E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten
Smethurst Tim Keller on the Christian Life
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9621-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
The Transforming Power of the Gospel
E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-4335-9621-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Matt Smethurst is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Tim Keller on the Christian Life; Before You Open Your Bible; Before You Share Your Faith; and Deacons. He also cohosts, with Ligon Duncan, The Everyday Pastor podcast from the Gospel Coalition. Matt and his wife, Maghan, have five children.
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Hopewell, Virginia, is easy to miss. Roughly twenty-five miles south of Richmond, and about three hundred fifty miles from New York City, this rural town is where Tim Keller (1950–2023) cut his pastoral teeth from 1975 to 1984. For nearly a decade, Keller prepared three biblical expositions a week—Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night—for his flock at West Hopewell Presbyterian Church. By age thirty-three, he had delivered approximately fourteen hundred expository messages. Like many small-church pastors, his job description seemed endless: doing pastoral visits, caring for the sick, officiating weddings, conducting funerals, even cheering on the church softball team—not to mention leading and loving his family.
This season was so important that we cannot understand Keller’s ministry in Manhattan without considering Hopewell. Far from a quick pit stop, his time there provided “the most formative ministry years of his life.”1 Hopewell is where, in Keller’s words, “Kathy and I learned for the first time how to walk beside people who were facing grief, loss, death, and darkness.”2 This is why so many sermon illustrations at Redeemer Presbyterian Church came from experiences and counseling moments in his first church.
Keller observed that, generally speaking, in a small town “your pastoring sets up your preaching.” That is, people won’t respect you as a preacher unless they trust you as their pastor. But in a big city it’s often the opposite: “Your preaching sets up your pastoring.”3 People won’t trust you as their pastor unless they respect you as a preacher. Keller experienced both dynamics, but his renowned preaching was infused with wisdom gleaned from years of diligent pastoring.
Hopewell was also where Keller honed the art of contextualization, which (rightly practiced) is about clarity and therefore love. In an interview two months before his death, Keller defined this fancy term as simply giving a message in “the most understandable and persuasive way without compromising or changing the message itself.” What was his main reason, the interviewer asked, for caring about contextualization? Simple: “I want people to fall in love with Jesus.”4
A Sketch of His Life
Born on September 23, 1950, to middle-class parents in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Timothy James Keller was the oldest of three children. His parents could hardly have been more different from one another: Bill seemed remote, while Louise could be downright stifling. The family dutifully attended a mainline Lutheran church, but Tim rarely heard the gospel and remained unconverted.5
At Bucknell University, though, the Lord invaded his life and captured his heart. After a season of spiritual wrestling, Tim repented of his sin and trusted in Christ in April 1970.6 “During college the Bible came alive in a way that was hard to describe,” Keller later reflected. “The best way I can put it is that, before the change, I pored over the Bible, questioning and analyzing it. But after the change it was as if the Bible, or maybe Someone through the Bible, began poring over me, questioning and analyzing me.”7 Through involvement with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Keller was introduced to solid Christian literature—including British authors such as J. I. Packer and John Stott, who helped crystallize the gospel and its implications for life.
After college, Keller moved to Massachusetts in the fall of 1972 to attend Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Another first-year student—an acquaintance from western Pennsylvania—would become his closest friend. Collin Hansen writes,
Even before Kathy Kristy took the name Keller, she would become the most formative intellectual and spiritual influence on Tim Keller’s life. When you’re writing about Tim, you’re really writing about Tim and Kathy, a marriage between intellectual equals who met in seminary over shared commitment to ministry and love for literature, along with serious devotion to theology.8
The three years on campus would prove pivotal in their theological formation. They entered with patchwork beliefs and emerged with thought-out convictions: historic Reformed theology, dynamic complementarianism, inward spiritual renewal, gospel-shaped missiology, and so on. Tim and Kathy were married on January 4, 1975, before their final semester. A thirty-six-year-old R. C. Sproul officiated the ceremony.
When Tim stepped into his first pastorate that summer, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) was only two years old. Those years in Hopewell, Virginia, were a baptism of fire for the newly minted pastor.9 From preaching to counseling to hospital visitation to just about anything else that a solo small-town pastor is expected to do, Keller poured his life into the salt-of-the-earth saints the Lord had entrusted to his care. “It didn’t take long for Keller to realize he needed to adjust his preaching—to become more concrete, clear, and practical. . . . He realized he needed to listen and learn before he spoke, so that he could persuade.”10 Hansen conveys it well:
Many have concluded that in Hopewell, Keller learned to “put the cookies on the bottom shelf.” . . . Hopewell’s blue-collar congregation forced Keller to develop his skill for distilling difficult and complicated concepts in ways that Christians and non-Christians alike can understand. If he would have jumped straight from seminary to a highly educated congregation, he might never have become a widely popular writer or preacher.11
Keller would always look back on the Hopewell years as foundational to his life of ministry.
While pastoring in Virginia, Keller had received a doctor of ministry degree—studying the work of deacons—through Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Eventually, after nine years in Hopewell, Westminster hired him to teach practical theology part-time. (Keller also became the first director of mercy ministries for the PCA’s Mission to North America.) So the Kellers moved back north, and the pastor became a professor.
While enjoying a fruitful teaching ministry at Westminster in the late 1980s—Keller was one of the school’s most popular professors—the PCA asked him to consider planting a church in the heart of New York City. He declined and offered to try to recruit someone else.12 But in God’s providence, he couldn’t find a pastor willing to move there. Meanwhile, he was becoming more and more attracted to the challenge himself:
Keller’s friends back in Philadelphia had been praying for Tim for months as he first searched for a different pastor for this calling and then slowly realized he would need to go. Finally, he came to the group and said, “I have to do this myself.” Kathy considers that decision “one of the most truly ‘manly’ things” her husband ever did. The move scared him. But he felt God’s call. He had no way of knowing the result would be a dynamic, growing megachurch. He just knew it was the next step of faith, even if the church were to end in failure.13
So in the summer of 1989, the Kellers moved to New York, three young sons in tow, with the goal of establishing a new outpost of Christ’s kingdom.14 From a rural town in Virginia to the quiet suburbs of Philadelphia to the city that never sleeps, God had brought the Kellers to the place he had prepared them for.
Redeemer Presbyterian Church was soon born and, almost immediately, experienced revival-like growth. “Everyone who remembers those first three years says they’ve never seen anything like it,” Keller recounts. “We had conversions, a sense of God’s presence, changed lives—all the stuff everyone hopes for. . . . It was unusually thick and rich—beyond anything we expected.”15 Or as Kathy has sometimes quipped, “Want to know the secret to planting a successful megachurch? Find out where God is going to send a revival . . . and move there the month before.”16 Redeemer experienced other significant surges in growth over the years, including after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.17
Keller was instrumental in developing several ministries that grew out of Redeemer: Hope for New York (an effort to resource local nonprofit groups focused on mercy ministry), the Center for Faith and Work (a resource for believers seeking to bring the gospel to bear...
