I hope you’re not tired of me blogging on Tim Keller! As I wrote in my last post on him, “Your Idols Will Always Let You Down,” I am a big fan. And I’m a fan for several reasons. What do you know, he is on the cover of the latest Christianity Today. The article is titled, “How Tim Keller Found Manhattan.”

Keller has a heart for the city and a comittment to the Gospel that is bearing much fruit. He started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989 by moving into the city when there were virtually no other Evangelical churches in Manhattan.

Most churches look at New York as a cesspool,” says Charles Osewalt, a Bronx high school principal and Redeemer elder. A big, bearded man, Osewalt often wears basketball jerseys to church and talks with the accent of a lifetime New Yorker. “There’s something ugly about people coming into New York and saying, ‘we’re going to save you.’”

By contrast, Keller enjoyed New York’s lack of ceremony and openness to the new. In Manhattan he wasn’t competing with other preachers. Gordon MacDonald came to Manhattan’s Trinity Baptist Church at about the same time the Kellers arrived. One major financial supporter almost pulled out when he heard the news, thinking that Trinity would be the big draw. But Keller looked on MacDonald’s coming as an advantage: MacDonald’s name drew many New York Christians, leaving Redeemer to focus on non-Christians. Longtime believers joined Redeemer only if they caught the vision of creating a church that appealed to their non-Christian friends.

His heart to build a church of non-believers resonates with mine and the Anglican Mission in America’s focus upon reaching the unchurched. He also fell in love with Manhattan and ALL of its people. He found that New York attracts people driven to succeed.

Suppose,” Keller says, “you are the best violist in Tupelo, Mississippi. You go to Manhattan, and when you get out of the subway, you hear a beggar playing, and he’s better than you are.” New York attracts the best and the most ambitious. The sheer density of competition, along with the diversity of points of view, makes for a “culture-forming engine,” says Keller. It also exposes the weaknesses of those caught in it.

Sherman relates Keller’s vision to the apostle Paul. “Paul had this sense of, I really should go talk to Caesar. He’s not above caring for Onesimus the slave, but somebody should go to talk to Caesar. When you go to New York, that’s what you’re doing. Somebody should talk to the editorial committee of The New York Times; somebody should talk to Barnard, to Columbia. Somebody should talk to Wall Street.”

Redeemer is now some 5000 members, meeting in multiple locations. Out of this 20 year comittment is a focus upon reaching CITIES  with the Gospel. They have helped launch 65 new churches in New York City alone, with one of those being a new Anglican Mission Church: St. Paul’s Church. They are now doing this globally. 

Keller reckons they should be planting churches not just in nyc but in “center cities” worldwide as well. This vision came into sharp focus when church leaders from Amsterdam approached Keller. They had investigated other North American church-planting centers, but felt that they didn’t fit culturally (too suburban). Since that initial meeting, Redeemer has helped Amsterdam pastors plant 18 churches, and is helping new churches in cities around the world.

Keller realized that Manhattan may have more in common with Amsterdam and London than it does with small towns in eastern Pennsylvania. It may even have more in common with Mumbai. Gyger, who now heads Redeemer’s Church Planting Center, says, “You go to Soho or London or Berlin or Madrid or Sao Paolo, and you’ll find a new kind of international culture of young elites and professionals. We go to these city centers and try to reach these kinds of people.”

Now I realize that Phoenix is no New York, Soho, or London, and probably never will be. At the same time, my heart and vision for St. George’s in Downtown Phoenix is similar (on a much smaller scale) as to what Keller describes. In other words, if indeed Downtown Phoenix develops into a micorcosm of this “city culture” like it seems to be on the path towards, then we want to be there ministering the Gospel in that context. This, of course, is up to God. All we can do is be faithful to the Gospel and the mission of Jesus today and be ready for the future when it arrives.

Read it all: “How Tim Keller Found Manhattan.”

Shane+