July 18 1994

ARTICLE TOOLS

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He looks like a boxer. He enjoys performing on the piano. He likes to talk about his early years when he played hockey in northern Saskatchewan against scrappy Mennonite farm teams. Gifted with an eloquent tongue appropriate to someone from a Pentecostal home, he talks easily with politicians, form a pulpit, in small gatherings, or on national radio or TV.

Brian Stiller, executive director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), Canada's counterpart to the National Association of Evangelicals, has become one of Canada's best-known evangelical spokespersons.

When Brian became executive director of EFC in 1983, he joined a moribund organization that had limped along for more than two decades. It had only part-time staff and a budget of $24,000 (Canadian). Today it has a budget of $2.6 million and a staff of more than 20. Then, though it sought to bring evangelicals together, it got little attention from most denominations and had virtually no public voice.

Now, a decade later, the evangelical convergence has left a mark on the entire country.

Under Stiller's leadership, EFC has gained the support of 27 Canadian evangelical bodies-70 to 80 percent of the total-and now includes 110 agencies, institutions, and missions within its membership. It helps motivate and empower evangelicals in what they do best-evangelism-while giving them a means to address issues that affect all Canadians, whether abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, pornography, homosexuality, education, the Constitution, or national unity.

When he left the leadership of Canadian Youth for Christ, Stiller says, he was uncertain about his future. During a retreat to rethink his direction, he read Nehemiah and became preoccupied with the words "Find a broken ...