Keller’s hometown paper:
The Rev. Timothy J. Keller, a best-selling author and theorist of Christianity who performed a modern miracle of his own — establishing a theologically orthodox church in Manhattan that attracted thousands of young professional followers — died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.
His death was announced by Redeemer City to City, an organization affiliated with Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Mr. Keller announced on Twitter in December 2021 that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Keller, whose only previous experience in the pulpit had been at a blue-collar congregation in a rural Virginia parish, moved with his wife and three sons to New York in 1989 and, with neither fire nor brimstone, embarked on what New York magazine hyperbolized as “close to a theological suicide mission — to create a strictly conservative Christian church in the heart of Sodom.”
Colleagues, Mr. Keller recalled in his best-selling book “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” (2008), “were incredulous when I explained that the beliefs of the new church would be the orthodox, historic tenets of Christianity — the infallibility of the Bible, the deity of Christ, the necessity of spiritual regeneration (the new birth)— all doctrines considered hopelessly dated by the majority of New Yorkers. Nobody ever said ‘fuggedaboutit’ out loud, but it always hung in the air.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “we launched Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and by the end of 2007 it had grown to more than 5,000 attendees and had spawned more than a dozen daughter congregations in the immediate metropolitan area.”
Today the church has several locations in Manhattan, though the main one is on West 83rd Street near Amsterdam Avenue; the others are on the Lower West Side, on the West Side at Lincoln Square, on the Upper East Side and in East Harlem.
In addition to those who heard him preach in person at any one of those churches, thousands downloaded Mr. Keller’s weekly sermons from the Redeemer website. His dozens of books have been translated into 25 languages and sold an estimated 25 million copies.
“Fifty years from now,” the journal Christianity Today wrote in 2006, “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.”
Read the rest here.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.