Tim Keller

Timothy James Keller was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 1950. He grew up in a Lutheran church, went to Bucknell University in the late 1960s, and there — through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, in the middle of a Vietnam-era campus — came to a faith he owned himself. He married Kathy Kristy, whom he met at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; they had three sons. Both of them had been shaped early by C. S. Lewis, and it shows in nearly everything he later wrote. His first church was not in a city. From 1975 to 1984 he pastored West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Virginia, a blue-collar town of chemical plants. He preached three times a week to people who worked shifts. He said afterward that those nine years taught him to talk plainly, and that he learned more there than anywhere else. Then he taught practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, working on the church's care for the poor — the subject of his first book, Ministries of Mercy. In 1989 he and Kathy moved to Manhattan to plant a church. Nearly everyone told them it would not work: center-city New York was among the least churched ground in America, and a conservative Presbyterian congregation was the last thing anyone expected to grow there. Redeemer Presbyterian Church started with a handful of people in borrowed space. Within twenty years it was drawing about five thousand a week, most of them young professionals, a large share of them skeptics who had come because a friend brought them. His preaching had an unusual shape. He would state the objection of the doubter better than the doubter could, agree with whatever was true in it, and then show why the gospel answered it more deeply than the alternative. He quoted Flannery O'Connor and Nietzsche and Jonathan Edwards in the same sermon. He never made a fool of anyone in the room. The Reason for God (2008) put that method into a book and became a national bestseller. The Prodigal God, Counterfeit Gods, Every Good Endeavor, Prayer, and a long shelf of others followed. Through Redeemer City to City, he and his colleagues helped start hundreds of churches in cities around the world — the work he considered his real legacy. He stepped down as senior pastor in 2017. In May 2020 he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He spent the next three years writing and speaking about death and hope, saying that the doctrines he had preached for decades had turned from theory into food. He died on May 19, 2023, at seventy-two. Sources: Collin Hansen, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation; Timothy Keller, The Reason for God and Ministries of Mercy; the published history of Redeemer City to City; contemporary obituaries.