John Robert Walmsley Stott was born on 27 April 1921, in London, the son of the physician Sir Arnold Stott, an agnostic, and Emily Lily Stott, of Lutheran background. He was one of the most influential Anglican clergymen of the twentieth century, known for decades as rector of All Souls, Langham Place, and as one of the chief architects of the worldwide evangelical movement.
He was converted in 1938, while still a student at Rugby School, after hearing a sermon by the Anglican evangelist Eric Nash. He later described that simple step of faith as the one that changed the whole direction and quality of his life. He studied French and theology at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went on to train at Ridley Hall, the theological college linked to the same university.
He was ordained deacon in 1945 and priest in 1946. He served as curate of All Souls, Langham Place, between 1945 and 1950, and became rector of the church in 1950, a post he held until 1975, remaining afterward as rector emeritus. He never married, devoting his life to ministry and writing under voluntary celibacy.
As a preacher and writer, Stott helped shape post-war evangelicalism within the Anglican Communion. In 1966, he publicly disagreed with the Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who argued that evangelicals should leave historic denominations considered doctrinally mixed. Stott argued for remaining within the established church, a position that prevailed among much of British evangelicalism.
His view of mission also changed over the course of his life. At the Berlin World Congress on Evangelism in 1966, he held that the mission of the church was essentially preaching, without a central place for social action. By 1974, at the Lausanne Congress, he had changed his position: as chief drafter of the Lausanne Covenant, he helped insert into the document the affirmation that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of Christian duty, influenced above all by Latin American leaders such as René Padilla and Samuel Escobar.
In 1969 he set up the Langham Trust, directing the royalties from his books toward doctoral scholarships for pastors from majority non-Western countries. In 1971 he also founded the Evangelical Literature Trust, to fund theological books for libraries and seminaries outside the Western world. The two organizations merged in 2001 into the Langham Partnership, today present in dozens of countries.
He wrote more than seventy books over his lifetime. Basic Christianity, from 1958, sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages. The Cross of Christ, from 1986, considered his most important work, became an evangelical reference on the doctrine of the atonement. His last book, The Radical Disciple, was published in 2010, a year before his death.
Stott also took positions that stirred controversy within the evangelical camp itself. In 1988, in the book Essentials, written in dialogue with the liberal theologian David Edwards, he admitted to tentatively considering annihilationism, the idea that the wicked would be destroyed rather than suffer conscious eternal torment, as a legitimate biblical possibility, without claiming certainty about it. The position divided evangelical leaders and was unsuccessfully put forward as grounds to exclude him from a North American evangelical gathering. Stott also publicly defended a reading opposed to Christian Zionism, arguing that the church, and not the Jewish people as such, is now the true Israel, a position likewise debated and criticized by other evangelicals.
He served as chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II between 1959 and 1991 and was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2006. In 2005, Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential people in the world. He announced his withdrawal from public ministry in April 2007, at the age of eighty-six, and went to live at the College of St Barnabas, in Lingfield, Surrey, a residence for retired Anglican clergy.
He died on 27 July 2011, in Lingfield, surrounded by family and friends, listening to passages of the Bible and Handel’s Messiah. He left as his legacy the Langham Partnership, which to this day trains pastors and theologians and distributes Christian literature in lower-income countries, and the Lausanne Covenant, which continues to guide evangelical mission congresses and strategies around the world.
