Found: The Lost Recording of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' 1966 Call for Evangelical Unity

Sixty years after the address that divided British evangelicalism, the MLJ Trust will release the audio for the first time on Tuesday, October 13.

This article was first published in Evangelical Times and is reproduced with permission.

For six decades, one of the most consequential addresses in the history of British evangelicalism has been known almost entirely through the printed page. Now the voice itself can be heard. The MLJ Trust has recovered the audio recording of "Evangelical Unity: An Appeal," the address Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave to the Second National Assembly of Evangelicals on the evening of October 18, 1966. The Trust will make it freely available at mljtrust.org at 8:00 a.m. ET on October 13, 2026, days before the sixtieth anniversary of the evening on which it was given.

"The questions Dr. Lloyd-Jones raised have not gone away," said Greg Jones, president of the MLJ Trust. "Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that his message may be even more relevant today than it was when he first delivered it."

The Evening at Central Hall

The Assembly, convened by the Evangelical Alliance at Westminster Central Hall, had asked Dr. Lloyd-Jones to speak on the question of church unity. The recording makes plain that he did so at the invitation of the Alliance's own commission on the subject, before which he had already given evidence. "It was the members of the commission themselves who asked me to say in public here tonight what I am now proposing to say," he told the gathering. "So it is their responsibility."

He did not treat the subject as one item among many. He was considering, he said, "incomparably the most important question" facing Christian people at that time.

His argument began with history. The Evangelical Alliance itself had been formed in 1846, after John Henry Newman and others went over to Rome, and evangelicals had since met the rise of higher criticism in the same way, by forming alliances, movements, and societies. As a temporary measure, he allowed, this had been justified. But the ecumenical movement, which had gathered pace since its first assembly at Amsterdam in 1948, had changed everything. The major denominations were now openly willing to "throw everything into the melting pot" in pursuit of a single world church. "We are confronted by a situation today," he said, "such as has not been the case since the Protestant Reformation."

Against that background he found the evangelical position, in his own word, tragic, and he gave three reasons. The first was neglect. "Everybody seems to be talking about church unity except evangelicals," he observed, yet a people who take Scripture as their authority "ought to be the first to preach the vital necessity of church unity. But we are the last to do so." The second was negativity. Whenever unity was debated in the assemblies of the denominations, evangelicals were the ones objecting, opposing, and delaying, until they appeared "more concerned to maintain the integrity of their different denominations than anybody else in those denominations."

The third was silence. That very year, he said, "certain visits have been paid to certain places," and evangelicals had left it to a few isolated voices to protest. "Our silence has very nearly become a criminal silence." The cause, as he saw it, was plain. Scattered as small minorities across the major denominations, evangelicals were, in his words, "weak and we are ineffective."

Doctrine Before Fellowship

The heart of the address was a question: what is the Church? Here, he said, lay the great divide. "The ecumenical people, they put fellowship before doctrine. We evangelicals, we put doctrine before fellowship."

The Church, he insisted, is not a paper constitution or a confession of faith, however valuable these may be, since a church can keep its articles while a majority of its members deny them. "A church consists of living people": men and women who believe the doctrines essential to salvation, who have been born of the Spirit, and who show it in their lives. Among those doctrines he named the infallibility of Scripture, the unique deity of Christ, his substitutionary death, and his literal, physical resurrection.

From there he turned the familiar charge of schism on its head. Evangelicals who left their denominations were routinely accused of schism. Dr. Lloyd-Jones argued that this misunderstood the word. The church at Corinth, to which the apostle Paul wrote, was agreed on its doctrine but was splitting into parties around personalities: "I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas" (1 Corinthians 1:12). That, he said, is what Scripture means by schism: division among true believers, who agree on the essentials, over matters too secondary to justify it.

Three conclusions followed. First, to leave a church that has abandoned the gospel is not schism but Christian duty. Second, those who deny the essentials of the faith cannot commit schism at all, because in denying them they stand outside the Church. Third, and most pointedly, the people most exposed to the charge were evangelicals themselves. Agreed on everything that matters, they remained divided from one another, often for no better reason than the denomination they happened to be born into. Of that inherited loyalty he said: "because I was born there, I stay there, and I'm prepared to fight for it." Meanwhile they spent most of their time bound to people who rejected the very doctrines of the gospel.

His appeal was positive rather than combative. He had not come, he said, to debate. "I'm a believer in ecumenism, evangelical ecumenism." He did not minimize the cost, acknowledging that ministers who heeded him would face financial and family hardship, and pointed his hearers to the Reformers and martyrs who had faced far greater difficulties. "We are living in one of the great turning points of history," he said. He closed with the hope that the ecumenical movement might yet be something for which evangelicals would one day thank God, because it had brought them together "as a fellowship or an association of Evangelical Churches."

A Parting of the Ways

What followed has passed into evangelical folklore. By convention, the chairman of such a meeting simply thanks the speaker and closes proceedings. Instead, when John Stott rose to announce the closing hymn, he urged those present not to act on the appeal. Iain Murray records Stott's words that "history is against what Dr Lloyd-Jones has said." Because the chairman's remarks brought the meeting to a close, Dr. Lloyd-Jones had no opportunity to reply. Stott later apologized to him for using the chair in this way.

[PENDING AUDIO CONFIRMATION: The recovered recording also preserves part of the chairman's closing remarks, in which he proposed a continuing dialogue between members of the Westminster Fellowship and the Church of England Evangelical Council.]

The evening has long been regarded as a watershed. The following year, the National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele committed Anglican evangelicals to full participation in their denomination. John Stott and J. I. Packer remained within the Church of England, while many others withdrew into independency. The friendships survived, but the paths had parted.

Why It Matters Now

Sixty years on, the questions Dr. Lloyd-Jones put to his hearers have lost none of their force. He asked whether evangelicals were content to remain an evangelical wing within a comprehensive, national church, and whether they would merely modify what existed or start afresh from the New Testament. Since 1966, the Church of England and other historic denominations have declined markedly, and the doctrinal disputes within them have deepened rather than eased. Dr. Lloyd-Jones' appeal met fierce resistance in 1966. Sixty years on, history has vindicated this physician-turned-preacher's diagnosis of the problem, and perhaps the prescription he proposed.

The recording will be released on October 13 to coincide with a chapel service at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary devoted to Dr. Lloyd-Jones' legacy, at which Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. will speak. For the first time since that evening in 1966, listeners will be able to hear the appeal as it was delivered: in the Doctor's own voice, with its urgency, its warmth, and its cost.

*"Evangelical Unity: An Appeal" will be available free of charge at mljtrust.org beginning Tuesday, October 13, at 8:00 a.m. ET.

The MLJ Trust makes more than 1,600 sermons by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones freely available to listeners around the world.