The Rev. John Stott did not fill stadiums with the faithful like his longtime friend, Billy Graham, or give the invocation at a presidential inauguration, as megachurch pastor Rick Warren did for Barack Obama. Yet he was a giant of the evangelical world - perhaps the most influential evangelist most people have never heard of.
Unassuming but erudite, the Anglican pastor who died at 90 Wednesday in Surrey, England, after several months of deteriorating health, wrote 50 books, including the 1958 classic "Basic Christianity," which sold more than 2.5 million copies. His book royalties seeded Langham Partnership International, a nonprofit organization he founded that trains ministers in 100 countries. He also was the principal framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a defining statement that launched the global evangelical movement.
When Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2005, Graham, who like Warren revered Stott as a mentor, explained why the gentle Englishman deserved the honor.
"I can't think of anyone who has been more effective in introducing so many people to a biblical world view," Graham said. He credited Stott's work as "a significant factor in the explosive growth of Christianity in parts of the Third World," which Stott preferred to call the Majority World.
"He was a very broad-minded evangelical," said Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, which hosted Stott several times. "He was the kind of person who wanted to bring different factions together and emphasize what we hold in common."
Stott believed that evangelism was not the only mission of Christians, a stance that some evangelicals criticized. He urged Christians not only to spread the gospel but to act on the Bible's teachings by addressing social injustice in the world. He wrote and preached on climate change, global debt and other pressing issues facing contemporary society.
It became a global phenomenon at the International Congress on World Evangelization, convened by Graham in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974. With 2,700 participants from 150 nations, half of which belonged to the developing world, it was an unprecedented gathering, "possibly the widest-ranging meeting of Christians ever held," Time reported.
