This is the address given by Dr Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador of the World Evangelical Alliance, at the WEA’s 180th Anniversary Celebration webinar.
Our celebration today of 180 years of the World Evangelical Alliance comes out of the vision, prayers and initiative of evangelical leaders almost two centuries ago. Church leaders from Protestant churches across Europe and North America gathered in London in 1846 and formed the Evangelical Alliance. A century later the Evangelical Alliance, renamed the World Evangelical Fellowship, was renewed and a new era began around the same time that the World Council of Churches was formed.
My journey with the Alliance
My own life with the WEA began in 1983, when I took on the leadership of our Canadian alliance, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. At the time I was on the Lausanne Committee’s executive, and Leighton Ford asked me to lead a Younger Leaders Conference in Singapore in 1987. But my friends and colleagues internationally knew, as I did, that the real place of legitimate global affiliation was with the Alliance. I got involved with David Howard and Jun Vencer, and over these last decades my life has been intertwined with this global body.
Let me go back a little. My life began in the middle of the Second World War, born into a Canadian prairie pastor’s home. When I attended my first year of college in 1960, the evangelical community was estimated at about 90 million worldwide. Within a few decades that grew to over 650 million. And let me add a parenthesis here. Todd Johnson of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity has said that number is really closer to a billion, as most Protestant churches in the Global South are decidedly evangelical.
After leading the Canadian alliance and then Tyndale University, I was appointed Global Ambassador for the WEA. I travelled to dozens of countries, and everywhere I went people would ask me: What’s going on globally? What are you seeing? Country after country, I was amazed at both the depth of commitment to the gospel among Christians and, in most countries, the explosion of church planting and conversions. And so I set out to discover the essentials that made this growth surpass any other religion or time in our history.
A movement of independents
The nature of evangelicals is independence. We’re independent of ecclesiastical structures, and when it seems right to us, we’ll form another denomination or another independent church network. Consistent with that pattern, our community gravitated to developing parachurch ministries. For example, I was part of Youth for Christ, a youth ministry started by Billy Graham. We all know about World Vision, the ministry started by Bob Pierce. Parachurch ministries, independent networks and unaffiliated denominations: these characterize evangelicals.
National alliances: fellowship and a voice
But here’s what startled me. National alliances had sprung up everywhere. You see, as our global alliance was being re-formed in 1947, it was made up of a few national alliances, but mainly conferences and statements on theology and issues we faced. Then, one country at a time, national alliances began to appear. In 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals in the US. In 1951, the Evangelical Fellowship of India. And in my country, in 1966, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
There was no strategy. No one was assigned to start these. But in country after country, as the evangelical church and its witness grew, church leaders recognized their need for fellowship. New churches, old denominations, parachurch ministries: all of them knew they shared a deep commitment to Jesus Christ as the only Saviour of the world. That fellowship was compelling. It allowed people to push aside their differences and come together to form those national alliances.
But they also recognized they needed a voice. They needed to speak on issues that mattered to them. And in many countries there were issues particular to their own geography, cultural makeup, weather patterns and physical needs.
So what we have today is the largest network of evangelical Christians in the world, with national alliances started and run by the people of each country. Indigenous leadership, we call it. There’s no grand plan from some country or agency or denomination or movement. Every country decides what it will do, its agenda and its leadership.
A shifting centre of gravity
Today, evangelicals make up roughly one in four of the world’s 2.5 billion Christians. Amazing growth has taken place in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Korea, China, and in the Majority World more broadly, as the centre of gravity of the evangelical world shifted. Anyone who still pictures evangelicalism as a white, North American phenomenon is looking at a map that is decades out of date.
I have watched this change happen. The church I meet today sings in languages the founders in London never heard, worships in forms they would not recognize, yet carries the very convictions those founders gathered to affirm. What they hoped for, I have seen.
What holds us together
At the heart of this vast and diverse movement, our core commitments remain as they have always been. The Bible is trustworthy and holds supreme authority for faith and life (2 Timothy 3:16). The atoning death of Jesus Christ is the only basis for salvation (Romans 5:1). Every person needs to give their life to Christ and be born again (John 3:3). And lives are changed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and by a faith that is active in witness and mission to the world (Matthew 28:19).
Those beliefs hold the movement together. They are why believers in Nairobi, São Paulo and Beijing recognize each other as family, even when they have never met and share no common language.
An honest word
Evangelicalism has never been a perfect movement. It has sometimes been captive to its culture, sometimes to its politics, sometimes to the personalities of its most prominent leaders. I have seen that, and I will not pretend otherwise.
But I have also seen men and women at their best, quietly doing extraordinary things because they are convinced that the gospel is true and that it changes everything. Missionaries learning languages in remote corners of the world. Leaders building institutions of learning and mercy in places where none existed. Young people giving up comfortable careers to plant churches in urban neighbourhoods. Relief workers going into disaster zones because they believe every person bears the image of God. Students who, even though subjected to ridicule, continue to speak of their faith in public witness.
That is the movement I have spent my life serving. And whatever its human failures—and they are real—it is a movement that has been vital to the church, serving as a gravitational centre for evangelicals.
A seat at the table
The World Evangelical Alliance does what no other organization in the evangelical world can do. It speaks for the whole evangelical movement. That is not a small thing. In the architecture of global diplomacy, representation matters enormously. Religious communities that have no recognized voice at the international table are left out of the conversations that shape their future. The WEA gives evangelicals a seat at that table. It engages with international bodies in ways that individual churches and denominations simply cannot.
As a network, it reaches into the local church on every inhabited continent. It does not impose a Western agenda. It provides a framework within which Christians from every culture can find common cause and mutual support. That is a harder thing to build than it sounds, and it is one of the WEA’s genuine achievements.
Over the decades, the WEA has been the seedbed for some of the most significant collaborative efforts in evangelical history. In 1974, when Billy Graham was planning the Lausanne conference, he turned to this global alliance for the people to assist in assembling leaders from around the world. The WEA has been behind establishing accountability frameworks for evangelical universities and colleges worldwide. It has created platforms for theological dialogue that cross cultural and denominational lines. It has been, in the truest sense, a flag bearer for evangelical theology in the global public square.
Why the WEA matters now
So why does the World Evangelical Alliance matter now, perhaps more than at any time in its history? Because no other organization has both the global reach and the evangelical theological grounding to do what the WEA does. Parachurch ministries, however excellent, operate in specialized domains. Denominations, however large, speak for their own constituencies. The WEA has the mandate and the architecture to speak for evangelical Christianity as a whole, to gather the voices of believers from many, many nations and bring them into coherent, sustained engagement with the challenges and the opportunities of this historical moment.
When the founders of the Evangelical Alliance chose to stand together in a divided age, in 1846, they could not have imagined what the WEA is today. But everything that has happened in the last 180 years rests on that original decision to work together as one body of Christ. And so, on its 180th anniversary, I give thanks to the Lord for planting in our hearts a love and desire to fellowship and coordinate strategies to give praise to our risen Lord and strength to his church.
