By Jim Coggins

AT ONE point in his career, Brian Stiller was wrestling with what direction to take and began reading through the Bible with a notepad. When he came to Nehemiah, he wrote down, "Find a broken wall."

That has been a metaphor for his life. He has specialized in rebuilding Christian ministries.

After earning degrees from Central Pentecostal College in Saskatoon and the University of Toronto, in 1967 he was appointed director of Youth for Christ (YFC) Montreal. The chapter was bankrupt. With the help of a good board of directors, Stiller was able to restore the ministry.

This was also where Stiller learned the leadership skills that have informed his whole life. "I learned how to work with governance bodies, do youth ministry, work with media, organize, raise money, build a board, recruit staff," he says.

In 1971, YFC sent Stiller to Toronto to organize and train music teams. When he got there, he discovered that Toronto YFC had folded, "so I took that on and rebuilt it over the next four years."

In 1975, Stiller was appointed president of YFC Canada. It was a pivotal time. Radical movements were washing over universities, and the youth culture had disengaged from much of the church community. "The question of how you relate the gospel to this changing world fascinated me," Stiller recalls. For him, YFC became a calling "since young people mattered," but it also became a context in which he could test out ideas about evangelism.

"YFC had been very much shaped by the evangelical community of the '40s and '50s," Stiller recalls. "It was culturally very conservative, and when the counter-culture movement happened in the '60s, they had no idea how to translate the gospel into a new idiom."

YFC was primarily known for its big Saturday night rallies, but "the big events were no longer as effective." So YFC started two new forms of ministry. One was Campus Life, "doing high school ministry in the language of the high school." The other was Youth Guidance, a ministry to troubled youth.

In 1983 came that revelation from Nehemiah and Stiller's transition to director, then president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC). At that point, the EFC had "no money, no program, no staff and no office," says Stiller. The total budget that first year was about $26,000. When Stiller left 14 years later, it was about $3 million.

An important moment occurred in 1986 when scandal erupted at Jim Bakker's PTL television ministry in the US. Stiller had been a guest on the program the day the story broke. Back in Canada, he went on radio and television doing interviews almost non-stop. "It became an opportunity for Canadian evangelicals to define ourselves both by who we were and who we weren't," he recalls.

Stiller says he realized that what "what the evangelical community needed was for us to be a voice -- thoughtful, informed, articulate, Christ-like and theologically grounded." That became the prime focus of the EFC. Stiller started Faith Today magazine and the Crosscurrents television show.

Stiller's arrival at the EFC coincided with the beginning of what has turned out to be three decades of growth for evangelical churches.

"What really happened in the 1970s was the charismatic movement opened the door for other Christians to be more mindful of the person and work of the Spirit," says Stiller. When Spirit-empowered ministry was set loose, "it captured a lot of the evangelical churches and gave them new life -- and they began to grow."

At the same time, "there was a growing recognition that the sectarian mindset of evangelicals was not only unbiblical but also counter-productive for ministry."

Evangelicals had moved away from involvement in social issues because the social gospel had led to theological liberalism in mainline churches. But by the 1980s, evangelicals realized that "a lot of stuff was going on in our culture" that they were not happy about.

The creation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 "also helped people realize that what is done in social policy ripples its way down into our lives and if we care about what happens in our community, in the lives of our children and grandchildren, then we should be concerned about who makes the decisions," says Stiller.

Another development occurred when a number of evangelical MPs were elected as part of the Mulroney government in 1984. Ironically, notes Stiller, these MPs (Jake Epp, John Reimer, Benno Friesen and others) were Mennonites, and thus members of a community who "of all people seem to hold to a sectarian line that you shouldn't be involved in that world." They helped "evangelicals wake up to the need for engagement in public forums."

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Stiller's gifts and interests were a good match for the times. "I had probably preached in more churches than any other Canadian . . . I was thoroughly biblical, I was passionate about people knowing Christ, and I believed in the renewal of the Spirit in the church. " Because of this, evangelicals trusted him and allowed him to talk about social and political issues. "I was able to pick up on some of the trends that were going on and bring a bit of convergence."

Stiller's next transition occurred in 1995, when a friend mentioned that Ontario Bible College was in trouble. Stiller responded, "Let me know how I can help." Within two weeks, the college was in receivership, and Stiller was asked to take over as president.

Leaving EFC and moving to the school was "the toughest thing I've ever done," says Stiller. He had no peace about it until his wife Lily reminded him that rebuilding broken institutions was what he did. He took over as president on June 28 and had only 60 days to get the school up and running for the next fall. Stiller worked one year for the school without salary and then spent one more year as head of both the EFC and the school, before moving to the school full-time. The school, renamed Tyndale University College & Seminary, has managed to pay off its debts and have a small operating surplus every year since.

Two incidents honed Stiller's vision for Tyndale. First, his son Murray attended Trinity Western University in BC, and that convinced him of the need for a Christian university in Ontario.

The other incident, Stiller says, occurred "about a year into my tenure. We were broke, just hanging on by our fingernails." Next to the Tyndale campus was a facility owned by the Roman Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph, 240,000 square feet of buildings on 56 acres. As he and Lily were driving past, she said, "Honey, some day the Lord will give that to you."

"That helped me think in larger terms," says Stiller. "The development of Tyndale has been a progressive journey built around the vision that was birthed through EFC, that Christians should move from the cul-de-sac to Main Street."

Tyndale has now purchased that facility on a $40 million, interest-free, seven-year mortgage. Even though the seven years are not yet up, the school has raised $40 million for the purchase and is working on raising a further $18 million for renovations.

Stiller officially retired as president of Tyndale at the end of June. However, he is staying on as Chancellor for at least the next couple of years in order to help raise the remaining $18 million.

Stiller is also working on developing a Christian think tank that will include Roman Catholics as well as evangelicals. Noting that Catholics represent 47 percent of the population, Stiller says, "In Canada you have to include the Catholic community or you aren't fully Christian."

He adds, "When I was with EFC, our best friends were the Catholic bishops, because there was no debate on critical issues of the Trinity, of Christ being the only Saviour. We would disagree on some items, but on the larger social issues that have dominated our conversation for the last 30 years, there's more that unites us than divides us."

Regarding the Canadian church as a whole, Stiller is encouraged by a couple of trends. One is the many prayer and spiritual renewal groups that are "popping up all over the country in the most surprising places -- junior hockey teams, parliamentary communities and schools."

The other is the many initiatives in the evangelical community in the areas of social justice. Noting that Mennonites have tended to be very political and Pentecostals have tended to be very spiritual, Stiller says he is encouraged that there is now "a recognition within our community of the need to remove that line of demarcation between social justice and gospel power. It's the whole gospel being expressed."

Stiller is also not discouraged by statistics showing declining church attendance. He says it is wrong to equate a drop in weekly church attendance as a decline in spiritual life. Lifestyles have changed, and people are "getting spiritual input in ways other than going to church Sunday morning." He notes that surveys show the percentage of Canadians who "trust Christ as their personal Saviour" is actually increasing.

"My sense is that lurking under the surface is a spiritual hunger, an inclination toward spiritual receptivity that we often miss. I don't know what would trigger it or what its manifestation would be, but we might be at the edge of a spiritual renaissance such as our country has never seen."

Stiller says he is also not threatened by the renewed debate over atheism. "I love it when Christopher Hitchens and others come out swinging. It tells me they're a little nervous. It's sharpening the debate and forces people to consider what they really believe."

July 17/2009