Timothy Keller

We lost a great Christian leader this past month – Timothy (Tim) Keller.  He passed away on May 19, 2023, following a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer.  He was 72.  Keller was a bit of an enigma at a time when American Christians seemed to clamor for “relevance” and charismatic leadership.

Keller’s resume is actually pretty short.  After graduating from Gordon-Conwell Seminary in 1975, he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a newer denomination that had been formed in the early 70s.  His first call was to pastor a church in a small blue-collar town in Virginia, where he served for nine years.  It’s there that he learned how to trust, serve, and pastor.  Keller in a World magazine interview:

Being in a blue-collar church taught me to be both clear and practical in preaching. One of the biggest compliments I ever got was when someone in the congregation thanked me that I “wasn’t intellectual” and therefore could be understood. I also learned not to build a ministry on leadership charisma (which I didn’t have anyway!) or preaching skill (which wasn’t so much there early on) but on loving people pastorally and repenting when I was in the wrong. In a small town, people will follow you if they trust you—your character—personally, and that trust has to be built in personal relationships, not through showing off your credentials and your talents.

“People will follow you if they trust you—your character—personally, and that trust has to be built in personal relationships, not through showing off your credentials and your talents.“

The next item on his resume was a professorship stint at Westminster Theological Seminary, teaching practical theology while working on his doctorate.  He also began working for the PCA, focused on their church planting efforts.  He was charged with finding someone willing to plant a church in Manhattan.  No one was interested – it was a bad idea, fraught with potential failure.  Keller:

I was told by almost everyone it was a fool’s errand.  Manhattan was the land of skeptics, critics, and cynics. The middle class, the conventional market for a church, was fleeing the city because of crime and rising costs.

So, in 1989, Tim and his wife, Kathy, embarked on the fool’s errand, moving to Manhattan to plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church.  In the process, they fell in love with the city and its inhabitants.  In the World interview, one can see Keller’s heart for the upwardly mobile young professionals that landed in Manhattan:

They had lived their whole lives with parents, music teachers, coaches, professors, and bosses telling them to do better, be better, try harder. In their view, God was the ultimate taskmaster, with unfulfillable demands. To hear that He Himself had met those demands for righteousness through the life and death of Jesus, and now there was no condemnation left for anyone who trusted in that righteousness—that was an amazingly freeing message.

Keller was a model of cultural evangelical engagement.  His approach was especially popular with those Christians who felt the culture wars had harmed their gospel witness.  He resisted the prevailing evangelical emphasis on suburbs that overlooked the cities.  In a similar spirit, he challenged the political mobilization of churches.  His views were not universally received as we can see in this op-ed by Carl R. Trueman, professor at the Alva J. Calderwood School of Arts and Letters, Grove City College:

I disagree at points with both his theology and philosophy of ministry.  [I do not] share his love of the city.  For me, cities are a necessary evil whose sole purpose is to provide country boys like me somewhere to go to the theatre once in a while.  And I am definitely not an optimistic transformationalist as he is—trust me, things are going to get worse before, well, they get even worse than that. 

Regardless of push-back from those who questioned his theology or methods, Keller was true to the orthodox Gospel he understood, preached, and lived.  His understanding of the Gospel was something he oft Tweeted: “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

His theology and methods led a Christianity Today editor to write, “Fifty years from now, if evangelical Christians are widely known for their love of cities, their commitment to mercy and justice, and their love of their neighbors, Tim Keller will be remembered as a pioneer of the new urban Christians.”

Tim Keller will be missed!

(This was Keller’s last message to the Redeemer Churches recorded a few weeks before his death. It is worth 10 minutes of your time.)