Friday is my day off as a rule. Yet it is a favourite day for a funeral or memorial service whereupon I lose my day or have to have it another time. So why today would I take my day off and use it to go to, of all things, a memorial service? For a family member, obviously - but no, this elderly gentleman was not a member of my family or even a friend. I went to honour the life of a man who has not only shaped me by his preaching and writing, but has helped to create the spiritual landscape in which I have been blessed with a saving knowledge of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. Today was the Memorial Service for John Stott.
St Paul's Cathedral was an unlikely setting for a Service respecting such a humble man yet suited to the purpose partly because it was the place in which 'Uncle John' was ordained, that it was London's Cathedral (the city of his birth and core ministry) and that it is big (for there were a lot of people there of course). I was in a seat about a mile and a half down the nave observing minuscule people at the front (and, much closer by, the back of Nicky Gumbel's head) as they brought their tributes from the continents of the earth. The three senior clergy of the Church of England were there - the two Archbishops and the Bishop of London - though I know that more by the hearing of the ear than the seeing of the eye!
Of a thousand observations that might be made I make this one: that John Stott grew as a child in All Souls, Langham Place, where his whole life ministry was centred. Yet his influence on the worldwide church was as great as anyone in Western Evangelicalism. In later years this was turned into travel miles, but for many years it was the result of a faithful Biblical ministry in the centre of a world City. It is but one of the countless ways John Stott imitated Christ. Jesus spent nearly all his life in one area too. But he still changed John Stott the Londoner, and his Gospel of saving love reached the ends of the earth long before the internet.
Nor do any of us need to change the world by racing round it so much as by bringing Jesus to the part to which we have been called.
Of a thousand observations that might be made I make this one: that John Stott grew as a child in All Souls, Langham Place, where his whole life ministry was centred. Yet his influence on the worldwide church was as great as anyone in Western Evangelicalism. In later years this was turned into travel miles, but for many years it was the result of a faithful Biblical ministry in the centre of a world City. It is but one of the countless ways John Stott imitated Christ. Jesus spent nearly all his life in one area too. But he still changed John Stott the Londoner, and his Gospel of saving love reached the ends of the earth long before the internet.
Nor do any of us need to change the world by racing round it so much as by bringing Jesus to the part to which we have been called.
