For over 50 years, up until his death in 2011, John Stott was a leader of the worldwide Evangelical movement. He was a key author of the Lausanne Covenant on World Evangelisation in 1974 (he was chair of the drafting committee) and central to the subsequent spin-offs and supplementary statements. Stott was an ever-present eminence in my youth, an evangelical authority who was assumed to be right until he could be positively proven to be wrong. You would be hard put to find such proof - his writings are careful and considered, marshalling evidence before laying out a modest, logical conclusion. His sermons - to which we listened on cassette tapes - were masterpieces of the art of condensing complex subject matter into four alliterative points for easy recall. He was not so much an original theologian as a gifted teacher, able to explain complex concepts in simple lay terms. He was a good role model for young evangelicals. He didn't despise learning but nor did he flaunt it.
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson