Thousands pack the services of the evangelical Redeemer Presbyterian Church, most of them single and under 35.
‘Cheer up, you’re worse than you think,” Rev. Timothy Keller says with a smile. He’s explaining that humans are more weak, more fallen, more warped than they “ever dare admit or even believe.” Then comes the good news: At the same time people are “more loved in Christ and more accepted than they could ever imagine or hope.”
Do you know many New Yorkers who believe that? Perhaps not, but on Sundays some 5,500 city folk file into the church Mr. Keller founded 25 years ago, Redeemer Presbyterian, at eight packed services across three Manhattan locations, the Greenwich Village campus of which I attend on Sundays. The service is traditional, the congregation less so: Most who show up, if you can believe it, are single and under 35, whether bankers, lawyers, actors or artists.
Mr. Keller has a growing national following and is often described as a Christian intellectual who takes on the likes of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud in a sermon rooted in a specific Biblical text. He’ll sprinkle in references from popular culture—something about contentment he read in the Atlantic, a poignant passage from “Lord of the Rings.” His fruitful work has multiplied. Redeemer efforts have helped plant more than 300 churches in 45 cities, from Santiago to Dubai.
I met the 64-year-old Mr. Keller this week at the church’s offices in midtown Manhattan. He’s at least six-feet tall, bespectacled and I don’t have a chance to notice much else before I realize he’s asking me questions. We sit down in his office to discuss how he’s revived Christian orthodoxy in the naked city and how he sees religion changing in the modern world.
“Everyone has a God, everyone has a way of salvation, we just don’t use the term,” he says. “St. Augustine would say: What makes you what you really are is what you love the most.” Mr. Keller adds that he likes “to show secular people that they’re not quite as unreligious as they think. They’re putting their hopes in something, and they’re living for it.” For ambitious, driven New Yorkers, it’s often a career, he says. “I try to tell people: The only reason you’re laying yourself out like this is because you’re not really just working. This is very much your religion.”
If there’s no God, he says in sermons, then everything you do at work will be forgotten, and nothing you can do in your career will earn lasting significance. But if Christianity is true, then “every good endeavor,” he likes to say, no matter how small, “can matter forever.” One tough part for people, he says, is coming under “God’s authority,” because “you have to find your identity in Christ, and not in just fulling yourself,” That “completely collides with what the culture is telling people.”
The skeptics in his audience—about 15% of the people in the audience, he estimates, tell the church they aren’t sure what they believe about Christianity—are often “attracted to the idea of sacrificial love,” he says. But he says his preaching can also bother people, and Mr. Keller’s Dec. 7 sermon offers one example. He preached on a passage in Matthew, when Joseph learns that his wife-to-be Mary is pregnant with Jesus. Christianity, he says, will never be “a” good religion among many good religions, one that works for some and doesn’t work for others.
“Every other religion has a founder that says: ‘I’ll show you the way to God. Only Christianity of all the major world religions has a founder that says: ‘I’m God, come to find you.’ If that’s right, he has to be the superior way to find God.” If it’s wrong, he says, “then it’s an inferior religion.” Not a lot of wiggle room there, even on Christmas.
One of Mr. Keller’s golden rules is: Use plain English. “Evangelicalism has developed a very sentimental vocabulary,” he says, pointing to an overuse of the word “blessing” and other “tribe” lingo. He says of prayer: “When I pray, I think people who don’t believe say: If I did believe, I could pray like that.” That is important when converting people in New York City, where Mr. Keller says he hopes to break down stereotypes that highly religious people aren’t intellectuals.
Mr. Keller looks less like a pastor than a professor, and in an earlier life he was one. In the mid-1980s he taught theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pa., working part time for the church-planting arm of Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative presbyterian denomination.
The organization’s then-director asked Mr. Keller in 1986 if he would be interested in starting a church in Manhattan. He said no. He thought it too soon to leave his teaching job. He’d go to New York, he said, to do some networking and field work to help secure the right minister.
Every plausible candidate fell through, and so he packed up his young family—wife Kathy and three sons under 11—and moved to New York in 1989. Everyone from family to fellow ministers thought he was crazy. “Churches die in Manhattan,” he was told.
Often he was asked by fellow Christians: Are you sure you’re called to this? His answer: “I have no idea.” His uncertainty rattled people he knew, but it is part of what he teaches: God is “not under any obligation to make me succeed.”
By any standard he has succeeded. Redeemer held its first official morning worship service on Sept. 24, 1989 in a rented Seventh-Day Adventist church. It took off: 200 congregants after a year, 700 after two years and 1,200 after three. About a third of the early attendees, Mr. Keller says, did not attend church at all before finding Redeemer.
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SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal
Kate Bachelder
