In 2005, Time magazine included John Stott in its annual list of the one hundred most influential people in the world, yet, as Alister Chapman notes, “most of the people who read Time that week would never have heard of him” (3). And most of the readers of the Journal of British Studies this month will not have heard of him either. This peculiar fact—that one of the most important figures in the history of twentieth-century Christianity is relatively unknown in Britain (and among British historians) despite his quintessential Britishness—is central to the argument of Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement. In this short, clearly written study of Stott's life and impact, Chapman explores the interplay between the contracting role of Christianity in Britain and the increasingly important global position of evangelicalism, and the way in which these “conflicting trajectories” (7) shaped, and were shaped by, John Stott. Moreover, by placing this “very English clergyman” (9) within his very English context, Chapman illumines the important, and still inadequately understood, changes that have occurred in English religious culture since the 1930s.

The son of a Harley Street physician, Stott's early biography at first seems upper-middle-class boilerplate: French governesses until age eight, head boy at a prestigious prep school, head boy at Rugby, a first-class degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. But Stott deviated from the standard formulation very early on. While still at Rugby, he experienced the classic evangelical conversion and embraced a version of Christianity very much influenced by American fundamentalism—much to the horror of his father. The rupture with his father widened when Stott's literalist reading of the Sermon on the Mount led him to refuse military service—not a popular stance in 1940. Unlike American evangelicals, however, Stott did not retreat into a separate subculture or counterculture. Born to influence and power, he intended to retain that power and use that influence. He chose ordination within the Church of England and until the early 1970s seemed on track for a bishopric. Very much a creature of his class, during Stott's first two decades of ministry he embraced a “trickle-down” theory of religious conversion, targeting the educated and influential and assuming the masses would follow their betters' lead (34). A child of the empire, moreover, he naturally assumed that English evangelicals should play a leading role in the growing worldwide evangelical movement.

At only twenty-nine years old, Stott in 1950 became the rector of All-Souls, the fashionable and centrally located Regent Street church he had worshipped in as a boy. Never short on ambition, Stott aimed to make All Souls a model for the conversion of all of England. As Chapman shows, in the context of the 1950s such a vision did not seem as delusional as it does now: churches, particularly evangelical churches, were growing, and evangelical mores resonated with the conservative climate of the decade. Within just a few years, Stott had established All Souls—with its ambitious parish evangelization schemes, unabashed talk of revival, and packed pews—as a model for evangelical congregations around England. Those packed pews, however, were filled with the middle classes, not the masses. Trickle-down conversionism amounted to barely a drop. Still, in the 1950s, evangelicals at least had grounds for hope; in contrast, “the 1960s brought a rude affirmation of their cultural marginality” (88). Evangelical churches continued to grow, in sharp contrast to the free fall in attendance experienced by their nonevangelical counterparts, but Stott's hierarchical assumptions and social conservatism no longer resonated with English society.

Stott encountered failure and marginalization in England; however, he experienced increasing success abroad. Flying from country to country for conferences and preaching gigs, he became “a new type of evangelical hero for the jet age” (136). Chapman—tongue firmly in cheek—notes, “Being an Anglican clergyman could still be an asset overseas. . . . [Americans] loved the BBC accent, the dog collar, and the liturgical poise” (110). Part of Stott's American and then global success rested on his more than forty books, many of them huge successes in the United States. But Stott also became a renowned preacher and, most especially, a skilled organizer, instrumental in establishing a number of international alliances aimed at fostering evangelical unity. Away from England more and more, Stott played less and less of a role at All Souls and within the English Anglican community. He retired as All Souls rector in 1970 (when he was only forty-nine) to devote his time to writing and to international work—a move, Chapman makes clear, impelled in part by Stott's frustration with the peripheral position of the church in England and with his own failure to make a discernible impact in that church.

Chapman thus places the story of what Callum Brown has so famously called the “death of Christian Britain” against the counternarrative of the rise of global evangelicalism and traces Stott's role in both. He divides his study thematically. After a first chapter narrating the story of Stott's conversion, he divides the chapters by Stott's ministries—students, parishioners, Anglicans, society, world. This approach sacrifices chronological clarity but does highlight the range of Stott's influence. The sections exploring Stott's English career are very well done. Chapman has read widely in not only the religious but also the cultural and social history of twentieth-century Britain and uses Stott's story to highlight, and often to complicate, that larger narrative. The chapters on Stott's international work are not as strongly contextualized; the reader will have to turn to Philip Jenkins's The Next Christendom (New York, 2011) for the essential account of the phenomenal growth and impact of evangelical Christianity in Africa and Asia. But even readers not interested in evangelicalism will enjoy this book, offering as it does an engaging account of an intelligent man struggling to find his footing as the ground beneath him disappears.