The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Tim Keller
1950–2023American
The pastor who planted a church for skeptics in the middle of Manhattan and spent thirty years answering doubt without ever mocking the doubter.
Summary
- Lived 1950–2023, American.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Awakeners.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1930–today
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
- Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Tim Keller at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Planted a church in the middle of skeptical Manhattan and preached to doubters without ever flinching.
Hangs on The Awakeners: The preachers of the Great Awakenings, fields for pulpits, nations for parishes.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.