Australian CHRISTOPHER GILBERT reflects on his time working with US Christian leader Tim Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan following news last week that Keller had died at the age of 72…
Sydney, Australia
When passenger planes were used as missiles to collapse the twin towers of the World Trade Center in September, 2001, Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan marshalled his team for the following Sunday.
As we sat behind him on the stage of Hunter College on the upper Eastside, all frayed from five days of seeking out the well-being of our 2500 congregants, we faced the influx of over 5000 people that Sunday, as Tim, impromptu, ordered extra services to accommodate their obvious need.
In this undated photo, pastor and author Timothy Keller speaks at an engagement. Keller died on Friday, 19th May, 2023, at the age of 72. PICTURE: Rachel Martin/Redeemer City to City via AP.
I was struck by the breadth of the man’s compassion for the sea of people in the Danny Kaye Theatre where almost 2000 seats were filled at three services, their faces aimed at him seeking solace and a way to interpret and deal with the chaos of families rent of loved ones and the smoking ruin that lay only five kilometres to our south.
Redeemer’s mission was to be a church for the city that made the city glad we were there. As we were preparing ourselves for this, he denied entry to a camera crew from CBN, an evangelical media group, already spruiking a narrative destructive to all that Redeemer stood for. People were grief-stricken – and Tim wasn’t going to allow a media group of any stripe to position us in their culture war.
Christopher Gilbert speaks with Tim Keller in a scene from a 2004 documentary Gilbert made about his global church planting. PICTURE: Video screenshot courtesy of Christopher Gilbert
“I was struck by the breadth of the man’s compassion for the sea of people in the Danny Kaye Theatre where almost 2000 seats were filled at three services, their faces aimed at him seeking solace and a way to interpret and deal with the chaos of families rent of loved ones and the smoking ruin that lay only five kilometres to our south.”
Pastor Keller offered words of truth about the evil of the tragedy and found solace in the Gospel, in Jesus’ own suffering for the joy of His anticipated resurrection. In this way, so consistent as he always was in his message of the prodigal love of God, the church stabilised over the following months at near double its previous attendance. That made a lot of work for him and us, and I recall that we willingly carried that extra load as necessary service for more than a year until staffing caught up with need.
I first met Tim when I arrived on staff as a director of fellowship groups in 1998. Redeemer’s staff inhabited two floors of an office block at 271 Madison Avenue in midtown and my hole-in-the-wall office on the 16th floor looked out across two blocks to the Empire State Building. I soon discovered that I was sharing that sliver of space with Tim. He would come in twice a week, and when he arrived, I would go to vacate, but he’d hold me back for chats about how I was doing, particularly with adapting to life in NYC. He wanted to understand my Australian perspective on the city.
He was just naturally interested, and conversation was easy. He was my boss, but he was amiable and over the next eight years I would learn how to read the Bible better from his sermons, break open his monthly leadership lectures in workshops for my group coordinators and their group leaders, and design training modules for them consistent with the Reformed theology Tim brought to Redeemer.
Occasionally we debated issues of staff management, but like most of the staff, I was always at ease around him and knew him as Tim, not Dr Keller. But we were all aware we were in the presence of a once-in-a-generation leader who flew at higher altitudes.
This past week, more than 90 of us from that era, former colleagues and fellow Redeemerites. conducted a Zoom call that went for more than three hours. We shared memories of a Christian leader who was the real deal. Each remembrance was a personal encounter, reminding us of the man who remembered names, made time for interruptions, shared his family with us – it was always Tim and Kathy, her presence implied even if not present with Tim, and they entrusted their sons to various ones as child sitters, Sunday school teachers and even our mentoring when they became young adults.
Tim stayed local to the church, declining the celebrity circuit until retirement and the many obligatory book promotional trips for publishers. He was more willing to fly around the country to help younger ministers raise the money needed to begin new churches.
On our Zoom reunion we discovered we were all over the world, some still in New York City, but many, like myself, pursuing callings far distant. And all owned that the Redeemer DNA imprints everything we do. Tim never referred to it as his own, he was that kind of man, but his influence we all agreed was like fingerprints over our Christian lives.
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His vision for planting new churches shaped my involvement in a project in Danvers, Massachusetts, between 2009 and 2015. That church thrives under the original pastor, Aussie David Cook, who spent his formative Christian years at Redeemer. There are hundreds of global city churches now planted around the world because of his teaching on the urban necessity of Christian mission, and facilitated by his church planting ministry, City to City.
When I left Redeemer in 2007, Tim had only published one book, Ministries of Mercy, Third Edition: The Call of the Jericho Road , but we as staff members were prevailing on him to make books from the copious teaching moments we had benefitted from. He has left a legacy of more than 20 books since then in his passing.
And at Excelsia College I have included in the Christian Formation curriculum An Invitation to the Skeptic, and Every Good Endeavor as particularly relevant to our international cohort. Yet the book that he said captures the heart of all his preaching and teaching is The Prodigal God – his commentary on the story we know as The Prodigal Son.
Tim Keller most of all loved Jesus, and gave the best of himself to showing us the beauty of Jesus and His Gospel. At his death on 19th May, his legacy to a generation is precious beyond measure.
Chris Gilbert has been teaching Christian formation and ethics as associate lecturer at Excelsia College in Sydney, since 2019. He returned to Australia after 18 years working in pastoral ministry, adjunct teaching at universities and colleges, and documentary film making in the US. With his wife, Jo Kadlecek, he lives on the NSW Central Coast.
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