← The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 339 | Tim Keller on How to Bring the Gospel to Post-Christian America, How He'd Preach Today if He was Starting Over Again, Why Founders Get Addicted to Their Churches and Why He Left Redeemer
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- [00:03]
Keri Neuhoff
Welcome to the Carrie newhough Leadership Podcast. A podcast all about leadership, change and personal growth. The goal, to help you lead like never before in your church or in your business. And now your host, Keri Neuhoff.
- [00:19]
Kerry Newhoff
Well, hey, everybody, and welcome to episode 339 of the podcast. My name is Kerry Newhoff, and I hope our time together today helps. Helps you lead like never before. Well, I am so thrilled to bring you today's episode. Every once in a while you think, wow, if at some point in my life I could actually meet and perhaps have a conversation with someone who's made a huge difference in your life, really. Toward the very top of my list would be today's guest, Tim Keller. Tim really doesn't need an introduction if you're at all familiar with the church space, but he's been one of the most influential writers, thought leaders, pastors in my life. And I had an opportunity to actually travel to New York City a few weeks before the coronavirus hit and sit down with Tim. And we spent a couple of hours together. And I'll tell you, the interview was bucket list stuff. We talked about how to bring the gospel to post Christian America, how he'd preach today if he was starting all over again, why founders get addicted to their churches, and even we got into why he left Redeemer when he did. As far as I'm concerned, Tim could be writing and preaching for the next 40 years every day, and I would be the beneficiary of that. So why did he go? How did that happen? And this is a very, very amazing conversation. One of those that, you know, I woke up the next day in New York and thought I could just go back and do, like, eight more hours of it. Tim is one of America's most renowned preachers, authors, and thought leaders. He is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. He started it in 1989 with his wife Kathy, and three young sons. 28 years, he led that church to grow to over 5,000. These days, he's spending his time as chairman and co founder of Redeemer City to City, which starts new churches in New York and other global cities and publishes books and resources for ministry in urban environments. He also teaches at seminary and, wow, his books have sold over 2 million copies. I have, I think, pretty much all of them. I'm so grateful for this. So I know a lot of you have been waiting for this episode for a long time. If for some reason you don't know Tim Keller, you're in for a treat.
- [02:32]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Hey.
- [02:32]
Kerry Newhoff
Thank you. We have just come off the biggest week ever in podcast history, so if you're a new listener, welcome. We are so glad that you've joined us. You can subscribe wherever you're listening to your podcast these days, and if this is helpful, please, please, please share it. Also, want to thank the folks at Barna Group, my friend David Kinnaman, who helped set up this interview. We are working together on another podcast called Church Pulse Weekly, and if you haven't discovered that one yet, please head on over there. And you know, we're all in the middle of this. Discuss disruption. And most churches have websites and social media accounts. And if you didn't have one before, guess what? You started one, but only about half. Actually, that number has dropped a little bit in the last few weeks, are growing in this moment. And so the question is, like, why? And one reason is strategy. When Netflix thrived, Blockbuster died. And that's because they never really saw the new strategy. So the decisions that you're making right now with your digital and creative methods will either make or break you in the future. And that's why ProMediaFire is helping churches with digital strategies that are working right now through something they call the Church Growth Program. Church Growth Program provides your church with a digital coach, a creative team, a web team, and a social team for less than the cost of a staff hire. So people are hurting right now. You have an opportunity to reach them with HOPE Online. You can book a free strategy session today@promediafire.com churchgrowth that's promediafire.com churchgrowth well, as damaging as Covid has been to American and Western nations, what about the rest of the world? With COVID now impacting everyone, many indigenous pastors have seen their churches closed, and they have fewer resources than most of the people listening to this podcast. So International Cooperating Ministries has been helping pastors in the developing world with the tools they need for over three decades. And I sat down with Tim Damon, their chief advancement officer, and I said, tim, you know, we live in an era of disruption. What do millennial leaders who see mission a lot differently than boomers and Gen X, what do millennial leaders need to know about mission that maybe they don't know? Here's what Tim had to say.
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Tim Damon
You know, Kerry, I think the thing that they probably need to know the most is that even though we do live in a time of change and disruption, that the message for missions is still the same as it was 2,000 years ago. You know, we believe that the local church is God's distribution system for the gospel. That's the way it was when Jesus was here. That's the way when he sent out. And that was Paul's missionary journeys. You know, he didn't go preach a bunch of crusades. He went around and planted and strengthened churches. And so we believe that that is still God's distribution system, his distribution plan for both the gospel, the good news, and for the ministry of the church, the work among the poor, the transformation of lives. We believe that happens in a local, healthy, indigenous church. And that's why our vision is a healthy church within walking distance of everyone in the world.
- [05:35]
Kerry Newhoff
That is a powerful vision. And I know you've been impacted by the virus, but you can help. And sometimes the best thing you can do when you've been hit is help somebody else. And ICM would love to partner with you. For $35 a month, you can equip four pastors every single month. With the training and the tools they need to lead, that's 48 pastors you can help equip this next year for $35 a month. That's a great opportunity. And you can learn more about how to help. Or just go direct to 1 million pastors.com. that's one. And then spell out the word million pastors dot com. And why don't you help somebody who's got more needs than you do through ICM? Just head on over to 1 million pastors.com. well, we also have today's interview with Tim Keller on YouTube. My little YouTube channel keeps growing. And thank you. For those of you, if you want to study this as a team or want to just watch what we did in New York, we had a film crew there right downtown in Manhattan. And wow. I gotta tell you, this is one of the highlights for me here is my conversation with someone who has profoundly influenced me and my life. Tim Keller.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
You and Kathy came here in nineteen.
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Tim Keller
Nineteen eighty nine, thirty years ago this last June. Wow. Well, last year.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What was the city like when you came here?
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Tim Keller
A lot more dangerous, actually. A lot more dangerous. So you actually saw, you know, crime. You actually saw people get mugged and saw blood and things like that. You saw people stabbed. So it really was actually a more dangerous place. It's not anymore. And of course, nobody can agree on why as soon as you start to talk about it, immediately, people just start screaming at each other because the. The various political ideologies just disagree on why the crime went down. And so, but anyway, that was the biggest difference in 30 years is the change in the danger and the crime, which made a massive difference. Because one of the reasons why, starting in the late 90s, in the early 90s, most immigration is now domestic. See, up until for many, many years, the majority of new people coming into New York were immigrants from outside. It was when the crime went down and culture changed in some ways, somewhere in the mid-90s, the number of new people that came into New York from America moving here became greater than the number of people coming from outside. And so that was partly because of the crime going down. And that really changed the nature of the city quite a lot.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What would you say the spiritual temperature of New York was when you arrived?
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Tim Keller
Well, it was very vital in the boroughs because for about 30 years were all these new churches getting started, but from non Western missionaries. So in other words, the people who were starting churches were from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and they were planting hundreds and hundreds of churches. That was from probably around 1970 to about the year 2000 or so. When I got here, just starting the 90s, Manhattan was very, very secular, but the rest of the city was not. So if you went to a community board meeting in the Bronx, for example, it might be open in prayer because most of the civic leaders were black and Hispanic Pentecostal ministers. And if you went to Brooklyn, it would be filled with Orthodox Jews. And if you went out to Queens, the community boards would be filled with Asian Christians. But in Manhattan was secular and the churches were extremely small or dying. And so when I got here, the spiritual growth that had been happening in the rest of the city hadn't really reached the center. But it changed that since then.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
And was there lots of mainline churches in Manhattan?
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Tim Keller
Oh, yeah, there always are. You still are. Because see, in Manhattan, what happens is in Manhattan, the real estate is so incredibly expensive, you cannot imagine. Then if you have a building of any sort, you can monetize it. You can like, you can actually sell a third of it and let somebody put a high rise up and get $100 million for it. And then you just put in the bank or you rent the place out or something like that. So churches here generally don't go out of business. They stay small. They have these. They find ways of monetizing things and so they kind of limp along. So there's lots and lots and lots of mainline churches that would not really. They wouldn't demand that you believe much of anything different than the average New Yorker does anyway. They would say war for peace and justice and that kind of thing. And we're not gonna tell you what to believe. Which is part of the problem they have is you start to say, why do I have to get up on a Sunday morning to just do what I could do anyway? Cause you're not calling me to be any different. Nevertheless, those churches, you know, they're community centers, and they've got nice buildings and they have endowment funds and all that. The more evangelical churches, they were pretty much in complete eclipse in the center of New York when I got here. That's been a change. Biggest change in the 30 years is there's been, I don't know, at least 100 or so new evangelical churches started in the center, at least.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I've heard a stat. It may or may not be accurate that something like less than 1% of Manhattan was attending an evangelical church when you arrived.
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Tim Keller
Right. Well, we define center city as from the top of Central park south to the. To the tip, plus a little bit of Brooklyn, a little bit of Queens. In other words, the very near environs, we would call it center city, cosmopolitan, very wealthy, professional. There's About a million, 1 million, 50,000 people that live in that area. And from what we can tell, 1989, there are only 9,000 Manhattan residents going to evangelical churches out of that 1 million in 1989. And by 2014, there were about 54,000. So that was a kind of growth of about quintupled. Yeah, yeah. In about 25 years. So that's been the biggest change spiritually.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Have you felt the temperature?
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Kerry Newhoff
Like, has that made.
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Tim Keller
Yes and no. I mean, because I was here first, I'm kind of well known, and I'm sort of an elder statesman type. So it surprises me that when I walk around the city very often there's a. I'm recognized by the Christians, not by anybody else, but there are more of them. So it does surprise me a little bit, and it's very sweet. You know, younger people say, oh, I've read your books, or I went to years ago, I went to Redeemer or something like that. So it's a little surprising, but still, 50, 60,000 people out of a million. It's not. We're not tearing up. The Christians aren't really tearing up things. It's just way better than what it was.
- [12:50]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
That's about 5%, right?
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Tim Keller
Close. Yeah.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Which is amazing. Which means in any of these office towers, there's probably a co worker.
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Tim Keller
Yeah, yeah. On the other hand, now, you know, it depends on how you define evangelical.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Okay.
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Tim Keller
I would say if you define evangelical, like, inerrancy of the word, you know, authority of the Bible, gotta be born again, that kind of thing. You know that in Atlanta and Houston, it's more like 30 or 40% of the population say that here it's 5%. So it's not, like I said, it's not overwhelming, but it is an increase. And you're right, there's a whole lot more than there used to be. Yes. So, I mean, there's no reason to get, I don't know, get too satisfied with it. I'm certainly not at all. Actually, it needs to triple or quadruple again before I think you might really begin to say there's significant Christian witness in the cultural economy of the city. The cultural economy. I mean, in the arts, in the media, in business, where you have significant leaders who are believers with a servant mindset, not trying to dominate, but also being, you know, not having given into the spirit of the age and really being thoughtfully and distinctively Christian. I would say most of the people who are out there are younger and are sort of at lower levels that are not having as much of an impact on the cultural economy. I think it will take at least two or three generations and if the church keeps on growing, where you start to get significant leaders in those various parts of the culture.
- [14:21]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, so you probably have, because Redeemer is well known for attracting people decades younger than their founder.
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Tim Keller
That's one of the reasons why I stepped out when I was 66. And there's some people who are saying, well, you know, you're 66, you're not senile just yet, and you can still preach. Why would you do that? I mean, a lot of other ministers, you know, you're a founder, you sort of hang on a long time and you keep preaching. I'm saying, I am not. I said, it's not just that. Everybody out there now, most of the people out at Redeemer are not only they younger than my children, but I said, I don't wanna get to the place where I'm preaching to people who are like my grandchildren. And I said, you don't? Even though they'd prop me up because, oh, you know, you're the founder and we love you so much, at a certain point, you start to lose your ability to appeal, I think. I think.
- [15:08]
Kerry Newhoff
Really?
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
But you hadn't seen that yet.
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Tim Keller
No, but I mean, you wanna get out before you wanna go out on top. Yeah, but I do. No, I do. Surely. I've seen the founder types, especially when I founded Redeemer, you have a tendency to. First of all, people actually are addicted to you because you were there first. Right. Over the years there's a self selection process. If you don't like the founder, you just don't stay. And so because nobody thinks you can kind of face down the founder because he was there first and he did all that. So what that means is over the years the founders are just, it's basically this huge fan club. So they're addicted to you, they just can't imagine life without you. And then you can kind of get addicted to it too. But if you hold on into your 70s, even if you're preaching well, next thing you know, you look out there and you see all the gray hairs and the bald heads and all that. Because ultimately there's a limit. Even if you stay up with things, even if you are a Quran and you, even if you're preaching is staying up on it, you still. People walk in and they don't see themselves up front. They see an old white man. You know, most of our people are not white, most of our people are not old. And at a certain point, no matter how much affection, no matter how much I try to stay up on things, I think I would start to lose my ability to connect.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So they get addicted to you.
- [16:34]
Tim Keller
Yeah.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
How did you not get addicted to that? How did you manage? Because that's an issue.
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Tim Keller
I'm married. And you know what? She's not more, she's no more impressed when she married an awkward 24 year old kid. She doesn't, she knows, you know, you put your underwear on one, you know, you know, one leg at a time.
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Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
One leg at a time.
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Tim Keller
Yeah. I mean, I mean that's a help I think is your wife. If you actually listen to your wife, your wife certainly doesn't get visions of your grandeur. There's this thing called prayer that, you know, the same sort of thing happens in prayer. God also doesn't get visions of your grandeur. I don't know exactly. But anyway there's, it's important not to get addicted to their addiction. That's called a dysfunctional family. You know, remember, nobody talks about that so much anymore, but it used to be that in a dysfunctional family where you had an alcoholic, one of the reasons the alcoholic couldn't get better was because the rest of the family needed him or her to be a mess. So in other words, the spouse, for example, starts to get an identity out of being the one who's pulling it together, making sacrifices, always rescuing the other person, at a certain pace, it almost becomes he needs to be rescued and she needs. Or he needs to be the rescuer. And so you are happily unhappy together. It's a feedback loop and you reinforce. And that addiction to the other person's addiction becomes. Happens in churches, especially with founders. And I just wanted to make sure it didn't happen. It wasn't easy for. And it's still not easy, by the way, for them. It's a little easier for me because I don't have the pressure of preaching four times every Sunday. Four times every Sunday. Which was not a wise thing to do. But once you get to it, I couldn't pull back. And so I don't miss that. That was a little too much. And I also don't miss the pressure of it. But do I miss preaching every week? Do I miss the people? Yeah, and they miss me. But you gotta only God's irreplaceable. Sorry.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I've been 25 years with the same people. And taking that journey you made in 2016, I guess to step back from.
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Kerry Newhoff
Preaching this my final year.
- [19:02]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Do you miss it?
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Tim Keller
When I preach, which I sometimes do, I don't preach as often. When I preach, I say, boy, I really like this. But as I said, I. To preach four times on a summit, which I did for many, many years. Twice in the morning, twice at night. And no matter what else I got interested in, everything had to stop to prepare that sermon. So I actually started to feel like I have no. Whatever I do has to always happen over like two or three days. Because every two or three days it's back to preparing, getting ready for Sunday. And so I always felt like I had no long ramp.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
How many Sundays would you preach?
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Tim Keller
Typically 42. Yeah.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
And a lot of raps. That's like 160 times a year.
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Tim Keller
Yep. Yes.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
You were never much of a guest preacher.
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Kerry Newhoff
Right.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
You'd usually be in the pulpit at Redeemer.
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Tim Keller
Yeah, I didn't do much. No. But now here at Redeemer, what I did was for many years, we had eight services on a Sunday, even though I can only preach four. And I decided for various reasons, I don't think it's important to go there. But I decided not to do the video thing. There are reasons why it might be. It may work now, maybe, but I don't think New Yorkers, years ago, New Yorkers, they go to the theater, not to movies. We. Various reasons, we felt like it wouldn't go well. So what it would be is I would preach four Times there's eight services. And so what I do is one week I'd preach in these four, the next week I'd preach in these four. And then each of the churches had a lead pastor. And so you'd get your lead pastor, your particular lead pastor one Sunday, you get me the next Sunday and be back and forth. So I was preaching every week, they were preaching. I was preaching every week, they were preaching every other week. So it wasn't like people are only getting me. They were getting. And I did that for several years as a way of trying. And they, you know, again, when I stepped out, it was still traumatic for plenty of people. But the point was that these other preachers had been building up over the years. So I actually spent almost eight years, seven or eight years getting ready to leave, where we went to this model where the lead pastors who were gonna become the senior pastors of their church were gonna be the regular preachers for eight years.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So you wean people off, but it's.
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Kerry Newhoff
Still a hard stop when you're not.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Gonna see Tim anymore, your favorite preacher. That's right, a challenge. So let's drill down a little bit further, Tim.
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Kerry Newhoff
When you look back on the last.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
10 years when it comes to the church in America, so just think about the last decade.
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Kerry Newhoff
What do you see changing?
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
And let's start with things that you can celebrate. What have been some bright spots in the last decade?
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Tim Keller
Well, I wouldn't say there's not a lot. I mean, let's put it this way, certainly there are a lot. But I mean, there's probably more. There's more areas of concern than there are bright spots, honestly. But bright spots I think is the growth of new multi ethnic churches. By and large, there's a lot more of those. I do think that the future of Western society and Western culture is multi ethnic. There's a lot of reasons why that's true. I'm not so much celebrating it or denigrating it at all. I'm just saying that the percentage of white people in the west and in the world will be smaller and smaller. There will be more. There'll be more multiracial marriages, there'll be more multiethnic communities and cities. That's still not true for parts of the heartland. Like, you know, Iowa and New Hampshire are still 90% white and so on. But by and large, that's changing and the church is changing there too, that there really are more efforts to create multiracial churches. There are. Especially in cities, there's more of them. And I think that's, to me, maybe the biggest bright spot, because that's keeping up with the changes.
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Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What are some of the challenges you see over the last decade?
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Tim Keller
Well, I just see exactly what Leslie Newbiggin saw, and that's. So this is nothing. But don't give me any credit for this at all. I'm just channeling him. He would say that for a thousand years, the Western church assumed a mission model in which most people in the culture would feel some social pressure or at least see some social benefits going to church. And the culture created people that had the basic furniture for a Christian worldview. That is, they usually believed in a personal God. They often believed in an afterlife, heaven and hell. They believed that they should be good and they weren't perfect, and that therefore they did need forgiveness. So you could call those the religious dots. Belief in God, belief in an afterlife, belief in the moral law, belief in sin. And so the church could assume that people would be. Would just show up in church if they were invited, or they would show up in church maybe at Easter and Christmas or maybe for weddings and funerals. And if they came, they would have a general respect for the Bible and they would have some basic understanding of these things. And evangelism was just waiting for people to show up and then connecting the dots. But what do you do if people don't come to church? Won't come to church. Why should they? And don't have the dots. So you can't evangelize by saying, oh, you want to go to heaven when you die. Right. And you know, you're not perfect, but Jesus Christ died for your sins so that you can be sure if you believe in him, that when you die, you'll go to heaven. So that's assuming all the dots. And what if the dots aren't there? Now what do we do? And Newbiggin is basically saying that the entire Western Church for 1,000 years has assumed a Christendom culture. And now that it's gone, it has no way of reaching people. Doesn't know how to talk to people, get their attention. It doesn't know how. Even if they do show up, they don't know how to share the gospel in a way that makes sense to them. So is that a cause for concern? Yeah, that's why I say that. To me, that was an overshadowing concern.
- [25:38]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Yeah. How do you see that show up in the model of church that you see in America today? What do you think? You think a lot of evangelicalism or even mainline Evangelicalism is still waiting for people to show up and connect the dots.
- [25:54]
Tim Keller
Yes. And now the Willow Creek seeker model did take one step in the direction of saying people aren't going to come to church unless they're great production values, so they don't feel the same social pressure to go to church. But even that seeker service model kind of assumes that people would see a social benefit and that they have somewhat of a traditional mindset that they would say, church is good and it's good to be talking about these moral issues, and it's good to be talking about how do you handle anxiety. I would still say that they are assuming a kind of a. Still a fairly traditional kind of person that would come in the door. They're not looking at people. I don't think they're reaching people who feel like the church is an agent for injustice. I don't think they know what to do with people who say, you can't make me feel guilty, because the meaning of life is not to be good, a good person. See, that's what my family, my parents generation, whether they're Christians or not, the meaning of life is to be good. Today, the meaning of life is to be true to yourself. And that's. I just don't think that our church today has any way of dealing with that. And they certainly don't know how to answer. How to answer somebody who says, I'm just being true to myself.
- [27:24]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So when you look at your ministry at Redeemer, how did you respond to that? How did you attempt to say, okay, we're gonna turn the dial on that a little bit differently?
- [27:32]
Tim Damon
Well, the.
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Tim Keller
30 years ago, there wasn't yet that my parents generation, whether they're Christians or not, believed the meaning of life was to be good. And the way you preach to them was to deal with their guilt and say, you're never gonna overcome your guilt with moral effort. You're gonna have to get forgiveness from Jesus. So that sort of thing is what you did. By the time I came along to New York, and New York was a little more. It was further advanced than the rest of the country went toward more southern. Bit of a canary in a colony. When I got here, the meaning of life was to be free to discover your true self. That's very Rousseau, Jean. That's very much like what Rousseau would say, which is, society kind of screws you up, but in your. There's an inner child in there, a kind of perfect inner being. And the world makes you feel very guilty about it, and you just need to be free, to discover who you really are and express that without guilt, that's very Freudian. It was very psychological. When I got here, all the talk was about dysfunctional families and enabling behavior and getting free from people making you feel guilty. So that's the reason why if you just preach why, if you assume people are guilty and then they know they ought to be guilty and then you give them the relief through Jesus and you try to do that with the people that were in front of me in New York, they would have just walked out the door. They said, that's what I don't need, I don't need that. And so the way the gospel worked with my parents generation was, you know, you should be good, but you're not as good as you would like to be. But Jesus Christ can forgive you and in him you can be accepted by God. With my young people that I came to here in New York, basically I said, you think the meaning of life is to be free, but you're actually not as free as you think you are. You have to live for something. Everybody has to live for something. And whatever that thing is you're living for will enslave you and you will feel guilty and shameful because you'll never feel like you can live up to it. So let's just say, well, I've left my little Bible believing church back in Hot Coffee, Mississippi and I've moved up here to be an actress or to be an actor or to make it on Wall Street. Well, guess what, you've got a new God, you've got a new master. And when you say I'm gonna be free to discover my true self now, you're gonna have to live up to that. And you're actually still a slave. You'd be a slave to your work, you'd be a slave to your figure. You gotta keep your weight down. You'd be a slave. You think you're free, but you're not. Cause if you're living for anything but God, you're a slave. And Jesus Christ is the only master who if you get him, will satisfy you and if you fail him will forgive you. Your career can't die for your sins. And so that's how I did it with them. And it was okay. In other words, I assumed their cultural narrative and showed how only in Christ could their, you might say their storyline have a happy ending. Just like I did that with my parents generation today, it actually has changed again because there's not that same feeling like I just need to Be free to find my inner child of the past. Inner child of the past. Now, the emphasis is not psychological, it's sociological. It's all about justice. It's all about creating your own self. If I say, I'm this, that's who I am, I can do that. And it's all about including marginalized peoples, marginalized identities. And actually would. The change was happening just as I was stepping out.
- [31:15]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So literally, last six years.
- [31:17]
Tim Keller
Yeah, in the last five or six years. And therefore, if I was starting a church now, I'd have to retool again. Really? Yeah.
- [31:25]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What do you think? Like, just off the top of your head?
- [31:27]
Tim Keller
But I haven't done it. So you're saying what would you do? I said, what would you do?
- [31:34]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Even a couple of broad strokes.
- [31:35]
Tim Keller
Yeah, yeah. A couple of broad strokes would be to say the Christianity gives you the only identity. That is because it's all about identity now. Christianity is the only identity that is received, not achieved. If you say, I can create myself, that's a lot of pressure. And you can see it online. You can see people, they come up with an identity and then they just scream at each other, if you don't support my identity. Or then you get screamed at if you're not true to your identity. You know, say. You say you're this, but you know you're hurting the rest of us who are like this. And it's. I said, it's. I said, Christianity is the one identity that's received. In other words, the fact is that because of what Jesus Christ did, Jesus Christ is actually a person who.
- [32:31]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Lost.
- [32:31]
Tim Keller
His glory and his power and his privilege and came, died on the cross for us, paid the penalty for our inhumanity to God and to each other. In other words, he took the penalty. And because of that, when I believe in him, I can actually know that God loves me unconditionally, forever. I'm righteous in Christ. And what that means is the minute I become a Christian, the minute I believe in God, God loves me as perfectly as he will love me 5 billion years from now when I'm perfect. And he loves me that well right now. And what that means is it's the ups and downs of my performance. And see, all postmodern people say that identity's performative. They say power is performative. They say identity, it's a role that you play. That's horrible pressure. We've got an identity that's received, not achieved. It's not up and down depending on how well I perform. And also, this is an Identity that doesn't exclude. Because if you have an identity that's based on being an open minded, justice oriented person, then you're going to despise the bigots. And one of the reasons you despise the bigots is a way of you bolstering your kind of flagging sense of self worth by saying, I'm basically saying, oh Lord, I thank thee. I am not as other men, including this tax collector right here. And that's how you bolster an insecure identity, by excluding other people and looking down at them saying, I must be okay because I'm not like these horrible people over here. With a Christian identity, you don't have to do that. You will not do that. In fact, in James, chapter one, verse nine and ten, it's interesting, it says that the rich Christian should think about his low position and the poor Christian should think about his high position. Now what's beautiful about that is Christian identity says, you're a sinner and you would go to hell if it wasn't for Jesus Christ. So it's got the lowest. It makes you come all the way down here and say, I can't save myself. So you have a low position, you're a sinner, you deserve nothing but judgment. And yet in Christ I am loved more than I dared hope. I'm accepted. Jesus Christ says, the Father loves you even as he loves me. Now what's interesting is if you're a poor person and look how brilliant the Christian identity is, if you're a poor person and all of your life you've been told you're nothing and you become a Christian, you should dwell on your high position, dwell on who you are in Jesus Christ and that will overcome all of the crap you've gotten for so many years from people. But what if you're a rich Christian? What if you're a person that you've gone to the right schools and you've gotten all these all your life people been telling you how great you are. You become a Christian, you need to remember your low position. You need to remember that you are a sinner saved by sheer grace, that you are no better than anybody else. What's brilliant about the Christian identity is it doesn't exclude people and it actually, it's an enormous equalizer and it takes all the pressure off. Now that's where I would be going. I would be saying, I don't care how you guys are forming your identity. There is no identity like the one that you can find in Jesus Christ. So that's not the same quite as 30 years ago, where I said, there's no freedom like you get in Jesus. And there's, you know, it's not like what I would have preached down in Hopewell, Virginia, which I did in the 1970s, when all the people out there were like my parents. So you've got to connect the gospel with. The gospel is that Jesus saves you, you don't. And you have to connect it to the cultural narrative.
- [36:08]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So just exegeting the culture.
- [36:11]
Tim Keller
Yeah, but then you. Right, but then you've actually got to find a way to take the plot line of the culture and give it a happy ending in Jesus. So, for example, 1 Corinthians 1, it says, the Jews want power and the Greeks want wisdom, but the cross is weakness to the Jews and foolishness of the Greeks. But to the Jews and Greeks that are being saved, the true wisdom and true power of God. So what is Paul doing? He says the cultural narrative of the Jews is we want. We're pragmatic. We want to know how you get things done. Give me power. The cultural narrative of the Greeks was they're the artistes. They're the, you know, we want contemplation, we want wisdom, we want beauty. And what he's saying is the gospel confronts the. The idolatries of both of those cultures differently, but also fulfills them differently. The cross confronts the idolatry of power and of wisdom. But then it says the cross is the true wisdom, the true power of God. In the cross, you actually get, oh, culture, what you want. So it's not just cultural exegesis. It's contradictive fulfillment. It's subverting it and fulfilling it. And that's what you have to do in every culture. That's basically the missionary. That's the missionary task.
- [37:28]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So we live in a disruptive age. And the state of the church report talks about a lot of elements of disruption. What else have you seen disrupted over the last few decades in New York City and in culture?
- [37:42]
Tim Keller
Well, one of the things, of course, is that the most disruptive thing is that there were always a kind of, how I say it, there was always a small number of evangelical and maybe conservative Catholics who were very devout, and they had, you know, Christian. They were very devoutly Christian, but they also had Christian ethics. So they, you know, the Christian view of morality and sexuality and things like that, that's maybe 20%. Then there was 80% of the. Of the population who were nominal Christians. They didn't. Maybe they went to church on Christmas and Easter, you know, they said they were Methodist or Presbyterian or Catholic, but it wasn't very deep. And yet they actually held the Christian views, too. And that was the reason I'm making these strange gestures, is they were like an umbrella. They were a shelter. Because to be an orthodox evangelical or Catholic and to have all these views of things didn't look that weird because 70, 80% of the population had the same view of marriage and sexuality and things like that. But when that has gone away, what's going away is inherited religion is dying. Not chosen religion, not religion based on conversion, but inherited religion, where you're born into it. My family's Methodist. I went to church growing up. That's just going away. Young people say, unless I choose it, nobody can choose my religion for me. So the idea that you're born into a Catholic family or a Presbyterian family is going away, and that's the reason why the main line and the Catholic Church is just collapsing. And so what you have is these devout people are pretty much the same number of really devout Christians, but now they look really weird. And in fact, they look dangerous and strange because you see what I mean, that protective covering's gone, and that means more ostracism, more strangeness, more estrangeness from the culture. That's the big thing that's happening, I think, right now.
- [39:48]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
When you look into the future, is there anything that you can see on the radar that you're like, hey, leaders, pay attention to this?
- [39:57]
Tim Keller
Well, the political polarization, yes. Okay, here's where I go, where I would go. The political polarization that's happening now is a major challenge for churches, because here's my reading of the Bible. My reading of the Bible says that Christians ought to be sold out for racial justice to all races, are equal, all in the image of God. They should be deeply concerned about the poor and the marginalized. They should be pro life, and they should believe, at least for Christians, that the sex should only be between a man and a woman in marriage. Okay, now, those four things, the early church was marked by them. We know that. Okay? Two of those look very conservative. Two of those look very liberal. And so right now, what's happening is, since those four things are never combined in any political party, they're not combined in any other institution other than Catholic social teaching and biblical Christianity. And so what happens is there's enormous pressure, enormous pressure everywhere in the country for churches to major in two of them and get quiet about two of them. So in New York, huge pressure for the churches in New York City to talk about racial justice and caring about the poor, everybody applauds. But if you say we're pro life or we think sex should be only between a man and woman in marriage, people are gonna pick at you. I would say in the middle of Alabama, if an evangelical pastor starts to preach about all four of those things, a lot of the people are gonna get nervous about the racial justice and poverty thing and say, that sounds kind of liberal. That sounds kind of like, you know, wait a minute, what are you doing here? And so I don't know anywhere where it seems to me like there's a kind of red evangelicalism and a blue evangelicalism. And almost everywhere I see people like, play up two of those and play down two of those or even actually stop believing in two of those. And that's because there's this enormous. These are packaged deals. The political parties say you can't have them together. You have to, you know, in other words, to be a Democrat or be a Republican, for example, be Fox News or msnbc, you just can't keep those things together. And yet. And so that is, to me, the biggest challenge for Christian leaders. How do you be. How do you be committed to the whole range? That's the early church, it's biblical.
- [42:40]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So all four of those, Tim, have been, I think, hallmarks of Redeemer, at least to the extent that I've been able to access hundreds of your sermons over the years and your writing and your preaching. How have you held that tension in New York?
- [42:54]
Tim Keller
Well, it hasn't been easy. I mean, there are occasions I have definitely seen people get up in the middle of sermons and walk out, which is always a little bit satisfying. Because when you see that, you do say, all right, okay, I'm not a total coward here. Because see, here's the thing. I do think you have to care about context. Which means, for example, is you don't want to pat yourself on the bat and say, I'm valiant for truth because I'm preaching against abortion every month. There are certainly people who criticize me for not preaching about abortion constantly. And I do say, all right, look, if I have a non Christian's coming to church, I don't want them to get hit over the head with something that I know that they're gonna be offended by within the first two weeks they come. So am I gonna be careful about my context? Am I gonna realize what offends people and what attracts people? Yeah. So, I mean, I would say that if I was in Alabama, I'm in the middle of New York City. I wouldn't preach identically. I wouldn't be reaching non Christians the same way. Nevertheless, what you have to do to your leaders constantly is at least your leaders, you have to say, we cannot get cold feet on any of this. I mean, there is no biblical warrant here. I'd have to say you all get excited about what the Bible says about justice, and you don't get excited about what the Bible says about sexuality. At that point, you're really not letting the Bible animate you. You're letting the culture animate you. And you've just got to immerse yourself in the word. Because they go together, by the way. You know, there's one. I think it's Amos, chapter two, verse seven, where it says, a father and a son go into the same woman and they sell the poor for a pair of shoes. So one verse. Sexual sin and economic injustice. The Bible sees it as a whole cloth. They go together. And we live in a culture that just tries to rip that apart. So important for important safety tip for leaders.
- [45:00]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So I know you're committed to human flourishing, and the State of the Church report has an awful lot to say about it. And so I want to share five categories with you of human flourishing. This is some of Barna's research that David Kinnaman has done. It's Harvard. And biblical concepts of spiritual formation. And as I share them, I'd just like you to kind of riff on it. Just talk about what that means to you, why it's important to the church in your view.
- [45:24]
Kerry Newhoff
But we'll start with relationship.
- [45:25]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
And the definition in the report is how biblical community and relational health impact human flourishing. So just relationships.
- [45:34]
Tim Keller
Give me all five.
- [45:35]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Okay, so relationships, Spiritual health, fiscal and material stability, vocation and career and wellness, and behavioral health. Those are the five components that contribute to human flourishing. I know.
- [45:50]
Tim Keller
This could be a book. Well, yeah, obviously. Well, that's a great list, because it really does. It is comprehensive. It is true that as a church, if you're caring about people's flourishing, you really cannot ignore any of those. There's no doubt that. I think probably most churches would say the first two, we're gonna talk about that. The last three, not so much. Of course, the one about giving. Yes. As long as it's giving to the church. Yeah.
- [46:27]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Fiscal stability, my fiscal stability as a.
- [46:30]
Tim Keller
Church leader, it tends to lose. Most churches, most evangelical churches, they're not very good at talking to them about money in general. They talk about, give us some money. They certainly the Fourth one is not mentioned much at all.
- [46:45]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Vocation and career.
- [46:46]
Tim Keller
No, because it's. I think part of that is because we pastors are not trained on how to help people. There, you see, if somebody comes and says, I want you to help me study the Bible and pray. Got it. I've been trained to help you. Let me give you these books. I'll meet with you. But somebody comes in and says, you know, I'm an actor and I don't know which parts I should take as a Christian and which parts I shouldn't. And I got some questions about certain roles and what does it mean to be a Christian actor and I'm not as a pastor? I don't know what to do. And I would say you have to figure that out yourself. I don't know. See, what happens, I think when it comes to that one is there's an equality between the pastor, the minister, and the layperson that we don't have. In the other areas, I may not know much about acting. He doesn't maybe know as much about the Bible, and we have to sit down and kind of work together. So it's not a matter of him coming and me telling him, yeah, you're not the expert. Right. And the last one. I actually do feel that we have a tendency to outsource that wellness and behavior. Yeah. And not talk about it and say, go to a psychiatrist or go to a doctor or a medical doctor. I do think that there needs to be better ways for maybe Christians who are medical professionals to inside the church, talk to people about it. All that stuff, though, is Fruit of the Spirit, all five of them. See, this is my take on the Fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, integrity, humility, faithfulness, self control. So love, patience and kindness is largely about relationships. Joy, peace and humility is largely about spiritual disciplines and self control, faithfulness, which is faithfulness, integrity. Those things actually have a lot more to do with the last three. So, I mean, basically, the Fruit of the Spirit covers. Does the Fruit of the Spirit are God, Spirit created character. And so I do think you can. If you went to the Fruit of the Spirit and you went to the Book of Proverbs, they're all covered because Proverbs talks about all those five areas in a way. Sometimes there's other places in the New Testament that don't. But if you go to Proverbs, and my wife and I did a devotional.
- [49:20]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Book, 2018 in it.
- [49:21]
Tim Keller
Yeah.
- [49:22]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Thank you.
- [49:23]
Tim Keller
Well, there's nothing that Proverbs doesn't talk about it talks about every single area of human flourishing. So I would say if you went to Proverbs and you went to the Fruit of the Spirit, you basically could preach that. And that would be a. I do think that's a great way of telling people. You really can't ignore any of these areas. And you've gotta make sure that you're honoring Christ in each of the areas.
- [49:48]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
It's interesting cause you raised it. Hamilton's playing right down the street. I mean, we're right in the heart of New York City. And you picked an actor as an example. How would you approach that? Actor knocks on your door, Redeemer, and says, hey, Tim, what part should I take? What part should I not take?
- [50:05]
Tim Keller
I would probably create a little John. I got this idea from John Stott years ago. It would be good to get a couple other Christian actors maybe a little more experienced both in Christianity and in acting. It would probably be good to maybe even get an academic. I mean, there are people who we do have, by the way, people who used to go to Redeemer have moved to other. Have moved to other colleges and taught acting. I mean, I know one woman who teaches acting at a secular school in New England, another guy who teaches acting at a Christian college. And so these are people who've not only done it, but they've actually had to do reflection on it. So he would say, get an academic, get a practitioner, get a theologian, get a pastor and come together and generate questions and then have a meeting over a period of year, maybe meet every month or every two months and work on the questions together. And it's kind of egalitarian because no one person has got all the answers. And have somebody take notes and it can be.
- [51:19]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
That's a great idea.
- [51:20]
Tim Keller
Yeah, I know I've done that in other areas. I wish I had more time to do it.
- [51:23]
Kerry Newhoff
Yeah, that's a really good idea.
- [51:24]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
And I know vocation's really important to David as well. David Kinnaman. We talk about it a lot. So also in the report, Barna asked pastors, what are the top concerns for the church? And these are some of the top findings. Watered down gospel teachings, the culture shift to secularism, poor discipleship, declining attendance and reaching a younger audience. Kind of touched on a lot of those already in different ways. And we've kind of touched on your top concerns for the church. Anything you want to add to that before we move on?
- [51:55]
Tim Keller
Well, that's an interesting list. Watered down gospel. I do think that what they're getting at there is we may be over adapting to the identity narrative. The identity narrative is you gotta be true to yourself and you've gotta feel good about yourself. And it's possible that you start to adapt the gospel and turn it into something where Jesus just makes you feel good about yourself. And by the way, what I did there a minute ago or a few minutes ago about how you would talk about the Christian identity, unless you're careful, it can really sound like Jesus is here to boost your self esteem. You have to say that when Christ's love becomes your identity, it reorders all your loves. Which means that's Augustine. What he would say is when Christ is your supreme love, he's both the support, he's the source of your love, but he's also your supreme love. What that does is it demotes everything else. It demotes other identities without effacing them. Which is another way of saying if you're Chinese and you become a Christian, you don't start being anything else, you're still Chinese. But your greatest pride is in who you are, in Christ. And therefore what it does is it takes racial pride, it takes vocational pride, it takes those things down a notch. And that has to be said. Otherwise if you're not careful. You say you find your I've seen youth group where people are told you find your identity in Christ which means God loves you even if you screw up. He just loves you all the time and you should feel good about yourself and not hate yourself. And it actually just becomes not an understanding of how your whole life is reordered by the gospel. It's more like Jesus basically makes you feel better about yourself as you.
- [53:47]
Kerry Newhoff
Regardless of whether you change.
- [53:48]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Regardless.
- [53:48]
Tim Keller
That's right.
- [53:49]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Yeah.
- [53:49]
Tim Keller
And that's watered down gospel, which is more of a self esteemism. And I think that's. I think that's right. And I think that's probably what they're getting at. That's a concern of mine too.
- [54:01]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Sure you've done. It's also Barna has a partnership with glue. Big Data is really making. Yeah, we live in a very different age. You've done some work with Barna over the years where you've done studies for.
- [54:19]
Kerry Newhoff
Your work at Redeemers in the city.
- [54:21]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What is in your mind the line between being data informed and data driven?
- [54:30]
Tim Keller
Well, the German philosopher, not a Christian, by the way, Jurgen Habermas is famous for saying. Well he's famous for more than this. But he said that while science can tell you what you can do and how to do it efficiently it can never, ever tell you whether you should do it or not. In other words, you can't get an ought out of an is. You can't get an ought out of an is. So science can tell you what is. It can never tell you what it ought to be. And you have to be careful when I have people saying, well, the data shows that you should do this. The data can't show you what you ought to do. The data can inform you about what is. And on the basis of what is, I can make decisions, but I make decisions on the basis of my moral values, which I get from the Scripture. So there is a little danger that you say, well, for example, my church does not have to grow.
- [55:31]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What do you mean by that?
- [55:32]
Tim Keller
It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible, your church has to grow. I mean, ordinarily, if people are growing spiritually and they're sharing their faith, the church will grow. But that's a byproduct of. I mean, the church must grow spiritually. The church must grow in joy, it must grow in worship, it must grow in those things. And if it's going to grow numerically, then it ought to be a byproduct of that. And therefore, I don't want to just do something that kind of doesn't end, run around those things and just gets more people in the door. And sometimes data can look like it's saying, if you do this, you will grow. So anyway, I would say the data can tell me what is, but it can't tell me what I ought to do. And if it looks like it is, then I think it's overstepped its bounds.
- [56:19]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Anything else on the state of the church today? Before we switch gears, I want to talk about preaching, but anything else on what you see, what worries you, what excites you.
- [56:32]
Tim Keller
What confuses me. Okay, okay, you didn't ask that. But what confuses me is I'm not sure how hostile the culture will get. So should we assume that all the evangelical colleges will lose their accreditation? For example, should we assume that Christian radio stations will lose their FCC licenses because they would be considered bigoted or hateful and that kind of thing? I think that's at least possible. In other words, we should not live in fearfulness of that, especially as I've traveled around the world as a speaker in the last few years and everybody's got it worse than we do. I mean, everybody's got it worse than we do. And certainly Americans. I mean, you're in Canada. I mean, certainly Americans have it even Better than Christians.
- [57:27]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I'm a little bit tighter where I am, for sure.
- [57:29]
Tim Keller
Nevertheless, I would say that we have to be not afraid of that, but we also should be ready for it. So we should be not afraid, but ready and not be shocked if it happens.
- [57:38]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Do you mourn that?
- [57:40]
Tim Keller
No, not necessarily. I mean, here's the thing. It would be. I see. To me, it's win, win. Believe it or not, the win is if it doesn't happen. Hey, that's great. I mean, there's great advantages to being able to keep your accreditation, your FCC license, and to keep on moving and have your endowment funds. And it's better for institution building. On the other hand, if it goes away, it's probably better for us spiritually. It probably is.
- [58:09]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Even like the whole tax question.
- [58:11]
Tim Keller
Yes. Yeah. Yes. If it goes away, it's better for us spiritually. If it stays, it's better for us institutionally.
- [58:17]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Would you fight it?
- [58:22]
Tim Keller
Oh, I would fight. Fight. What do you mean?
- [58:24]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I mean, would you petition governments and that kind of thing? Yeah, sure.
- [58:28]
Tim Keller
I'm not sure they'd listen. I'd be very happy to sign a petition for it.
- [58:31]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Sure.
- [58:32]
Tim Keller
In other words, I wouldn't. Yeah. I mean, lightly, lightly.
- [58:37]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
But you wouldn't?
- [58:38]
Tim Keller
No. Go to the mat or say, this is the end of the world or how can you do this? I mean, most of the other parts of the world, you know, you don't have the minister's tax break. You don't have the nonprofit status.
- [58:53]
Kerry Newhoff
A lot of churches, we still have.
- [58:54]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
That in Canada, but every time, you know, I get mail on that, I'm like, well, this feels like the first century more and more all the time.
- [59:01]
Tim Keller
Yeah. I would not make it easy. But on the other hand, I can say it's a win, win, I think.
- [59:05]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Yeah.
- [59:06]
Kerry Newhoff
Let's talk about preaching.
- [59:09]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What have you learned? And again, we've touched on this, but I think you're masterful at communicating to a post Christian culture. And New York has been more post Christian than a lot of America. And America is becoming very checkerboard. I mean, you go up the coasts, it's much more. You go into the cities, it's much more post Christian. I spent a lot of time in the Bible Belt, and there it's generational. You look at Gen Z and Millennials.
- [59:34]
Tim Keller
They'Re very post Christians. Yeah. And what's sad about those areas is a lot of times the older people don't realize it's happening 100%. Yeah. And so you could go into the very center, for example, if you go to the center of some of these conservative cities. If you go to the center of Houston or you go to the center of, you know, these Bible Belt cities, there's. The younger generation is definitely walking away from faith.
- [59:58]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
They could be in California or New York.
- [60:00]
Tim Keller
That's right. That's right. And very often the parents aren't as completely aware of it as they would be. So. Yeah.
- [60:07]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
What would you say to those kids?
- [60:10]
Tim Keller
Well, I think it's. I would say that the. That Christianity has better resources for what they're trying to do. You're looking for freedom, you're looking for meaning, you're looking for satisfaction, you're looking for identity. You're looking for a basis for doing justice. You want a basis for doing justice that doesn't turn you into an oppressor yourself. Do you want to have an identity that's not performative, that is not exclusive? I said, I got better resources for you. I mean, now here's why I would start there with them rather than start with what I'd call hard apologetics. Here's the evidence for the resurrection. There's a ponce by Blaise Pascal who said, he says, bring people to the place where they wish Christianity was true, then show them it's true. So there's really no reason for me to get out the guns on the evidence for the resurrection, stuff like that, which is trying to show them that Christianity is true if they don't want it to be true. But if I get them to want it, if they get to the place where they say, gee, it would be great if that was true, but is it? Then I can do my more traditional.
- [61:20]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So speaking to the identity pieces, identity.
- [61:23]
Tim Keller
Freedom, meaning, satisfaction, justice, you speak to the values they have and that they're trying. You have to have an operational way to get those things. You can't live without those things.
- [61:37]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Well, I think you've made the argument, others have made the argument that in some ways the culture still has the values of Christianity without the faith of Christianity.
- [61:44]
Tim Keller
To some extent, yeah. Especially in the area of morality and justice. We have a questionnaire that I, in my evangelism class, I ask people to go talk to a non Christian friend and they have a set of questions to ask them. And one of the questions is, how do you determine whether something is right or wrong? How do you make a moral judgment? And all of them, he said, almost all the secular people actually tie themselves into pretzels. Because I said, look, the assignment is not to actually get into a debate, but you can, if you want ask a follow up question. And the follow up question there is to say, how do you tell somebody who doesn't feel that what they're doing is wrong and whose culture tells them it's not wrong that they're doing something wrong, what would you say to them? And they just have no idea. Because on the one hand they're relativists and they say, nobody can tell me what is right or wrong for me. But then on the other hand, they want to tell other people not to live unjust lives. And that is deeply incoherent. So that would be one of the things I would be talking to them about. The fact is that they don't have a basis for. They don't have a sufficient moral source for their moral ideals. But that would be still not the hard apologetics. That's still saying Christianity has better resources for the things you're seeking than you have. And if I got them to the place where they said, oh, that's interesting, that'd be. But how do I know this is true? Then I could say, well, let's read the Gospels, let's talk about the claims of Jesus. Then you get into more traditional apologetics.
- [63:25]
Kerry Newhoff
Well, it's interesting.
- [63:25]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I mean, you've written a lot about apologetics and spoken a lot about apologetics. But I was listening to a talk you gave years ago, and I'm sure you've written about this as well, and I'm paraphrasing here, but you said the place to start with apologetics is not with hard logic. Like there are so many codices in the New Testament, et cetera, et cetera, because people don't actually respond to logic, they respond to emotion.
- [63:48]
Tim Keller
Yeah.
- [63:48]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
- [63:50]
Tim Keller
Well, what they're trying.
- [63:51]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Is that accurate?
- [63:52]
Tim Keller
Yeah. And I. Okay, yes. And I was trying to say this. They gotta want it to be true before they're open to an argument that it is, and they can only want it to be true, is if you actually, in a sense, do emotional apologetics. There's actually a book I wouldn't, I can't recommend every part of it, but a book by Francis Spufford called Unapologetic. He's a very cheeky British writer who is a professing Christian, not a full and certainly not an evangelical one, not an orthodox one. But the subtitle of the book is why in spite of everything, Christianity Still Makes Great Emotional Sense. That's the subtitle. And I thought that's pretty brilliant. That's what I was trying to talk about. Yeah, yeah. Is that if for people to think Christianity makes emotional sense, that it gives you a workable approach to identity, or it gives you a. It promises a happiness or a love that you find desirable, or it gives you a basis for making moral judgments that doesn't turn you into a Pharisee, but at the same time gives you a basis. It says, when people start to emotionally want that. Cause that's not hard logic. It's more like saying, look, I have better resources than you do for the things you're dealing with.
- [65:17]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
It's part of that. Pointing out the problem, anticipating the objections.
- [65:20]
Tim Keller
Yes. I'm trying to show them that Christianity makes emotional sense. And if it makes emotional sense, they'll be open to a argument that it makes rational sense. That's what I was trying to say.
- [65:29]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
An example, just to make it crystal clear.
- [65:33]
Tim Keller
Well, you might say C.S. lewis. I'll give you an example. C.S. lewis, when he does his argument from desire in his famous chapter in Mere Christianity on hope. And what he says is, he starts off by saying, if you're young, you may not have experienced this, but as you get out in life, you're going to realize that all the things you thought were really gonna make you happy, don't do it. And he does a wonderful job of saying, the job you thought would make you happy, the marriage you thought would make you happy, the travel you thought would make you happy. At first it seems like this is finally gonna do it, and it goes away in the grasping of it. And then he says, I'm not talking about bad marriages. I'm not talking about bad jobs. I'm not talking about bad jobs, bad trips. He says, I'm talking about the best possible ones. And you're going to find out that nothing actually satisfies. There's still a kind of emptiness. And then he says, now, once you decide that, there's only two or three possibilities, one is you could say, I just. I need a better wife, I need a better trip, I need a better job. And out there, that happiness is out there in this world. The second thing you can do, he says, that'll just make you an. Absolutely. It's gonna make you driven. It's gonna make you anxious. The second thing you can do is say, there is no happiness, there is no satisfaction. I just have to harden myself, stop crying after the moon. Just get cynical. And he says, well, that might make you less of a nuisance to people, but it also is gonna dehumanize you. It's gonna Kill the part of your heart that really wants love and wants happiness and satisfaction. He says the third possibility is this. He says, ducklings want to swim, there's such a thing as water. Babies want to suck milk, there's such a thing as milk. Desires don't exist unless satisfaction for those desires exists. And if you find in yourself a desire for something that nothing in this world can satisfy, it probably means you were made for another world. Now, that's logical, and yet it's basically working on emotion. It's really not. It's not the evidence for the resurrection. It's not saying there's the existence of God. It was trying to say there is an emptiness in you. That you can either say, I'm going to find it in this world, or you can say, I'm going to kill my desire for happiness and then become a real cynic and snob. Or you can say, there's actually something else out there, there's another way. Now, if I was preaching this, and I do actually preach this, I would add the Buddhist approach, the Eastern approach, which is to say that the world is an illusion. It's a little bit like hardening your heart, but it seems more spiritual. But ultimately it does make you detach. And I could make a case against it. So what I would do is I'm actually doing argument, I'm doing apologetics, but it's trying to make Christianity make emotional sense. And only if it makes emotional sense would people want eventually to sit and listen to an argument. Why it makes intellectual sense.
- [68:49]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I don't know whether you would think this has changed a lot, but a lot of people would see a surge in the new atheism. Everybody from Sam Harris to Christopher Hitchens to Yuval Harari and people like that who have written a lot of books, and some of their arguments are fairly strong.
- [69:06]
Tim Keller
Right.
- [69:07]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
You could make the argument that perhaps we're not doing very well on that front as Christians these days with a few, you know, Present company accepted.
- [69:16]
Tim Keller
Well, go ahead. I'm sorry, I cut you off.
- [69:21]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
No, no, no.
- [69:21]
Tim Keller
So you asked me, what do you think of that?
- [69:23]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Well, I'm saying, what do you think their best arguments are? That was going to be my question. What do you think the best arguments of the new atheists?
- [69:28]
Tim Keller
I actually think that the older new Atheists like Sam Harris and. And of course Hitchens is dead, obviously the original Dawkins. I think actually their stridency has actually faded. I mean, I think they're still strident. It's faded because. Is that a little Muddier, you mean? No, no, they're old. And even a Harari, he's a more recent one. But that's not where kids are. They are. The new atheists are saying science will solve everything. It's sort of an old enlightenment approach that sort of sees everything rationally. And younger people today are all about justice. They're all about identity. And I actually don't think that that kind of very detached, intellectual, scientific, enlightenment thing that science has got the answers to everything. I don't, I don't think younger people resonate with that.
- [70:29]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So back to what we talked about earlier.
- [70:30]
Tim Keller
Yeah, I actually, I think, I don't think that they're in ascendancy anymore. I think that they're fading. They also do come across as just as fundamentalist and narrow minded. As fundamentalists.
- [70:41]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Oh, yeah, yeah. Harari, especially at the end of some of his works.
- [70:44]
Tim Keller
I know. And yet the books are still selling very well. It doesn't mean they're not making a good income. Yeah.
- [70:54]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
So we got a lot of preachers listening who are like, I think I'm stuck in Christendom. You want to give them some tips on how to move out of that mindset. And I mean, whether that's generational in the Bible belt or they're in a city and they're not having the impact that they wish they would. What are some starting points for some preachers to connect better?
- [71:12]
Tim Keller
Okay, well, you want the cigar as the hardest question? You get the cigar for the hardest question. Thank you. Because there's not a lot of great examples. What worries me is I already told you, I think that the seeker megachurch I still think is probably. It's not the place a lot of the younger, justice oriented, postmodern people are showing up. I still think it's really not. It's not the way of the future. I don't think. I would say if you can find a multi ethnic church in a city that's growing and it's not compromising on any of those four things on the sex, the pro life, the justice, the racial, if it's multi ethnic, if it's really equally evangelizing people, calling to repentance and doing justice, calling people to be a sexual counterculture and work on being anti racist, if you find a church like that that's growing and orthodox and true to the whole panel of those things, they're probably doing what. They're probably doing what they ought to do. Probably, probably go there. But I don't. If you mean a movement, a book, I Mean even.
- [72:41]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
No, I just mean like they're stuck in an old mindset. How do they begin to detach from that and move forward?
- [72:48]
Tim Keller
You could, you could read Leslie new begin now. Newbiggin died 1999. Yeah, and so he's already somewhat dated. I mean, he's already looking at a post Christian west that has already moved from when he saw it. And yet he was just ahead of his time. And so if you could read Foolishness of the Greeks and the Gospel in a Pluralist Society. I mean, Gospel in a Pluralist Society, I think that's right. Those two books would be great starting points. They'd be really good starting points.
- [73:21]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Anything else on the megachurch movement that you've seen over the last 40 years develop.
- [73:28]
Kerry Newhoff
Knowing a lot of them are listening?
- [73:29]
Tim Keller
I mean, obviously I planted a megachurch, I mean, by anybody's standards. And at this point I feel like, I think it was the right thing to do to let it get that big. There wouldn't be a redeemer city to city. There wouldn't be a counseling center. There wouldn't be hope for New York. There wouldn't be all sorts of stuff. And I do think that for New York to grow an evangelical megachurch was a good thing for the whole ecosystem. I think it is breaking up. I broke up Ma Belle. I mean, we're already three and eventually four, five, six churches. So there is no 6,000 person Redeemer Church anymore. There's a whole slew of them. And I think that's good because generally speaking, when a church gets over 1000 people, it really becomes much more bureaucratic. I'll give you two real quick. I mean, that sounds kind of negative about big churches. The pastors can't know everybody. Like I always said to a pastor, if you can interview every single new member personally, then your church is still small enough. And if you can't do that anymore, it's too big. Secondly, what happens is, listen, if you run a pharmacy, you start a pharmacy, you're probably a pharmacist, you probably know how to stock the shelves, and then maybe you grow your pharmacy and then you form a second pharmacy and a third pharmacy. Even generally, the people running those pharmacies are still pharmacists. They actually know what it means to make it a good experience for people to come in the door and buy things. But when you have 50 pharmacies in a chain, the people running it know almost nothing about pharmaceuticals. They're just looking on roi, return on investment, bottom lines. They're just Operating like they're basically financial people. And what ends up happening in a very large church is more and more that both the staff and the lay leaders become people who are not so much doing the ministry at the bottom. They're not the pharmacists anymore. They're people who are looking at systems and doing all these things. And I don't think that's healthy. So I actually have been saying, frankly, the city would be better off with 10 churches of 500 people in general than one church of 5,000. Having said that, I think almost every city needs a couple of megachurches because they can do things nobody else can do. A couple. But I wouldn't aspire to be the pastor of a megachurch. I just want you to know that. There you go. For the reasons I just mentioned, it's a discipleship problem. A lot of passivity, and there's a bureaucracy problem where people spend an awful lot of time in just looking at systems instead of doing ministry. So I would say looking forward, I think churches, basically. I'm not a big house church fan, in spite of the fact that Francis Chan. Other people think it's the solution. I would say moderate sized churches, you know, 100 to 800 is the way forward.
- [76:45]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
You're speaking to most of the people listening to or watching this. So I've got a list of questions that you've been so generous with your time, but I'd love to close with this one.
- [76:54]
Tim Keller
Sure.
- [76:55]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
A lot of leaders listening in right now are discouraged. Personally. It's been a tough season. It's hard at home. I'm sure you've had seasons of discouragement. Do you want to just tell us about a time where you felt discouraged and how you got yourself through it?
- [77:12]
Tim Keller
There's so many. How will I ever choose them? You know, if you're talking about leadership, the hardest time was there was a period from about 2001 to 2005 or so that was tough for me as a leader because 911 happened. And that's a whole big story. 911 in New York City is a. It's a world of discussion. I can't go there. The whole city got depressed and everybody burned out. It was the day after 9 11, day after a Christian minister from Oklahoma City who had been through the Oklahoma City bombing called and told me, you're gonna have a lot of trouble in your church for the next three or four years. You're gonna have people burning out, you're gonna have people grieving. You're gonna have all sorts of Trouble. And he kind of gave me the list. On top of that, I got thyroid cancer. On top of that, my wife had Crohn's disease, had a big flare up, and had multiple surgeries on her body. And I stayed the pastor, but basically really let the staff kind of go. And when I actually came back to health, after about two years, basically I was still preaching and all that. I came back to health and I sat down with my staff and I found out they were all bitter because I left them on their own. And they also formed these little silos, and they were actually all having turf battles. And it was a wreck. It was a total wreck. And so I said, oh, my gosh, are we ever going to get out of this? And basically, frankly, I did hire a new executive director, Bruce Terrell, who was probably the single biggest help at cleaning all that up and reintegrating the staff into a community. But for about two or three years before that, I'm not sure how we made it other than to say, you gotta keep going, you gotta pray. My wife was so sick that at a certain point there, I thought maybe I should leave the ministry. But I couldn't tell her about it because then she would feel guilty. But I couldn't tell anybody else about it because I felt I would betray her. So I didn't tell anybody. And I lived with that for a couple years and never really resolved it other than God never gave me the freedom to leave. So prayer. That is when my prayer life really kicked in in a new way. I mean, my prayer life changed drastically right during that period of time, just deepened, got stronger, and pretty much worth it. The whole thing was worth it just for that. So. But no, no key. You know, God sending somebody was important. He deepened my prayer life. That's how. That's how you get through it.
- [80:09]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
Tim, this has been rich, deep, and such a privilege. Thank you.
- [80:14]
Tim Keller
Thanks for. Thanks for the thanks.
- [80:18]
Kerry Newhoff
Yeah. Like I said, could have gone back the next day and done another eight hours. And hopefully that won't be the last time that Tim Keller and I get to have a conversation. You know, one of the things I really appreciate about Tim is I think of all the people alive on the planet, Tim is one of the few in the church space that will be read 100 years from now. As long as there are humans walking the earth, people will be reading his work. And he continues to produce new content, including new sermons, new books, and helping plant churches around the world. If you want more, we do have show notes. You can just head on over to carynwhoff.com episode339. This is also on YouTube and if you found this episode helpful, please do share it with your friends. Post it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, wherever you are. We try to interact with all of you who do that and make sure you tag Tim Keller as well when you share that. So we have just a growing number of episodes. We are recorded well into the summer because we took the entire spring catalog and moved it into the summer and are rerecording for the most part crisis based episodes. And I have Joel Manby coming up who talks about the difficulty at SeaWorld, Ian Morgan Cron, Scott Harrison from Water. Who else is coming up? Danielle Strickland, John Eldridge, Patrick Lencioni is back. Henry Cloud. So many more. But coming up real soon. Annie F. Downs, man, I tell you, I just think Annie is incredible. And we had a pretty honest conversation, if you know Annie F. Downs about what her lockdown was like, about pivoting and about so much more. And if you think you need a lot of money to make a big impact, well, you're, you're going to love next episode. So here's an excerpt.
- [82:00]
Annie F. Downs
What people want. What I want, Carrie, as a, as a person who's taking in content is I want content that makes me feel like the person on the other side understands that I'm stuck and understands that I do not know how to do tomorrow and understands that I've worn, I haven't put on jeans in some time. And you know, I mean, everybody wants to feel like you said it earlier, we've all been equalized to some degree. Now that is a privileged position as well because we've all been equalized, but the content we take in has all been equalized. Jimmy Fallon and I use the same con, use the same pieces of equipment to get stuff out.
- [82:39]
Tim Keller
Yeah.
- [82:40]
Kerry Newhoff
And the answer to that is you do not need a lot of money to make a big impact. She has millions of downloads a month and oh, I'll tell you, it was a great conversation. So that's coming up. Subscribers. You get that automatically for free. If you are listening for the first time and you haven't subscribed, here's a little truth for me. I only listen to podcasts I subscribe to because otherwise I forget. So do subscribe. It's absolutely free. We love bringing this to you and thank you for our partners. I'm gonna share what I'm thinking about these days and do want to thank our partners. Thank you to ICM for training and Equipping pastors in Africa. You can help for $35 a month and train and equip 48 pastors in the next 12 months by going to 1 Million Pastors.com. just spell out 1 O N E Million M I L L. Well, you know how to spell Million Pastors.com just don't type in the numbers. 1 Million Pastors.com and ProMediaFire would love to book a free digital strategy session with you by going to promediafire.com churchgrowth Also, thank you to the 10,000 leaders who did my free crisis course. It's still available, but we're also pivoting. And I've got something I'm really excited about coming up soon. It's called the 30 day pivot. I think the future is uncertain and as we move into the days ahead, I think we're moving into brand new territory. So soon, perhaps by the time you listen to this, you'll be able to go to the 30day pivot.com and see a brand new training, a brand new resource that I'm releasing for leaders. I've had to pivot a couple of times in the last 60 days and I think that may be part of the new normal for all of us. So head on over to the 30 day pivot.com to learn more and I want to share what I'm thinking about. And this actually ties into the whole idea of are we going to keep pivoting? So my guess is you have changed so much in the last 60, 80 days. Like you look at yourself in February. It's like that was a whole other life. And you've gone online, you've led a virtual team. Some of you are reopening your buildings, but your buildings aren't the same and you're tired and you're exhausted and you've made some progress. But I don't want this to sound like an insult. It's not. Think about it. Did you really innovate in the last eight weeks?
- [84:53]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I don't know.
- [84:54]
Kerry Newhoff
You know what happened? We reacted. You and I reacted to something that we couldn't control. And you get full marks for that. But the pivots that you and I have made in the last two months aren't really innovation yet. So I've made a bunch of pivots, like changing this podcast, taking all the spring interviews, moving them to the late spring and summer, and then rerecording a whole bunch of episodes, doing that free course on crisis@howtoleadthroughcrisis.com from idea to launch in 10 days. That's great. That's a response. But am I really innovating?
- [85:26]
Interviewer (possibly Cary Neuhoff or a co-host)
I don't think so.
- [85:27]
Kerry Newhoff
The real innovation curve is just about to get started because all this quote innovation over the last few months has been caused by an external factor. True innovation happens when you start to really dig inside and go, okay, what does this make possible? So keep going. I really believe the real breakthroughs are ahead of you. And what I would encourage you is to take all the learning and change you've experienced in the last few months and lean into it way harder. Way harder. I know that sounds exhausting, but I gotta tell you, I think there are great breakthroughs ahead. And if you're willing to further rethink your methods, I think you will really begin to explode your mission. You've only really gotten started. So think about that. What if the real innovation was ahead of you? And as we move into a period of uncertainty, I think it's going to require greater and greater innovation. So if you want to learn more, head on over to the 30day pivot.com that's the number, 30daypivot.com and you can learn a little bit more. We got some fun stuff over there for you. Thank you so much for listening. What a joy it was to sit down with Tim Keller. We got some great episodes coming up, guys. Thank you for your partnership. You're just, wow, making this such a rewarding journey. We hope these resources are really, really help you. And if you haven't subscribed yet, head on over to YouTube. We're putting more and more of these up there and they will be there forever for your study and beyond. And as always, I hope our time together today has helped you lead like never before.
- [87:04]
Keri Neuhoff
You've been listening to the Cary Nieuwhoff Leadership Podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership change and personal growth to help you lead like never before.
- [87:22]
Kerry Newhoff
Hey, before we go today, just a quick word.
- [87:24]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
Let's be honest. At a certain point, hustling harder doesn't help.
- [87:27]
Kerry Newhoff
You probably hit that wall, right?
- [87:29]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
I'm not sure about you, but when things aren't going particularly well or growing particularly well and I'm stuck, my gut reaction is just to double down and go harder. But what I've learned over time is, you know what I need? I need an outside perspective. I need other voices to help me figure out what am I not seeing? Is there a better system, better strategy, like, where are my blind spots? And you know what? You only learn from others who have been there. And that's why I created the Art of Leadership Academy. It's an online community of growth minded leaders. It's growing every day and it's a very focused space where you can grow faster and lead more effectively. Now you'll get stuff like show notes for every episode, but even better than that, you get some quarterly free webinars with me, you get real dialogue with other church leaders.
- [88:14]
Kerry Newhoff
It's a troll. Free.
- [88:15]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
I'm going to say it.
- [88:16]
Kerry Newhoff
Weirdo.
- [88:16]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
Free environment.
- [88:17]
Tim Keller
Okay?
- [88:17]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
You're not going to get the kind of stuff you get on social media. We moderate the content very carefully and the community. So if that sounds like something you'd benefit from, real leaders trying to make real progress in real churches, I would love for you to join in.
- [88:30]
Kerry Newhoff
And you know what's super cool?
- [88:31]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
You're going to find people who are a step ahead of you and you're going to find people who are a step behind you. The people a step ahead of you are going to help you. The people a step behind you, well, you can help them. And I'm in that community on a daily basis. So if that sounds like something you.
- [88:43]
Kerry Newhoff
Would love, it's totally free.
- [88:45]
Host or Promoter of Art of Leadership Academy
No gimmicks, no tricks. Just sign up today. Visit theartofleadershipacademy.com or click the link in the description of this episode. A few clicks, you're in and I'll see you on the inside.