Inter-Varsity Press

Extract from Chapter 13 Still in Print: Serving the Contemporary Christian

In October 1995 John Stott was the preacher at the Frankfurt Book Fair and chose as his theme ‘Words Matter’, taking his text from 2 Corinthians 4:13. ‘We are meeting this weekend in Luther’s country,’ he reminded his congregation.
Luther had great confidence in words. He was convinced that it was neither political intrigue, nor military might, which established the Reformation in Germany. It was the Word. ‘I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word’, he wrote. ‘Otherwise, I did nothing …’ And in Luther’s great hymn (Ein’ feste Burg), which we shall sing at the end of this service, he contrasts the power of Christ and the power of the devil, adding: ‘Ein Wörtlein kann ihn fällen’ (‘one little word will fell him’).

It was in this conviction that John Stott used the comparative freedom from institutional oversight, a freedom which the 1990s increasingly brought to him, in order to write. The tally for the decade would be impressive for a full-time author; but, as the previous chapters have shown, John Stott was never that. Yet these ten years saw the writing or publication of eight new books (four of them major New Testament expositions), continuous editing (for The Bible Speaks Today series and of the Lausanne documents) and the revision and reissue of six or eight of his earlier works. Such output would have been impossible but for his ‘happy triumvirate’ of Frances Whitehead and the current study assistant.

By 1990 Todd Shy, the longest-serving among such assistants, had already been with him for two years. It fell to Todd to visit libraries (for older books, it was generally the British Library), check references, read typescripts and proofs for BST Acts and Thessalonians; but especially to help with the first revision of Issues Facing Christians Today in which (for example) contemporary references and statistical information needed to be brought up to date over the wide range of ‘issues’ explored in the book. It was painstaking and meticulous work, reading and rereading manuscript, typescript and proofs. As Todd Shy gained experience, John Stott would consult him on points of detail or interpretation, asking, ‘Is this clear? Have I got the balance right?’ It was not always easy for a young man only recently graduated:
I always felt sort of incapable, but he would say, ‘Tell me what you think honestly; mark anything you wish.’ But I never really knew how much he really wanted you to say what you thought, or how much he just wanted a little bit of approbation, or whatever. I never could gauge the dynamic … to be as helpful as you could, but still being honest, was always tricky.

Todd Shy returned to America in the summer of 1992 and for a year John Stott managed without a study assistant. Then Nelson Gonzalez joined him in 1993, and for the next three years combined his work for John Stott with his own studies. How much John Stott valued the help of his younger assistants can be traced, at least in part, from the Prefaces of these years. Hardly a book appeared without some acknowledgment to one or more. Issues Facing Christians Today is a good example. The first edition (1984) thanked, among others, Steve Andrews and the ‘“apostolic succession’ of my Study Assistants – Roy McCloughry, Tom Cooper, Mark Labberton, Steve Ingraham and Bob Wismer – who have compiled bibliographies, assembled groups for the discussion of sermon topics, gathered information and checked references’. The revised second edition (1990) added Toby Howarth and Todd Shy to this list; and the further revision of 1999 gave a deeper insight into his dependence on their labours:
I reserve my special gratitude for John Yates, my current study assistant. Not only has he given himself the chore of reading the book’s second edition several times over, made his own insightful suggestions, and updated the statistics, but he has also followed up our consultants’ proposals, done some redrafting himself and advised me which books and articles I needed to read and ponder myself.

John Yates, formally John W. Yates III, succeeded Nelson Gonzalez in 1996, the son of a family John Stott had known for many years, and whose father was Rector of Falls Church, Virginia. His successor, Corey Widmer, arrived at a time when John Stott was coming to depend increasingly on his study assistant for help in travelling, especially now that (because of impaired vision in one eye) he was no longer allowed to drive.

Issues was the most recent, and perhaps the most significant, but by no means the only one of John Stott’s books to be revised and reissued in the 1990s. Your Confirmation was another, originally written thirty years before and hardly out of print since then. Besides a revised and illustrated edition for confirmation candidates, a more general worldwide co-edition appeared under the title Christian Basics. The revision proved surprisingly demanding; so much so that, in John Stott’s words,
I found that the world, the church and I have all changed so much that it was impossible. Instead, I have virtually had to write a new book although keeping the old outline. Because the average age of confirmation candidates in Britain is steadily rising, and more than one-third of them are now adults, I have tried to write for them.

Other new editions were more straightforward, for example the revised American edition of Understanding the Bible, written originally for Scripture Union in 1972; or his small IVP paperback of 1982, The Bible: Book for Today, which was reissued in America in the 1990s as You Can Trust the Bible.

It was mainly John Stott’s association with Tim Dowley and Peter Wyart, begun in 1988 with Favourite Psalms, which introduced some of his earlier writing to a new generation. Favourite Psalms, a reissue of parts of The Canticles and Selected Psalms from the 1966 ‘Prayer Book Commentaries’ (long out of print), was followed in the same large-size colour-illustrated format by What Christ Thinks of the Church (1990), an exposition of the Letters to the Seven Churches from Revelation, chapters 1 – 3. First published in 1958 as part of a series, ‘Preaching for Today’, it had been twice reprinted in the 1950s and ’60s but then unavailable for some twenty years. The new, almost ‘coffee-table’ format, with colour photographs of the ancient sites and a text now based on the New International Version, brought these letters to life for Christians of the 1990s. Quick to exploit demand, Tim Dowley and his small design team Three’s Company (by now a partnership rather than a trio) followed this with Life in Christ (1991), a welcome reissue of a Fount Original, also long out of print.

Last in this series of reissues was the first book John Stott ever wrote, Men with a Message. In this case he entrusted the task of revision to Stephen Motyer, lecturer at the London Bible College. Dr Motyer replaced the first chapter on ‘The Message of Jesus’ with chapters on Mark and Matthew, and added some other new material.
The aim (he wrote, in his Preface to the book) has been to make its content accessible to further generations, by lightening the language, relating it to recent biblical scholarship, and incorporating the text into the ‘user-friendly’ publication format associated with the products of Three’s Company. John Stott allowed me great freedom in the revision, but I felt very much at home with his emphases and analyses.

Translations of John Stott’s books continued to appear in a variety of scripts and languages. Occasionally small books were published of which no UK edition is available, though some were translations of addresses given in English, and perhaps first published in a report or journal. In something of the same way Africa Enterprise published as a paperback the substance of six lectures given in 1988, entitled The Lordship of Christ in South Africa. Two books offering a different kind of reprint of earlier works were also published in this decade. Authentic Christianity is an anthology from well over a hundred of his writings, books, articles, published addresses and contributions to symposia; while in 1999, to coincide with volume one of this biography, the same publishers conceived the idea of a double volume containing reprints of two of John Stott’s major works, The Cross of Christ and The Contemporary Christian. Bound together in this way they made a book of 650 pages. There was some discussion between author and publishers as to the title. The publishers planned to call it The Essential John Stott (Macmillan had published The Essential C. S. Lewis ten years before), a play on the word ‘essential’ as indicating both ‘the essence of’ and ‘indispensable for the understanding of’ their author’s mind. John Stott protested. He wrote to IVP: ‘The “happy triumvirate” here has reacted very negatively to the proposed title – The Essential John Stott. Would you consider as an alternative The Cross and the Christian?’ But to no avail: the book appeared under the publishers’ title, described as ‘a double volume for a new millennium’, making available for the first time The Contemporary Christian between hard covers as well as in paperback.