University Missioner Visits Christchurch

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28658, 7 August 1958, Page 12

University Missioner Visits Christchurch

Students asked the same questions of Christians, whether they were the intellectual sophisticates of Oxford or Harvard, or from the younger American or Commonwealth universities, said the Rev. John Stott in an interview in Christchurch.

A university missioner and vicar of a fashionable London parish, Mr Stott is spending a week in New Zealand at the end of a two-month Australian tour, during which he held missions at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne.

“But university students cannot be brought to a point of commitment to Christ without reflection,” he said. “Someone has once said that ‘Commitment without reflection is fanaticism in action; reflection without commitment is the paralysis of all action.’

“There is very little active opposition from non-Christians or unbelievers of any sort, in the universities, but there is a great deal of apathy. “I also notice much concern by many students, a feeling towards Christ; but the problem is to get them beyond concern, to commitment,” he said. “Committed to Little”

“These mid-twentieth century students are interested in everything but committed to little. They have been described as the generation, and I feel that is true,” said Mr Stott. Students in the Commonwealth and American universities he found to be rather younger, on admission, than those in British universities, said Mr Stott, but they- seemed to mature fairly quickly.

Whatever their age or degree of sophistication there was always a great deal of interest from those outside any Christian or church affiliation in university missions, he said, and sometimes towards the end of an eight-day mission he would find the whole day taken up with personal interviews Mr Stott has conducted university missions since 1951. “I am blessed with an understanding congregation,” he said, “and come

with the full approval of my parochial church council.” In Christchurch he spoke to students at the university of Canterbury at lunch-time, to clergymen in the late afternoon and held a service in the Cathedral in the evening. Today he will leave for Dunedin, on Thursday he will be in Nelson, on Friday in Auckland and on Saturday in Los Angeles on his way home by air.