The Cross at the Center of Mission

In the twentieth century there lived a quiet Englishman whose voice shaped how millions of Christians across the world came to think about the cross of Christ. His name was John Stott. He was a clergyman of the Church of England, tall and spare and unhurried, the kind of man who looked like he belonged in a library. And for sixty years he stood in the same pulpit, at All Souls Langham Place in the heart of London, and opened the Bible, line by line, for ordinary people who came in off Oxford Street.

He could have been a bishop. By most accounts the doors were open to him. He chose instead to stay a parish minister and a teacher of preachers. He never married. He gave his life, undivided, to one task. To put the crucified Christ at the very centre of everything the church does.

Now consider what that meant in his own time. Stott watched the evangelical movement pulled in two directions, like a rope in a tug of war. On one side were those who said mission is simply preaching words, save souls and let the world burn. On the other were those who said mission is simply good works, feed the hungry and never mind the gospel. And in 1974, in the Swiss town of Lausanne, thousands of Christians from across the globe gathered to decide which it would be.

Picture that hall. Africans and Asians and Latin Americans, many from churches that were poor in money and rich in suffering, sitting alongside the comfortable churches of the West. And it was Stott, more than any other, who held the rope steady. He refused the false choice. He helped craft the Lausanne Covenant, and into it he pressed the conviction of his life. That evangelism and compassion are not rivals. That the cross both reconciles a sinner to God and sends that sinner out as a servant. Proclaim Christ, yes. Love your neighbour, yes. Both. Always both.

That was the heart of his great book, The Cross of Christ. He wrote that at the foot of the cross we see four things at once. The holiness of God. The horror of sin. The depth of love. And the cost of mercy. The cross, he said, is not a logo to decorate a mission. It is the engine of it.

And here was the beauty of the man. He did not build an empire with his fame. He built something he called the Langham Partnership, and its purpose was almost the opposite of empire. He took the money and the books and the training that the wealthy churches had, and he poured them into pastors in places where such things were scarce. Not to control them. Not to replace them. To strengthen the local teacher and then step back. He believed the church was far larger than England, larger than any one accent or class or nation, and that the rich churches had much to learn from the believers whose faith had been forged in poverty and pain.

When he died in 2011, an old man with a worn Bible, the tributes came from every continent on earth. And what they remembered was not cleverness, though he was clever. It was not power, though he had influence over millions. It was that he had spent a long lifetime pointing away from himself.

That was the whole shape of John Stott. He humbled the activist by saying salvation is God's costly gift, not our achievement. He humbled the proud theologian by saying that truth itself is cross-shaped. He humbled the missionary by making him a servant rather than a conqueror. He stood in one pulpit for sixty years and said, in a thousand ways, the same thing. Do not look at me. Look at Him. Keep your eyes on the cross, and you will not lose your way.