William Still

William Still (1911–1997)

William Still was born on 8 May 1911 in Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland, and he died in 1997 in the city of Aberdeen, where the greater part of his ministry had been spent. The north-east shaped him as it shapes few men: a plain, weathered, Presbyterian country, suspicious of display and impatient of anything that did not mean what it said. He came out of it with a manner to match, blunt in speech and without much interest in being liked.

His secular schooling was local, and he went on to study at the University of Aberdeen, taking an arts degree before turning to divinity. His ecclesiastical training was in the Church of Scotland, which was his denominational home for life, and he was ordained and inducted in 1945 to the parish of Gilcomston South in Aberdeen. He remained there until his retirement in 1997. For fifty-two years he was minister of a single congregation, and his place in the story of Scottish Christianity is largely the story of what he did in that one pulpit.

What he did was unfashionable. Still held that the minister's central task was to feed the flock by taking it steadily through the whole of Scripture, book by book, in sequence, without detours to the topical or the sensational. The congregation he inherited was not large, and the ministry he built there was not designed to make it so. He came to believe that a church fed in this way would grow in depth first, and that numbers, if they came, were a by-product. He was alert to what he regarded as the Church of Scotland's drift into liberalism and institutional drift, but his response was characteristically to stay and to work from within. He did not lead a secession. He remained a minister of the national church and argued, through the quiet accumulation of teaching, that reformation began in the local congregation and with the open Bible.

That conviction was tested by a good deal of resistance. Within his own denomination he was sometimes regarded as awkward and single-minded, and the intensity of his focus on expository preaching and on the weekly discipline of the prayer meeting struck some contemporaries as narrow. He was equally uneasy with the parts of the evangelical world that, in his judgment, valued activity and enthusiasm over the patient teaching of the Word. He had critics on both flanks and did little to soften his positions for either.

His formation was Reformed and biblical in the plainest sense. He read the Scriptures, the Reformers, and the Puritan and Scottish divines, and he held to the sovereignty of God and the sufficiency of the written Word with a steadiness that colored everything he did. Those who sat under him describe a man who prayed at length and taught with unembellished seriousness, and who gathered around him a succession of younger ministers who came to Aberdeen to learn how a congregation might be shaped by the Bible and nothing else. Still gave them time, correspondence, and a model, and many carried what they learned into pulpits across Scotland and beyond.

He never married, and he lived with a simplicity that matched the austerity of his preaching. The ministry consumed him, and it left little room for the ordinary comforts or for the easy warmth that some of his own flock longed for in a pastor. It is part of the record that his gifts and his severity came together in one man, and that the devotion which made Gilcomston South what it was also made him a demanding figure to know.

He retired in 1997 and died that same year, having served the one church from the end of the Second World War almost to the end of the century.

His Writing and Its Influence

Still's books grew out of the pulpit and the study, not the other way around. His most substantial work, The Work of the Pastor, set out in compact form the convictions that governed his ministry: that the pastor is first a feeder of the flock, that this feeding is done through the systematic exposition of the whole Bible, and that the prayer meeting and the home groups of a congregation are the true engine of its life. It is a short book, unadorned, and it reads as the testimony of a man describing what he had already spent years doing. His other writings, among them The Shepherd's Task and The Culture of the Church, drew on the same ground, as did the long series of Bible expositions that circulated in print and on tape from Gilcomston South. He was not a writer in the literary sense, and he did not try to be. The books were instruments for a task.

Much of what he contributed was a matter of insistence more than invention. He contended that the Reformed tradition, in its practice, had too often reduced the Word to a source of sermon texts, and he urged a return to the continuous reading and teaching of Scripture as the primary means by which God forms a people. His particular emphasis on prayer as the necessary companion of preaching, and on the congregation as a household to be taught rather than an audience to be gathered, set him apart from both the more programmatic evangelicalism and the more institutional churchmanship of his day. He also pressed the claim that ministers should be content to labor in obscurity, a counsel he embodied by remaining in one parish for more than half a century.

His influence ran through people more than through publication. The younger ministers who came to Aberdeen to sit under him, and who corresponded with him for years afterward, carried his pattern of expository preaching into the Church of Scotland and into the wider evangelical and Reformed world. He is regularly named by later preachers as a decisive influence, and the weight he gave to systematic exposition helped shape a generation of Scottish evangelical ministry that might otherwise have taken a different form. Some of the congregations he indirectly shaped adopted his emphasis on the prayer meeting and on teaching the whole counsel of God, and the vocabulary of his ministry, the pastor as shepherd and the congregation as flock to be fed, became part of the working language of those who followed him.

His reception has not been uniform. Admirers speak of him with a reverence that borders on devotion, and his book on the pastoral task remains a touchstone for those who want a ministry built on the Bible and prayer. Others have found his austerity forbidding and his single-mindedness narrow, and the sharpness of his judgments on the church around him did not always serve the unity he valued. Both assessments sit alongside the plain fact of the work he did. His reputation outside the circles that knew him has been modest, and he is better known as a model for ministers than as an author for general readers.

Who should read William Still: Ministers and church leaders, especially those in the Reformed and evangelical traditions, who are weighing what it would mean to build a congregation on the steady exposition of Scripture and on prayer, and who are willing to be told that their methods may be getting in the way. He is also valuable for anyone tempted to measure a ministry by its size or its visibility. He is not for readers looking for literary grace, devotional warmth, or a gentle introduction to the Christian life. He writes for pastors, and he writes bluntly.