On Tim Keller’s Death – His Impact on One Pastor’s Life

I am in mourning today.

My colleague and friend, Tim Keller, has gone to his eternal reward.

Our team at City to City has known for some time that this day would come. When he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May 2020, no one would’ve thought he’d live as long as he did.

I would’ve said three years with this diagnosis was wildly optimistic.

Still the news yesterday of Tim’s being placed under hospice care—and then this morning of his death—came as a shock.

Lord have mercy.

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Kimberly won tickets for us to see the new musical “New York, New York” last night. Variety called it “a love letter to Manhattan … unabashed.”

You’d be hard pressed to come up with a better description.

The whole night I kept thinking about Tim. About his love for the city. About his clear-eyed view of the city. Unlike suburbanites he saw the good of the city. Unlike the musical he also saw the bad.

And for half his life he prayed for God to send revival, to spark a movement of the gospel that would touch every corner of the city—not just Manhattan but the boroughs, not just the white collars but the blue collars and the no collars as well.

More than most people I know, he never stopped learning. Never stopped listening to different voices. Never stopped growing.

I’m still amazed at those times when I would host his classes and he would change his notes in response to a student’s question or pushback.

Never once did I hear him say, “You know who I am, right? Founder of Redeemer Church? New York Times bestselling author? You know I’ve thought about this topic longer than you’ve been alive, right?”

Never.

He knew that for the gospel to move in all corners of the city God would move through people unlike himself—people with different backgrounds, perspectives, experiences, theologies. People anointed by the Holy Spirit to do different but complementary work in other places.

People he wanted to work with. And learn from.

Because he loved the city. He loved Jesus. And he wanted to see revival.

To me, this is his legacy.

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But for me his impact is far more personal.

My family likely wouldn’t have come to NYC had it not been for Tim’s encouragement.

And we sure wouldn’t have stayed without it.

When I heard that an Upper West Side church was looking for a pastor, I found out that Redeemer was meeting there for two of its many services. Since I was going to a conference a few weeks later where Tim was a keynote speaker, I thought I’d seek him out and ask him about the church.

At the end of the last session I introduced myself and he graciously gave me 15–20 minutes of his time to answer my questions about the church.

He assured me that it wasn’t “a toxic situation,” just that the previous pastorate had been a poor match.

He asked me a few questions as well and when we were all done he said, “I hope you come. We need historic churches to be part of the movement of the gospel across the city.”

Five months later Kimberly and I made our first visit to the church. After a grueling weekend of interviews and preaching, we attended Redeemer’s Sunday night service. I correctly guessed the door Tim would exit, so we snuck out before the final song and waited for him there.

As we stood outside the side entrance of the church I would one day pastor, he reiterated how important it was for churches of all kinds to be planted and to get healthy.

He gestured to the building across the street—a residential complex that takes up an entire city block and housed luminaries like Al Pacino, Nora Ephron, and Robert DiNiro—and said that, if statistics are correct, only 2% of the people living there regularly attend an evangelical church.

“Redeemer cannot reach them all,” he said. “We could plant multiple churches in that building and not reach everyone there.”

He pointed back to the church building and said, “That’s why we need older churches like this one to get healthy.”

A year later I would be installed as pastor of that church. Tim was one of three pastors to speak that day, joined by my former pastor Danny Brooks and my dad Alan Hoskinson.

Tim’s charge to me was simple and to the point:

• Preach the Bible.
• Preach the gospel of the Bible.

Over the next nine months he would pop into my office (Redeemer still held evening services there), pull up a chair, and ask me how I was doing, what I was learning, how he could help.

Remember, he didn’t know me from anyone. I wasn’t a seminary student of his or an ordinand in his church.

I wasn’t even part of his denomination.

I was a random guy whom he met at a conference and chatted with once at a side door.

But he treated me as if we were friends.

Which is what we became.

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Eight years later when ministry at that church fell apart I didn’t know what to do. Our children were at an age where moving to another city would’ve been enormously disruptive. But pastoral jobs in NYC are few and far between.

Kimberly encouraged me to talk to Tim.

A few times over the years she would run into him in the courtyard in front of our building. (We lived in the same neighborhood.) And the Spirit of God would fill Tim with just the words that she needed to hear, in that very moment.

She rightly intuited that Tim had a word for us.

So I set up a meeting with him at the old CTC offices on the 16th floor of 1166 Sixth Avenue. We ate Chick-Fil-A and talked about the disintegration of my pastorate.

(Since I’m sure you want to know, he had a chicken salad sandwich with a side of chicken noodle soup. He told me that the soup was perhaps the most underrated item on Chick-Fil-A’s menu.)

I laid out everything that had happened personally and ministerially in recent days and asked his advice.

What he told me cemented our direction.

“Matthew,” he said, “if you were to tell me that ministry was going great but that your family was struggling, I’d tell you to leave New York.” And he recounted—celebrated—the stories of other ministers who chose to leave the city for the sake of their families.

“But,” he went on, “if you’re telling me that ministry has gone sour but that your family is doing well, I think you should stay. You’ve actually learned something that would be useful for other people here in New York. So wait for God to show you your next field of service.”

Which is what we did.

Not long after that I helped start a church in Queens. I like to call that phase of my life “Rehab Church.”

And then just a month before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the city, Redeemer City to City hired me to direct its leadership institute, the City Ministry Program (CMP).

Where I would work with Tim Keller.

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Most of Tim’s work the last three years has been far from the public gaze.

Part of that is due to Covid restrictions and of course to his cancer diagnosis.

But mostly it was by design.

Tim wanted to invest his retirement years in the next generation of pastors and Christian leaders, in men and women across the city who could take what he’d learned and contextualize it within their own ecclesiologies and for the good of their own communities.

All for the spread of the gospel.

That’s why he started CMP with small learning cohorts—to offer present and emerging leaders across metro New York an intimate space where they could learn together and learn from one another what God is doing across the five boroughs and how the Spirit could equip them for fruitful ministry.

For three years Tim spent hundreds of hours a year with just a few dozen people.

People whose lives have been changed by the interaction.

I watched Tim lead conversations with, say, a Pentecostal from the South Bronx, a Messianic Jewish missionary to Brooklyn, and a South Indian Southern Baptist church planter in Queens, discussing together how to preach Christ effectively from all of Scripture, or how to assess the spiritual state of the flock, or how to subvert cultural narratives with the gospel.

Profoundly transformational.

Who knows what fruit the Spirit will bear in the next 30–40 years through his investment in the next generation?

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And so I grieve.

Tim was never my pastor. I haven’t read half of his books. We did not share a denomination.

Yet he invited me to be his friend. He walked with me through the most disorienting phase of my life. He modeled a posture of pastoral humility that is all too uncommon.

Now he is gone. Absent from us.

Present with the Savior he loved.

So today in his honor, I am eating my first cup of Chick-Fil-A chicken noodle soup. (Turns out he’s not wrong!) 

And I have just one thing left to say.

Thank you Tim, for everything.