In 2005, Time included John Stott in its list of the world’s 100 most influential people, describing Stott as both a “touchstone of authentic biblical scholarship that has scarcely been paralleled since the days of the 16th-century European Reformers” as well as “a significant factor in the explosive growth of Christianity in parts of the Third World.” With this, Alister Chapman begins Godly Ambition, a compact analysis of Stott’s career that certainly does justice to this extraordinarily significant figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century global evangelicalism.

Thanks in good part to Chapman’s access to Stott’s personal papers (Stott died in 2011), Godly Ambition is a nicely textured study that also has the virtue of being well-organized as the book moves from Stott’s conversion to conservative evangelicalism to his time as rector at London’s All Souls Langham Place to his work promoting evangelicalism in the Church of England to, finally, his decades as a “Christian star” on the global stage.