, during which evangelical social activism felt buoyed by the march of human progress toward a seemingly ever-brighter future.

Fourth, the popularisation of some pre-millennial teachings by theologians such as J.N. Darby and his Schofield Bible convinced many evangelicals that the imminent return of Christ and his promise to set the world right obviated the need for evangelicals to attempt to reform society in the meantime.

Finally, the upward social mobility of many evangelicals rendered many of them oblivious to the pain of their poorer neighbours and the imperative to address these through remedial social action and mercy ministries.

Reversing the great reversal

After the Second World War, however, the evangelical “great reversal” showed signs of being reversed itself. As Stott noted, the post-war secularisation of the West, the rise of 1960s counter-culture and the decline of liberal Protestantism led many evangelicals to recover their morale and appetite to engage with the world. 

John Stott arguably played a key role in reversing this Great Reversal together with the work of evangelicals like Carl F.H. Henry, who founded Christianity Today, and the Reformed theologian and L’Abri founder, Francis Schaeffer, who reawakened American evangelicals to engage in culture and politics. In Britain, this shift was aided by evangelical leaders including Sir Fred Catherwood, who published books on evangelical social and economic engagement before serving as a Member of the European Parliament, and Professor Norman Anderson, who through his writings, encouraged evangelicals to re-engage with culture, society and politics. 

The contribution of John Stott

According to John Wyatt, from the mid-1960s John Stott began to preach and teach publicly about the need for evangelical Christians to be engaged in the world on the side of “the oppressed, needy and neglected”, campaigning for social justice as well as engaging in evangelism.

Perhaps Stott’s most defining contribution to reviving a socially engaged evangelicalism was his role as the architect of the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. The Covenant affirmed that evangelism and socio-political involvement were both part of Christian discipleship, as expressions of the evangelical doctrines of God and humanity, love of neighbour and obedience to Christ.

The following year, John Stott published Christian Mission in the Modern World. The thesis of book was that a holistic approach to Christian mission encompassed both evangelism and social action. And to help evangelical Christians engage with culture, John Stott founded the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC) in 1982. Its aim was to encourage Christians to listen to the Word of God and the world, so that biblical principles could be brought to bear on everyday life. 

Stott appreciated that a holistic and cohesive approach to Christian social engagement also required a sturdy intellectual foundation. With this in mind, he published Issues Facing Christians Today in 1984. The book provided a whole generation of evangelicals with a theological framework within which to approach a wide range of matters — including racial harmony, environmental conservation, industrial relations, to abortion, euthanasia and family values.

Passing through four editions, Issues Facing Christians Today not only gave Christians the intellectual ballast to respond to the topical issues but furnished them with a holistic vision for a flourishing society. As such, this volume deserves to be esteemed as one of the authoritative works of evangelical social teaching. It has arguably done for a generation of evangelicals what papal encyclicals do for generations of Catholics — that is, teach laypeople to apply Christian ethics to the world in which they live, and to inspire them to realise a society reflecting the intrinsic goodness of the divine order for all humankind.

Stott’s appreciation of Christian social responsibility was consistent throughout his ministry and writings. It permeated not only his specialised volumes on the theme, but also his classic works Basic Christianity (1958) and The Cross of Christ (1986) where it was emphasised as integral to Christian discipleship.

Yet as pivotal as Stott’s role was in the revival of evangelical social engagement, he was also part of a broader evangelical awakening of the need to engage with the secular world. This was evident in the wide range of evangelical mercy ministries, publications and moral movements that sprung up in the latter part of the twentieth century — including initiatives like the child sponsorship charity Compassion, which was founded by Everett Swanson in 1952, the international aid charity Tearfund by the Evangelical Alliance and George Hoffman in 1968, the Shaftesbury Project directed by Alan Storkey, and Gary Haugen’s International Justice Mission founded in 1997.

Evangelical moral reform movements focused on restoring Christian moral standards to society and culture included the inauguration of the Nationwide Festival of Light in 1971 which eventually morphed into the continuing Christian Action Education and Research (CARE) in 1983. Publications like Third Way magazine, launched in 1977, sought to furnish readers with a biblical perspective across a wide range of current issues in order to equip evangelicals to engage with the world.

But while these evangelical movements and initiatives harkened back to a golden age of philanthropy and social reform, they were also recalibrated and attuned to the needs and concerns of the modern world. John Stott himself appreciated that the Bible was the “oldest book with the newest message”, and believed that its teachings were the key to future spiritual and social renewal and human flourishing. It was this end to which his work of reviving social engagement was directed.

Lessons for contemporary evangelicals

For evangelicals today, there are a number of lessons to be learned from Stott’s example and legacy of Christian social engagement.

The first is the need to nourish a fuller doctrine of God — in particular, to have an enlarged view of his lordship over all of creation. To believe that God is not just the Lord of an individual’s spiritual life and our personal salvation, but over all of life, both the so-called sacred and secular spheres. As the Dutch Reformed theologian, Abraham Kuyper, once remarked, “there is not one square inch in the domain of our human existence over which Christ does not cry, Mine!”

The second is the need to recover a richer Christian anthropology or understanding of what it is to be human — to have a more robust theology of the imago Dei. Not simply to view human beings as fallen, sinful creatures, as critical as that is to classic evangelical theology, but to see every woman and man as being of inestimable worth before their creator, as precious children of God, created in God’s image and likeness. As Francis Schaeffer once put it, “with God there is no such thing as little people”. Appreciating the exceptionalism of the incarnate Christ, Glen Scrivener affirms that evangelicals should be both Christian and humanist. For Scrivener, it is not “Christian humanism” but “secular humanism” that is the real oxymoron. When evangelicals recover these truths, their resolve to contend for the sanctity of human life in all its stages should be all the more visible and determined.

The third is the need to have a greater confidence in the intrinsic goodness of the natural law for all of humanity. In the present age of moral relativism, it is understandable for evangelicals to either feel reticent or believe that in a pluralistic society it is somehow self-entitled to take a public stand for Christian moral values. Yet drawing from the Reformed tradition of John Calvin, evangelicals should have an abiding theological conviction that the moral teachings of a loving, just and sovereign God exist for the good of all people created in God’s own image with his law written on their hearts (Psalm 40:8). This truth will help embolden evangelicals to champion just and righteous social causes that may otherwise be unpopular in the public domain.

The fourth is the need to recover the doctrine of salvation in its biblical fullness — that is, the belief that the atonement of Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the grave was not only for the salvation of individual souls from eternal damnation, but for the redemption of the entire created order. In helping evangelicals to appreciate a fuller doctrine of salvation, the scholarship of theologians such as Oliver O’Donovan and N.T. Wright has been invaluable.

The fifth is the need for a balanced doctrine of the church as both world affirming and world denying. On the one hand, evangelical contributions to the natural, human and spiritual wellbeing of the world will be guided by the biblical teaching that what God created was intrinsically good (Genesis 1:31), and the gospel proclamation that “God so loved the world” (John 3:16). On the other hand, the teaching of the Apostle John for Christian disciples to “not love the world” (1 John 2:15) will remind evangelicals to deny everything in the world that they view as contrary to the will and purpose of their creator.

Finally, there is the need to exercise both courage and wisdom in navigating the contemporary “culture wars”. When it comes to engaging with some of the “hot button” issues of our time — particularly in the domain of bioethics and human sexuality — there are two major pitfalls for evangelical Christians. The first is to ignore them, dismissing such battles as either too contentious or a distraction from the primary mission of proclaiming the gospel. The main flaw with this approach, however, is that evangelicals can forfeit invaluable opportunities to speak prophetically into the important debates and point people to what they see as God’s good will and purpose for human flourishing. At the other extreme, there is the pitfall for evangelicals to become unduly fixated on the culture wars. The danger with this approach is that it can reduce public Christianity to just a series of negative “target shots” at what the faithful are against and detract from impressing the merits of the broader Christian social vision.

Again, Stott’s own example in his work Issues Facing Christians Today is particularly instructive. It is bold and specific enough to broach the contentious issues of our time, yet balanced and catholic enough to propound a holistic vision for the social, material, cultural, moral and spiritual flourishing of all human beings.

John Stott’s contribution to restoring the classic evangelical synthesis of preaching the gospel and addressing social concerns is rightfully lauded as one of his defining legacies. Paying tribute to Stott upon his passing in July 2011, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said:

Through his ministry with the Lausanne Movement and his many books, there is no question Stott played a pre-eminent role in helping global evangelicalism to recover its social conscience and mission to bring spiritual, social and moral renewal to the world.