The Stott Legacy – Détails, épisodes et analyse

27th April 2021 is the centenary of Uncle John’s birth in central London, as well as being roughly 10 years since his death. As a special podcast treat, we have dug out an old conversation Mark Meynell had back in 2013 with the one person that John’s ministry could never have done without: Frances Whitehead. Having worked for the BBC next door to All Souls Langham Place, and converted at All Souls in a process that began with her attending a lunchtime concert in the building, the church of All Souls became her life. She was recruited by Stott to be ‘Parish Secretary’ and would spend the next two decades working with him in that role (only addressing him as ‘Rector’). When his ministry began to expand, affirmed by his appointment as Rector Emeritus in 1975, not only was Frances allowed to start addressing him by his first name, but she formally became his secretary and organiser. She typed up every single one of his books from his manuscripts, fielded every phone call and managed all his correspondence, in a working partnership that lasted over 50 years. She was a force to be reckoned with and a dear friend to many around the world.

This is inevitably an edited version of the conversation - if you would like to hear the whole thing, which includes more about her own upbringing and experiences, go to Mark’s blog.

To get hold of the 2nd edition of Julia Cameron’s book, John Stott’s Right Hand: The untold story of Frances Whitehead, go directly to the publisher page.

Mark says: We had a lovely surprise a while back when a mutual friend who used to visit Frances weekly after she had moved out of London said that she wanted us to have a plant from her garden. So, just a couple of weeks ago, we planted this Peony in one of our beds - we don't have great green-fingered credentials but so far so good! It still looks alive!

 

Rico Tice is a passionate evangelist known on university campuses and in local churches all over, in particular through Christianity Explored (CE) Ministries. He was first ordained in the Church of England when he joined the staff team of All Souls Langham Place, in London, in the mid-90s. John Stott was still very involved in church life at that point and mentored Rico over many years. He is still at All Souls and lives in central London with his wife Lucy and 3 young children, while at the same time, working with CE in its training and evangelistic work around the world.  

• All Souls, Langham Place including past sermons by John Stott and Rico Tice
• Christianity Explored courses (for enquirers)
• CE Ministries (church-facing, for training and other resources)

 

• Excerpts from John Stott’s funeral at All Souls
• Videos of John Stott’s memorial at St Paul’s Cathedral

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

José de Segovia is a Spanish journalist based in Madrid with a particular interest in arts and culture. But that is not the only string to his bow, as he has also pursued theological studies at various points in Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. In 1982, he spent six months at the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity and as a result, got to know John Stott as a teacher, mentor and friend. Since then, he has felt Uncle John’s influence keenly, not least because he has spent his entire professional life taking Stott’s principle of double listening seriously. Along side his journalism, he has taught theology in several institutions and is a pastor at the Reformed Church in Madrid. He has also been very involved in the Spanish Evangelical Alliance, and at John Stott’s recommendation, was one of the World Evangelical Alliance’s representatives in its theological dialogues with the Vatican.  

• More on LICC
• José’s blog (in Spanish) - including many posts about John Stott
• José’s podcast series about John Stott (in Spanish)
• Reformed Church of Madrid (where José pastors)

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

Laura Meitzner Yoder is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Wheaton College in the US, and holds the John Stott Chair of Human Needs and Global Resources. She did a PhD at Yale in Forestry and Environmental Studies and has years of experience involved in environmental projects in South East Asia and Latin America. This includes work in Indonesia in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and teaching in Thailand and Bhutan. As it happens, she was a member of All Souls Langham Place as an older teenager, because her parents sent her to London to study for A levels. So she had several encounters with John Stott as a young woman. Little did she know then that she would end up working on the manuscript of a major work undertaken by Prof Sam Berry and left unfinished when he died. This was a compilation of everything his long-standing friend John Stott had written or taught about the environment and natural world, from a surprisingly extensive archive of material. The result of Berry’s and Yoder’s work was published in October 2021 with the title John Stott on Creation Care.

• Laura’s home page at Wheaton College
• More on John Stott on Creation Care
• More on A Rocha, the Christian conservation movement that Stott was involved in.

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

Ted Schroder was the last of a very select group of people - curates at All Souls Langham Place appointed by John Stott. He started in 1967, and it was while he was there, that Michael Baughen was appointed as Vicar in anticipation of him taking over from Stott as Rector in 1975. Originally from New Zealand, he came to study in Durham and was identified by John as someone who could break the cultural mould at All Souls. Since moving on in 1971, Ted served as Chaplain at Gordon College in Massachusetts and subsequently in several churches in the USA. Married to Antoinette, they have two daughters and four grandchildren. He retired in 2018 and has dedicated his time to writing and blogging.   He has recently published an introduction to Stott’s theology called John Stott - a summary of his teaching (published by Piquant Editions)   Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

Dr Robert Aboagye-Mensah is a theologian and scholar, pastor and leader, a thinker for the church and the public square. His career culminated in his being appointed as the Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church in his native Ghana in 2003, a post he held until 2009. But he has vast experience of ministry in various parts of the world, including seasons in The Gambia, and teaching at All Nations in the UK, and being a research Fellow at Yale Divinity School in the US. He has served in various roles with the World Council of Churches and has published several works. But through it all, a constant thread has been that of John Stott.

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

Jerram Barrs has taught apologetics at Covenant Theological Seminary in St Louis since 1989 and just a few years ago was made the inaugural holder of the Francis Schaeffer Chair of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture. He was born in the UK and studied at Manchester University.

He was involved in the original L'Abri Fellowship in Huémoz in Switzerland with the Schaeffer family and in 1971 was one of the founding members of the English L'Abri and founding pastor of the International Presbyterian Church in Liphook, Hamphshire, nearby. He has written and taught widely ever since, and in particular, got to know John Stott through their public debates and discussions on Just War and Pacifism.

Stott asked him to be one of the first board members of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC, formerly known as Christian Impact) in the 1980s.

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

Mark Meynell chats to Corey Widmer, from Virginia USA, who was John Stott’s study assistant for three years in the late 90s. For many years, John had a study assistant, usually a young university graduate, and often they were from the states.

Corey is now the lead pastor of a church and recently completed a PhD. He sees Stott as having a great impact on not just his preaching but also his engagement with current social issues.

Listen to the episode for many stories and reflections from someone who worked extremely closely with John Stott and saw different aspects of his life and ministry.

 

Links:

• Book reviewed this episode: The Radical Disciple
• Article Corey wrote to commemorate John Stott’s centenary (Missio Alliance)

Produced by Langham Partnership UKI. For more about John Stott's centenary visit the dedicated website.

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

To those in the UK, Jeremy Vine needs no introduction. He’s a veteran journalist who started out in local radio and newspaper reporting. He was for several years the BBC Africa correspondent based in Johannesburg, and has since become very familiar, as presenter of flagship programmes like BBC’s Newsnight and Panorama. He currently juggles hosting two daily broadcasts, one on BBC Radio 2 and the other on Channel 5 TV. This is quite apart from the fun he has hosting quiz show Eggheads. But most significantly for our purposes, he knew John Stott well when starting out on his career, and counts him as one of his heroes. He even visited John in the last weeks of his life. So I was really grateful that Jeremy carved out the time to speak about the impact John Stott had on his life.   - Jeremy Vine on BBC Radio 2 - Jeremy Vine on Channel 5  - His memoir is 'It’s All News To Me' (Simon & Shuster, 2013)

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode.

John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.

John Dickson is a man of many talents. He was the frontman for a band in the 80s and 90s; he’s an ancient historian and theologian, having done a PhD in ancient history and had teaching posts in his native city, Sydney Australia, at Macquarie University and University of Sydney’s Department of Jewish Studies; more recently he had a visiting role in the University of Oxford classics department.

He is also an ordained anglican minister and has led a church in Sydney. But as if that wasn’t enough, he was the founder of the Centre for Public Christianity and is a writer and media presenter, currently known for his excellent Undeceptions podcast. He is passionately concerned to communicate the Christian gospel to sceptics and to that end, has written a number of successful and helpful books.

Yet the primary reason for getting him onto our podcast is that when asked to describe his churchmanship (especially when visiting the USA), he describes himself as ‘a John Stott evangelical’. So naturally, this amongst other things was the focus of our conversation.

For more information

• Some of John Dickson’s books:

* A Doubter’s Guide to Jesus * A Doubter’s Guide to The Ten Commandments * A Doubter’s Guide to the Bible 

• John Dickson’s Undeceptions Podcast  
• The Centre for Public Christianity

Visit https://uk.langham.org/get-involved/the-stott-legacy-podcast/ for more info about this episode. John Stott holds a unique place in 20th-century Church history, both in Britain and across the globe. From 2020 to 2022, Mark Meynell recorded conversations with a range of people who have been impacted by John Stott’s legacy. His thoughts, life and example represent many challenges to our own generation. Join us by listening to these remastered episodes, as we explore inspiration, challenges and insights from the life of Uncle John.