[Music] welcome to the Kerry new Hoff leadership podcast I hope this episode helps you thrive in life in the leadership and if you like it hit the like button and subscribe to my channel and that way you'll never miss a thing well if you're like me if you're always looking for ways to stay informed and engaged with the world around us and that's why I created On The Rise it's a curated Weekly Newsletter packed with thought-provoking articles and insights on faith culture and the future of the church and really any other subject that I find fascinating and conversation worthy and I send it to you absolutely free every single week so if you're ready to join the conversation and be part of a community of curious engaged leaders you can subscribe to on the rise today at ontherizednewsletter.com you can start and stop at any point on the risenewsletter.com this episode is also presented by glue glue is connecting the faith ecosystem in innovative ways one way is by making it a lot easier for churches to connect with new visitors did you know for example that time it takes for a church to respond to new visitors has a major impact on whether that new person or family will stay well with glue you can use automation to build engaging new visitor engagement Journeys you can learn how at get.glue.us visitors that's get.glue.us visitors and now to today's episode Colin welcome to the podcast oh I'm so glad to be here yeah yeah so I'm curious how did you initially come across Tim Keller uh just give us the origin story yeah uh so I I think I'm like a lot of people in the millennial generation where as we were coming up and heading into Ministry Tim Keller began to be this kind of name that we were hearing about especially related to church planting especially related to Global cities this is after 9 11. and so I was working for Christianity magazine at the time and I was sent to cover the first ever meeting of the Gospel Coalition it was at the campus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School North of Chicago and Tim Keller is one of the co-founders and he was going to be there he gave a talk that I still think is an absolute Landmark where he works through gospel centered Ministry especially focusing on Jesus as the true and better fulfillment of all these different Old Testament figures the very memorable and I remember talking to him afterward hey I'm working on a book this was my first book young Restless reformed and I said can you you know could you help me with this and he said no I'm not interested in that and he kind of felt a little bad maybe and then said well here's my email address you can email me and I thought okay here's my chance so I emailed him about 10 questions or so and responded with yes no no yes no no it was useless to me as a journalist so and a little bit later I reached out to him and I said hey I'm thinking about a series of books about cultural engagement do you want to work together on them and that was the shock he said yes and then shortly thereafter I started working working with him at the Gospel Coalition so yeah first meeting was there in 2007 started working together in 2010 and uh and worked closely together for those 13 years Tim was really straightforward wasn't he I mean my interactions with him were interview based but I I it's funny when he said no I'm like oh you know what I can imagine that coming out of his mouth well even even as somebody who's pretty conflict averse and he liked you know likes people liking him um two things he often would say about himself yeah being in New York a long time especially if you're not from there he'll come across a little little abrupt and then and then you meet and then you meet Kathy and you realize that Tim is kind of like the the Less Direct of the two of them uh but yeah that's that's a New York thing it's also just kind of an Eastern Pennsylvania thing overall with Tim just as you know from interviewing him so many times just what you saw is what you got yeah and very very straightforward and um so the biography came out it's called Timothy Keller came out earlier this year before he passed away and if people want to grab it I would highly recommend so when I I'd love to you you share quite a bit of his origin story and I'm interested in how you know our childhood shapes us as adults I think none of us really Escape that there are things that happen along the way what were some moments Tendencies patterns in his family of origin his childhood that really shaped the Tim Keller that we've all come to know and many of us came to love and respect I think this is one of the more significant contributions of the book yeah um the only living immediate family member now from the Kellers would be Tim's younger sister and it's interesting that I I took a different kind of approach with this book I I did talk to Tim I talked to him extensively but I knew that he wouldn't necessarily be the best source on himself so one of the first two people I talked to was a sister Sharon and all of a sudden all these windows into Tim Keller's life began to open and you began to identify his his father who worked a lot middle class manager very distant to the point where I would say something like well yeah I'd say to a friend of Tim something about him being remote and not working they're like no you don't understand he literally would not speak you go into their home and you would not hear them speak at all and then I would hear a lot of stories about okay him being a a German Lutheran marrying this Italian Catholic wife they met in World War II and all of a sudden the stories from Tim's sister about their mother started to come out and these weren't things that Tim really ever talked about anywhere else but the fact was that she was extremely strict she had very very high expectations specifically of her oldest son she was very religious and she expected her son to go off and to sort of make her proud in his religious achievement um Tim was simultaneously they call him family members would call him Boy Scout because he was the oldest child who always did the right thing yet at the same time when he went off to college he really did Rebel and he rebelled in large part against his mother he was torn between the Dynamics of of wanting to to do the right thing but also the pressures of falling far short and so it helped me to see Carrie is that when he would write his seminal book The Prodigal God about the the role of Grace he's talking about the parable of the two sons not just the prodigal son but the two sons that Tim really demonstrated the the proclivities of both sons that he had the older son the tendency toward legalism of of approving kind of of living up to his mother's expectations but also the the difficulty of living under that and the desire to just get away from it so they argued a lot growing up it was just it sounded like a fairly tense environment but he became a kind of protector especially of his of his sister and so once I saw that all of a sudden Tim's core message of the transforming power of Grace this gift from God that changes everything about our lives all of a sudden that made a lot more sense hmm the the picture that also emerges that you paint Colin is that Tim was lonely as a child can you can you talk about that a little bit more yeah so part of it's just what it's like to grow up in the 50s and 60s in terms of you know in terms of you don't have the same entertainment options there but they also lived on the edge of town he was in a gifted program which meant that he wasn't going to the neighborhood school he was going across town it was set up in such a way that contributed to him being being bullied um in some different ways um also they his mother did not allow the boys Tim had a younger brother as well did not allow the boys to fight back at all in the neighborhood but as uh Tim's sister would say it led Tim to really learn how to argue his way out of things and so you can see some of the initial apologetics and things like that coming out but you definitely do get the picture of a child who I mean he's teaching himself to read by age three and and that family definitely you know it was a it was a middle class family with some you know they had they had some books and there were some restrictions on what they could listen to and things like that but it wasn't some sort of extraordinary home so part of the loneliness is simply that as as Tim's sister Sharon would tell me um that he just you could see that he was a global kind of thinker he was just he he was different from a from an early age and there but there was a lot of but there was a lot of tension because he didn't yet really know who he was he that identity was not settled at all and that bled into his college experience he was very much still searching for that identity yeah is it true that he spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia yeah no doubt yeah it kind of it's an interesting thing that I've heard from some other uh significant figures of that same generation the the classic experience of Tim and I think you could say this about him anybody who would have known him all the way throughout his entire life is that when he saw something he wanted to know the story behind it and he wanted to tell you about it just a natural teacher so there was an innate curiosity a desire to learn what is the story behind this and a pursuit to find that out and then tell you that whole story so so friends and family would talk about vacationing in England and they'd be looking out over a Vista and Tim when all of a sudden burst into a 30-minute lecture on the history of the region because he'd been sitting up all night reading about it or they'd be sitting on a beach in South Carolina or going on a tour of Charleston and he would become the tour guide because he knew everything about that that place so yeah that pattern of I see something on TV I want to know about what's going on there I'm going to read the encyclopedia and then I'm going to teach the rest of my family about you know about what's going on um behind that that was a that was a pattern that was there in the beginning and it continued through his whole life fascinating so for younger listeners an encyclopedia which I grew up with in my home every family pretty much had one back in the day imagine Wikipedia bound and uh sitting in anywhere from a two volume to a 40 volume set on a bookshelf you can just pick it up look up a subject and read the entry and that's what Tim did um is it true that he had a like he had an incredible memory so in my three interviews with him I remember the second one which was maybe a year year and a half after my first one so we met in person in Manhattan just before the pandemic had a wonderful sit down for a couple of hours in a great interview came out of that not about a year and a half later I'm picking up on Zoom and he I don't think he looked at his notes but he said Carrie last time we were together you asked me about and I told you blank blank blank and I'm like in my head I'm like okay I don't remember that was like one of the most important interviews I've ever done but I don't remember what I asked him per se but he did and then I've also heard through the grapevine that he may have had a photographic memory do you want to talk about his ability to recall and knowledge and memory etc etc I I think Carrie that was simply a a gift from God wow you know sometimes you you look at you look at a figure somebody that we aspire to in leadership we aspire to emulate somebody who's been especially successful and we think I'm going to learn their method you know one thing you're not really going to find in my book is a clear method of how to become like Tim Keller how to beat Tim Keller yeah exactly I don't really think that's how he he didn't really think to replicate himself that way and I think at some level so for example people have asked him for those of you know listening out there who are preachers a lot of the things you'll have a system for remembering illustrations and anecdotes and things like that people would ask Tim what's your system and he said I'm I I can't really tell you I don't have a system which was another way of his saying well he could recall things that other people couldn't couldn't recall as it just wasn't a replicable system there so especially his when you look at him as a student I think for the the three years that I that he spent at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary I just can't imagine anybody else who ever could have gotten more out of their graduate education all the things he could recall really that's the backbone of my book is because he could recall so much of what he learned there so I don't know exactly how I would describe his his memory and his abilities for recall but that just seems to be a kind of Supernatural gifting that I just don't think you see very often at all and I'm not sure I've seen anybody else with that with that parallel gift um talk a little bit about his rebellion in his teen and college Years what happened there how far away from the faith of his childhood did he stray etc etc so one of my key sources on this question and I was just corresponding with him even this week was the best man at Tim and Kathy's wedding his name is Bruce Henderson a retired professor and Bruce's Bruce is he kind of speaks about Tim in a way that only one of your longest friends can speak about you only the best man at your wedding can speak about you because he's one of the few people again outside of that immediate family who knew Tim not as a Christian right and so he just describes how Tim was very much not clear on on who he was of who he wanted to be um was very demonstrative in his arguing so in one sense he had very much straight away from the assumptions about race and religion and things like that that he'd inherited from his family but of course he started college in 1968 that was a fairly common thing at the time at the same time the people he tended to be arguing with about this stuff were the Christians were in a varsity Christian Fellowship so at another level he's still with that group so he's definitely rebelling he's pushing boundaries he's asking questions but at the same time he's doing it within that community structure and you would actually see throughout his entire life that's why he always believed in the transformative power of Evangelistic communities you mentioned the pandemic he was so discouraged at the beginning of the pandemic especially about evangelism because he thought it happens in community this is how people's lives change as in community well when you go back and you look at his story that's absolutely true it's how he came to Faith and it's how he continued to grow was always in the context of that community so you know the rebellion was real but he was also doing it within a context where he was going back and forth with with Christians like his friend Bruce so Tim becomes one of the leading voices of the reformed Christianity and his generation ultimately ends up becoming Presbyterian but he had a real hodgepodge of a theological background didn't he like like what were the ingredients that it didn't necessarily lead to reformed thinking or presbyterianism No in fact that was one of the the key dynamics of that relationship with his mother because his mother's Church the one that she brought the family to was an Evangelical Congregational Church basically kind of fundamentalist leaning but also very much non or even anti-reformed so one of the reasons he went to Gordon Conwell and not Westminster in Philadelphia was because he wasn't reformed and in fact it was a clear thing from his mom and from the bishop of that denomination was don't you dare don't you dare go off and then become reformed but he ran into a very formidable uh Challenger and that was Kathy Christie that was uh Kathy Kathy Keller then later they became best friends at Gordon Conwell and she was the one who really introduced him to a lot of his formative theological thinking but it remained eclectic I mean to say the least as you would say because one of those I mean you could point to Jonathan Edwards and say a stalwart of reformed theology in American history but then you can turn over and say the other key figure is C.S Lewis who definitely does not fit that mold at all so you'd look throughout and you'd see I mean he he at his at his core he was saved within a broadly Evangelical context of innovarsity Christian Fellowship he would develop in a broadly Evangelical context of Gordon Conwell at Gordon Conwell he developed those reformed convictions became a presbyterian and then went deeper into that but I think as you can see fairly clearly in my book and others documentation of him he retained great appreciation for people that that I mean continued to learn from people that he disagreed from in fact I think if we're just thinking about some leadership applications here one of the key signal contributions of Tim Keller would be the ability to learn from people that you disagree with so we could we could cite a lot of examples here but one key one would be NT right uh you know similar generation to 10 similar age similar accomplishments on a lot of the things related to reformed theology and the Reformation they would have disagreed strongly but that never stopped Tim from strongly recommending some of his works such as his work on the resurrection um so that just that was something that was there from the very beginning in intervarsity his only uh personal Mentor ever was Ed Clowney Ed Clowney was the president of Westminster but Ed knew that he wasn't reformed that Tim wasn't reformed that's why he encouraged him to go to Gordon Conwell but then it kind of came full circle because at cloudy then did lectures at Gordon Conwell that helped to contribute to Tim becoming reform the only other name I'll just toss out there at this point at least would be RC Sproul um many people may not realize RC actually performed the wedding ceremony for Tim and Kathy and Tim was very much closely involved with a lot of people influenced by by RC Sproul and actually uh made some made some trips and visits to Ligonier Valley study center in Western Pennsylvania uh shortly after RC sport started it what was Tim's seminal moment where he went from that period of Doubt Rebellion because I think he was questioning the very foundation of the Christian faith is it true is it credible is this something I'm going to base my life on what was his Turning Point at turning point there is a 1970 um it's the end of his sophomore year and all these all these questions are coming uh coming to the fore it it's not it it's a common experience I think that a lot of us face you're in that sophomore year you're that you're that Wise Fool you've learned enough to be dangerous in some ways and that's really where he was it was that turning point of I can't really go back to what I inherited from my church of my upbringing but I'm not sure I want to go completely against it and what happened ultimately was that in his searching he was found I mean he's looking for all these things but ultimately that big team just absolutely formative for his not only his experience but then what he would teach of of God's grace finding him of him being overwhelmed so he he engages in all these intellectual Pursuits but Tim's Tim's uh teaching philosophy was always that you start out teaching and if everybody's taking notes then you're doing the right thing but by the end if anybody's taking notes you've done something wrong they need to be looking up and listening to you engaged emotionally so that's a that's a very similar to the dynamic of his conversion what in 1970 was he's doing all this intellectual investigation and he's concluding this doesn't have the answer this doesn't have the answer this doesn't have the answer this is the age of existentialism of the death of God movement but he isn't finding is Buddhism isn't working for him Islam these things are not working but in the end it's not some mere intellectual exercise it is a transformative encounter with Christ himself an acceptance of the gift of Grace and received in the context of a believing worshiping Community which was his friends for the intervarsity Christian Fellowship what happened to his loneliness as he got older I mean you're talking to lifelong friends he had a a very strong marriage all of his life with Kathy um how did he because loneliness is now basically and you know this Colin an epidemic for a lot of leaders and I can relate feeling lonely as a child I definitely had that in my own past what did Tim do about his relationships as he moved into adulthood and then maturity it's a very perceptive question because it not all church leaders are going to answer that question the same way and so with Tim specifically what you see is primarily the loneliness was was dealt with through an exceptionally strong relationship with with Kathy with his wife um so he develops this incredibly strong group of friends they they dubbed themselves The Edmund P Clowney fan club at Gordon Conwell and it's it's two women and it's two men and they they pair off and they remain lifelong friends so David Midwood the other the other man died of cancer years ago but Louise was an absolute amazing help to me on the book she gave me just unparalleled insight into those years and she even mailed me a lot of the the documentation that she'd kept from those years so they made very very very strong friendships in seminary there's a group called The the robins that they would send letters around to from the Seminary years and then then also when Tim moved on democathy moved on after Seminary to Hopewell Virginia for his first pass through it it made some really strong lifelong friends there as well especially Graham and Lori Howell who make a significant appearance in the book as well but one thing I I noticed in there is that that was very much true in seminary it was true in his first pastorate and then and Kathy was primarily the person and is primarily the person who facilitates a lot of those relationships and friendships but professionally as it went on then Tim's relationship started to become a little bit more Ministry based or professional and then when he got to New York things grew so quickly that I didn't find a lot of evidence of close friendships in New York in a lot of ways it's also you're growing up your kids become busier and then fairly soon into that he becomes a I mean well within a decade or so you've got 9 11 and then after that the books and becomes a really world-renowned figure in that process and friendship becomes a lot more complicated the thing that I'll add here in the end is that something seem to have liberated him with his diagnosis three years ago with of cancer um all of a sudden you know when you're a Ministry leader you have to maintain a lot of relationships for professional reasons he seemed to have been liberated for the first time in his life to think about his legacy and to think about investing into younger generations and so he seemed to have begotten deeper into developing some of those friendships and rekindling older friendships really when he was liberated from a lot of the pressures of ministry and when his life's end began to come into Focus but I think Tim's a good example of just how complicated friendships and and lonely and how common loneliness can become for leaders there was one person you know it was interesting that Tim spoke so highly especially of two people in New York one of them was Bruce Terrell and one of them was Dick Kaufman dick just died a little while ago they were his two main executive pastors that was only two but his two main ones so you could sense that the the real close relationships largely came from how these men had served his ministry and really had solidified some of his weaknesses and that really meant a lot and it meant a tremendous amount to him but I wouldn't say that friendship became natural I I guess one thing one final thing to mention just in terms of loneliness though I don't think Tim ever would have thought himself lonely so long as he had a book you know like that's the books are friends so if he was in was engaging that was a dynamic exercise of Friendship with with the book and with its author so well you might be able to argue that he was friends with C.S Lewis even though they never intersected right that is that's exactly what I'm trying to get at and I think even more so than well I'll say something about Lewis and then something about Tolkien The thing about Lewis is maku fujimura what the artist the renowned artist was an elder at Redeemer and he would say we always knew when Tim didn't have time to prepare a sermon because he would just quote C.S Lou like Lewis was one of his old friends and then Tolkien was that older friend because Tolkien was the only author outside of scripture where Tim said I never stopped reading him I was always reading Tolkien so talking was that constant companion of his as well wow yeah that that's uh that's very fascinating and what impressed me was some friendships were lifelong and it seemed like Tim and Kathy I mean they wrote a book on the meaning of marriage and everything like that but I think they really did find solace in each other yeah oh absolutely and it's one reason why so many of us are praying so much now uh for Kathy and and love her and think of her in in this grief because you don't and I don't mean to say that their marriage has to be paradigmatic for everybody in leadership whether inside or outside the church it's simply to observe that you and I could talk to Tim in a professional context and we'd be getting the authentic Tim but when you would see him together with Kathy or you'd call him up and you'd realize that in a New York apartment you know they're they're never far from each other but you're gonna get Kathy's comments in the background it was just a a constant dialogue um between the two of them and that is rare and it's it's kind of like Tim's recall if it's a gift that you receive then you accept it but it just doesn't always happen for everybody else even when you're very close in marriage you may not have that kind of overlap or even that kind of closeness hmm well there's a lot of different directions we can go one and I want to put a pin in Tim's last three years because I want to come back to that toward the end he said something to me that honestly I can't get out of my mind I've shared it with friends and they can't get it out of their mind just about your legacy and distraction etc etc but we'll come back to that um Tim became one of the best known I mean whenever I introduced Tim either on the show or to friends or introduce a thought you know I'll often say unlike most of us he'll be read 100 years from now and I think that's very true I mean his contribution is at that level but when he died I was reflecting on him and it struck me that Tim didn't build a platform thinking or hoping that his message would be heard he offered a compelling message and the platform built itself is that a naive understanding like I I get hit up by leaders all the time it's like how do I build a platform how do I get more followers to me from what I know on the outside looking in of Tim he didn't think that way at all is that is that fair is that a characteristic or was he more strategic about building platform then it might appear no I I think you're right about that and I'll mention here Kathy as well and it's and it's one of the reasons why writing this book had been something of an awkward exercise because Tim knew that this was something that would help other church leaders that cooperating and working on this book would help with other church leaders but talking about himself pointing to himself using himself as an example did not come naturally at all that was very awkward it's not something he enjoyed doing in fact it really relates not only personality wise but also strategy wise going back to something that Redeemer Presbyterian Church implemented from its founding in 1989 and keep in mind that Kathy was the communications director for the church and it was a no publicity um a no publicity policy essentially now there were all kinds of exceptions to this what did that mean no publicity well what it meant was they did not go into New York kind of The Stereotype you see now Carrie is that a new church arrives in town and you see these placards everywhere saying not like your grandmother's Church come you know new exciting Dynamic whatever it was really the opposite for them it was like we're gonna lay low we're not seeking publicity we're not trying to promote ourselves in fact we're trying not to promote ourselves I think there was a very keen except well I'll say two things on this and that's why they're in my introduction in the book the first part is personal what uh the first line of my book is says this the first ten thousand people Tim Keller sees when he walks out his apartment door have no idea who he is I'm not sure that's true but it's how Tim and Kathy thought of themselves uh my first book was about Billy Graham Billy Graham sought Fame so that people would hear about Jesus you're exactly right Tim never did that that was just not what he did people didn't even know that Tim would be meeting with a president of the United States because he wouldn't broadcast that information whereas Billy Graham would promote that as a way of saying see my messages has credibility all this sort of stuff so Tim personality wise and strategically just did not did not do that that was the first reason the second reason about a no publicity process or policy of like not seeking out media and not trying to send out press releases things like that was because their goal was to try to reach people who had been in New York City for a long period of time and did not know Jesus you weren't really going to get a lot of help in fact it would typically backfire on you so I I say in the book that he wanted to reach Skeptics on the upper east side of Manhattan more than he wanted to sell books in Nashville and sometimes selling books to Evangelical Christians makes it harder for you to reach people in New York city so we've seen some other churches go into New York and really it's for people who are tourists in the city or passing through a brief period of time that's not the kind of church that Tim Keller sought to build it's not the example he set with his family and so yeah I just he he was not about building a platform so that this would happen in fact one of the things that he regretted is he thought we should have separated congregations earlier to replicate the different communities instead of making it about me but the part of the problem was the Lord was working a Revival he was such a gifted teacher that it grew too quickly and it outpaced things so yeah I mean it's just he you're absolutely right he did not seek to build that platform and in some ways it might have been I felt like Tim left people wanting more and thus they did yeah that is a really good point that's a really that's very well said Colin and yet at the same time you know you mentioned New York city so in in your book you say Robin Williams Elizabeth Hasselbeck many others would frequent or visit Redeemer how did he relate to famous people yeah so the there's a great observation about this that came from David Brooks The New York Times columnist and another friend of Tim's yeah exactly so so they um they were part of a book club of some different folks in the last number of years and the way he described it was that everybody in the room would just you know the virtual room would just kind of wait and see what Tim would say and then they would finally have to ask him and then everybody just kind of hoped that he had liked what they had said I Tim kind of had an anti-charisma Charisma I don't know how to describe it but he was not he was not fascinated or impressed by famous people which is one reason why I think famous people felt comfortable with him he just wasn't the kind of person who was going to reach out to you and and try to take advantage of you at all um and so that's part of what allowed people in New York to be able to to be able to attend because it wasn't I mean I I ran into Tim and Elizabeth Hasselbeck when I visited one time and they were just in the fellowship hall just grabbing you know just eating whatever coffee and donuts or something like that it was just it was not a place where if you wanted to be seen or be impressed or even to impress others it's not the just Tim had set that tone that he wasn't really impressed which ironically made it easier for him to relate to famous people so um I don't know how you'd explain that to others but it's it's very much just his personality and what there was no photographer there to get the picks to post to social Etc yeah you know you know what that actually kind of makes his biographer a little bit upset because I was I you know for example I said okay so I'm sure you guys have photographs of the message on September 16 2001 I'm sure you have photographs of the lines extending outside the church building because that'd be really helpful to include in the book to be able to illustrate no of course they don't in fact you know when some Christian Media showed up to be able to broadcast and their service Kathy physically chased them away and told them do not come back there was just this certain sense that what they were doing was precious and physical it was these people here it wasn't just for consumption part of this is generational though as well because this is still pre-social Media Pretty smartphones and things like that it'd probably be different today but so it's personal and strategic and also just probably the time of life yeah although I think there's something very compelling to it I think sometimes we get over our skis in terms of seeking influence and maybe you get it but you don't have enough character to sustain it or enough content to sustain it and Tim was the opposite well let me give you an example of that you're exactly right on here Carrie the example here is that so I I can I don't think I've ever said this this part before um so Tim and I had feedback on on the book and one of the things that I so I had gathered everything that I could find about why he originally did not want to go to New York all the all the rationale he'd given things about his family about Kathy about how much he liked his job of why he didn't want to plant this church but then he came and he clarified something he said Colin that wasn't the reason the reason was I didn't think my prayer life could sustain the challenge I just I was not ready spiritually to be able to do it that's what I was afraid of the most and um and keep in mind this is somebody who achieved I mean I know this is going to be exaggerated because I can't think of every different scenario but I don't know how many parallels we have in Christian history for somebody's literary output over a 15-year period uh seven that was actually a little bit less than that period that we have like from Tim's and um but of course it's in part because he started at age 57. was that his first book well it was his first major release he'd earlier done work on Ministry of Mercy that was his uh demon doctor of ministry work at Westminster Seminary so that's kind of his academic expertise and then he'd also done some chapters but the first major release was not until he was 57 coming out in 2008 the reason for God as well as the Prodigal God so to your point there there was it was well he was baking for a while and the and the result was very tasty absolutely and uh and what a great uh first book I mean my goodness my goodness the reason for god um what do you think having done as much research known him for as long as you've known him what do you think is the most misunderstood aspect about Tim Keller his life his personality teaching you pick yeah so I think that people on both the political and Theological Spectrum I think they I think right and left both misunderstand him and it's kind of weird that both would misunderstand it but I think it's basically this that he at his core would be accurately described as a consistent lifelong from his conversion conservative Evangelical that again to clarify I'm speaking there about his theological convictions uh and his founding of Ministries like where I work the Gospel Coalition that was very consistent in fact he developed those convictions pretty much as a young adult and he didn't really ever deviate from them um so the reason that's confusing on both sides is because missiologically being in New York it meant that he was often emphasizing what Christians share in common with each other over what we disagree about with each other so that was a missiological decision that made him in some ways perhaps sound a little bit more ecumenical so when you love your enemies you respect their arguments Christian or non-Christian and you're focused on what Christians share in common for missiological purposes it might make people think that you lean a little bit more left than you do just because of your disposition because being right wing is a little bit more considered you know combative and things like that but then on the left there might have been a misconception to say wait a minute maybe we don't understand how formed he was by reading the Puritans or how formed he was by Elizabeth Elliott or other figures that led him into what would be often described as conservative Evangelical views so I think both sides have have misunderstood him in that way and it was a misunderstanding that that at least I I don't I don't know that that he cared about this but it was a misunderstanding that I hoped to try to help correct in the book it seems to some extent the die after his conversion was set early so you have the story from 1970 it was the Kent State shootings uh the Jesus movement had come to Bush is it Bushnell college now thank you thank you he's thinking of binoculars Bucknell college uh where Tim was attending and he decided to protest and when I read what he put on the sign he and a friend put on a sign I laughed out loud it was it was the best so his protest sign read and I'm quoting the resurrection of Jesus Christ is intellectually credible and existentially satisfying yeah I'm like okay way to go 21 year old Tim that's that's pretty amazing uh I mean do you see the die being cast that early in his thinking and his personality and his makeup and everything Gary I think it was I think it was set so quickly that I actually made a mistake in the book so the mistake that I made in the book is that I never talked about his official or formal call to Ministry oh wow it didn't even occur to me to ask about it and apparently it didn't occur to Tim to tell me about it because it was so quick that he's converted to all of a sudden he's out there at The Book Stall for intervarsity Christian Fellowship arguing with people and recommending books like that they they're just the same person that you would have imagined later on and so part of this is because his conversion like for many of us it was um it was sudden and yet it took a long time so he was reading Mere Christianity he was reading these books and then he was converted and then he's out there missionally um you know the the milieu that he was in at Bucknell you mentioned the intellectually credible well that was what we talked about earlier his Pursuit eventually as a religion major the other religions does the the message does the gospel of Christianity does the resurrection does it hold up to intellectual historical scrutiny so that's the one thing but then when we're talking about being existentially satisfying I mean it's because it's a combination of things one it's because it was a matter of identity and personality for him and becoming a Christian but also this is the era of Albert Camus of sartra of existentialism so this was the intellectual movement that he was learning in his classes that he was arguing over with his classmates and in fact the message that Ed Clowney came to deliver as an Outreach was about existentialism it was related to his work on Kierkegaard when he was a grad student at Yale so he came in to address this question so for those of us who are not in that boomer generation who lived through all of that we might have forgotten that but absolutely like that was considered the avant-garde challenge to Christianity so what's consistent for Tim is like other figures like Edwards or Calvin or bavink that he looked up to he was very much engaged from the beginning in The Cutting Edge theological and and intellectual and philosophical challenges to Christianity oh absolutely well I can see him that was 1970 and it's so funny among all the long-haired hippies and the whole deal I can imagine Tim you know with that sign but I could also hear a sermon of his in 2021 being along those lines you know and it's just incredible you mentioned before we leave young Tim entirely Tim had some childhood wounds any others that we haven't touched on yet and how they shaped him well I think one of the other childhood wounds would would just come out later into adulthood and that was just really his relationship with his younger brother um this was was something I mean they were he was a fair bit younger and I don't get a strong sense that they spent a lot of time together but one of the key differences between Tim and his younger brother Billy is that Billy was more like his mother personality wise in fact it was their sister who gave me the key Insight she said you know when you visited my brother Billy's place you knew where every single thing was because it was exactly where my mother had it wow you know so you so you could tell so there was that kind of thing and the other thing was that Tim wasn't at the same church with his family for very long because they'd flip from the Lutheran Church over political and Theological reasons to this other Church Tim wasn't there that long it was kind of a decision walked the aisle kind of place is he younger brother was the kind some of you may you know when you're listening here you may know the personality Tim's younger brother was the kind of kid who walked the aisle every week like he knew he wanted to do the right thing and so he did that every time but his younger brother then ran far away and it lived a homosexual lifestyle eventually contracted AIDS and then died of it and I died of complications related to AIDS in 1998 Tim then preached that he became a Christian shortly before he died I think my book is probably the first time or only time that we have documentation of the sermon that Tim had preached at that funeral so in some ways that was a bit of a kind of a Reconciliation of that um of just that that relationship and and with their mother and with their family of kind of well also say the other thing in there is that um Contracting AIDS and everything like that was of course just a big deal in the 1980s and 1990s and it was a major Challenge and kind of a point of Shame between him and his family um but in his death there was actually a lot of reconciliation with his parents they came and ministered to him in hospice which lasted a number of months um so yeah I mean I just Tim the reason I'm bringing all this up is because Tim really didn't talk about that very much and he was always a challenge of what do I talk about here when people might think that I'm exploiting my brother's memory to be able to make a theological point right so he was really loathed to be able to talk about that um but I thought it was really important because it's no doubt a major backdrop of his moral and intellectual and spiritual formation across his entire lifetime when you look at his whole life were there particular patterns disciplines habits or rhythms that you think really contributed to what he was able to accomplish with his life well you know boy that's like the only thing I can say is that man read like nobody I've ever yeah like you get the impression because he's quoting by memory from these obscure philosophers I mean I've spent you know and historians and seemed to know about everything like did he just wake up and read and then read some more and yeah yes and yes and yes so I think you know he's he's very much a he was very much a creature of his time in his place here's what I mean being in New York the center of publishing in the United States was so perfect for him because at one point in the Heyday of newspapers and magazines he's subscribing to all of them so he's getting first things and he's getting Christian today and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times And The Village Voice and New Yorker and New York Magazine he's getting all of them and he's reading them just devouring them and then it's like the internet is made for him one of the comments that people would often make is yeah I was a 25 year old blogger in 19 or in 2006 and all of a sudden I got an email from Tim Keller or I got a comment on my blog from Tim Keller that I mean so things like um you know most leaders I know of Tim's caliber um have left Twitter behind a long time ago major reason is that you're a big inviting Target it's it's a very hostile atmosphere for most prominent leaders Tim could not stay away because he loved learning what he could learn on Twitter the way it would aggregate so many different things he just loved reading that sort of stuff so so Tim seemed to have a much stronger idea than anybody else I know of his generation of what was happening on the internet because he was reading it so so I mean the the thing is that they're only the only practices that I would recommend from this or maybe comment would be he didn't watch a lot of TV yeah yeah and and this is not necessarily what I would recommend but he doesn't really have hobbies you know so what's interesting I didn't have these major parts of the book about I mean when he was younger he played video games when he was younger also he played trumpet but those weren't things that he was still doing when he was older so really reading was his hobby it was not only his ministry and his practice but it was it was also basically his Hobby yeah any any insights into how he cared for himself in terms of sleep exercise diet etc etc that's a good question I I don't I don't think it came up very often um the one thing that I can keep in mind or the one thing that comes to mind is that especially for his health and just general practice um several of his close friends would tell me Tim would forget to drink water if not for Kathy and I'd say that's a really interesting metaphor and they said no I I didn't mean that as a metaphor I meant literally he would not drink water unless Kathy would give it to him and so the major discipline there was that Kathy very much devoted herself in many ways to caring for him in ways that he would simply lose you know so for example he would want to you know with you or with me or anybody else he'd want to just be on the podcast forever and then all of a sudden you'd be like well Kathy's telling me that I need to get on to this like she's the one who's really trying to help him with that and so again I'm not necessarily recommending this to other people it's just to say that um he just simply would not have been able to accomplish half of what he did without a lot of really direct support uh from his from his wife who was very much dedicated to helping in those ways on multiple levels the most practical levels relational levels as well as intellectual levels that's kind of what I mean you just don't find a pairing like that that often or all of those things seem to match up so I do get this instant in some ways Tim probably didn't take care of himself as well as he could have sure um but there he did have a wife who was uh trying to help him as she could oh that that's uh yeah that's helpful to see it's not surprising to me the one thing that really surprised me when I met him in person I had him sort of pegged at five nine five ten oh yeah yeah not at all he's he was what six three six four six four yeah six four um and and not large in the terms of of you know overweight or anything like that but just a big big frame man Big Frame that's the word thank you big frame and a large imposing presence very very unassuming personality like very self-effacing down to earth relaxed and yet I could see you talk about it in the biography that when he made an argument boy you listen and he was like fully engaged like bodily engaged mentally engaged emotionally engaged and that is that's a tour to force like when you sit down with Tim Keller I was hanging on for dear life for those hour and a half two hours it's like I'm listening to every word making mental notes because it's it's like a bullet train trying to keep up with him yeah you don't normally find people who are good at listening as well as teaching um and so one of the things that stood out to me I thought let's see how do you develop his contextualization method of how to teach to New Yorkers and I thought I'd get long lists of books just knowing knowing Tim and there were a couple books that I mentioned in there that he read really just sitting down and talking to people and that's again what I'm getting at in that in that context so you're sitting there with some of the most prominent public Evangelical intellectuals you're in a book club with them but he has the discipline to be able to sit there and listen to the others to the point where they have to draw him out to what to say even though they all knew that he was the smartest person in the room and would have the most insightful comments but I mean I never talked with Tim about this so I can't say it for sure but given his innate curiosity his humility his respect for others his just absolute love of learning if you're talking you're not necessarily learning yeah yeah you know and I and so he would have wanted to learn was there something else here that I can develop even if I might have the most insightful comments in there um but yeah you don't normally see those that combination in the same person so I want to go back to something he told me in our last interview together which I think it came out in 2023 but I believe we did it in December of 2022 so it's it's five months before he died and he was in very good you know relatively speaking for someone's with terminal cancer very good mental space lots of energy Etc and this is a long quote but I want to I want to quote it and then I want your comment on it he said I would say that as a man who was 69 years old I was actually pretty unfocused because the reality is it doesn't matter whether you have cancer or not when you're approaching 70 you should actually know that the time is short you don't really have decades anymore you've got Years anyway and so I should have been more focused but I was tending and this is the part that shocked me I was tending to do whatever anybody asked me to do you're a nice person you're a minister so you do whatever anybody asked you to do and I had no Focus I really didn't I wasn't saying what do I really if I finally had one year left two three four five what should I be doing I don't ha I didn't have that Focus now I do end of quote and I when I heard that from Tim I just about fell over because I'm like if Tim's unfocused I don't know if there's hope for the rest of us how do you hear that comment about his focus and I think he was being very sincere he's just like I spent the last decade responding to a ton of inbound when I probably should have been doing what God wanted me to do yeah there's there's a lot of good ways for us to answer that that question um one of them is that it's it's it's an exaggeration I'm sure because he did say no to a number of different things before just by sheer capacity and he did hire an assistant who his job was to help him say no to certain things so he wasn't just doing anything randomly but on top of that he really liked he didn't not like to disappoint people he did not like to disappoint people and he did not like people being upset and he did not like conflict so that probably meant that he said yes to some more things than he probably should have the overall issue here though is that he could just get away with it more than other people could you know like earlier I mentioned the the question about the sermon collection okay so somebody that's I would recommend everybody if you're the kind of person who's teaching regularly you need to have some kind of system Tim could just get away with it he could be so productive while being unfocused because he had exceptional ability to do those things so he probably just didn't recognize the need to be disciplined in some of those same ways but here's the other challenge he was so successful as an entrepreneur launching Redeemer Presbyterian Church launching Redeemer City to City to start new churches around the world launching the gospel coalition that these organizations would have significant demands on him they would say we need your help with fundraising red Presbyterian Church would be building these you know some of the first church new church buildings in Manhattan in decades any attempts help the fundraise you know same thing with City to City The Gospel Coalition needs him to speak at an event or something like that or attend a board meeting or whatever that's the kind of thing where he was saying yes but he was saying yes to institutions that he had helped to build those institutions were so successful that they needed him to continue to do that and so maybe in some ways what he should have done is he should have been more deliberately mentoring young leaders maybe he also should have been focused on ensuring that he would be able to write everything that he wanted to write and that he wouldn't assume that he had that time because of course he retired at age 67 didn't get the cancer diagnosis until a couple years later so he didn't necessarily know when he was retiring that he's he would only have 72 years probably realistically thought I've got a good decade there to be able to do that so that's that's kind of the leadership lesson in application and warning for all of us is that we're of course not even guaranteed 72 years we're not guaranteed tomorrow and what Jesus said so what I take away from that comment from Tim is that we should try to be deliberate and focused on those things that we can do and not merely simply responding to other people's expectations of us um and I do think that's that's probably what he kind of the bottom line of what he was getting at with that quote did he have unfinished tasks yeah unfortunately um he did um there was a book on I so he on the spot in Oxford uh he was doing a mission there an Evangelistic Mission and on the spot somebody was asking him a question about Biblical teaching on sexuality and he developed doesn't encourage people to check out my book or check out his book on preaching you can see his illustration of the Anglo-Saxon Warrior but the point is he was trying to illustrate that none of us forms our identity individually even though we have that conceit in the west instead we form it communally and he just came up with it on the spot and it's very effective he believed that one of the core idols and misunderstandings of our age is related to the concept of identity and so he wanted to write something to be able to treat that concept but what was what's interesting is that his uh his longtime publisher just didn't really think it would sell necessarily so that's one reason why it didn't hit the Forefront there so um you know I'm not sure Tim has so many things that were unpublished or published as essays that could become books and I know that his um a long time assistant Craig Ellis is is working on some of those projects now which is wonderful so some of them will still see the light of day I know that some of what he left unfinished he wanted us to do at the at the Keller Center for cultural apologetics which he and I launched together this year so hopefully we'll be able to do some of those things but that was one of the first things that came to mind was boy I don't think we're ever going to see his book on identity and that's oh that's sad to me so that first interview I did with him uh which I think is pushing half a million views and or downloads is crazy yeah uh that's the one we did in person in New York between audio and video but he talked about those ideas like if I was starting over again in New York I would actually base my preaching on identity and went through sort of three and I'm I have gotten more feedback to that one idea so whoever's listening if you could Plum the archives for any identity stuff Tim may have left behind that would be wonderful to see more on and you were you were talking to him the same time that I actually saw him the last time in person wow um all the interviews that we did were over phone and zoom and things like that which actually helped because I could record them and things like that but um at the he was very much in that mindset in 2019 going into 2020 so this is the last period of time before the pandemic and before he knows he has cancer right he's thinking big picture he's thinking about his granddaughter he's working on a a new kind of catechism that'll address common questions emerging in the 21st century and he's telling you and he's telling me Iris I don't think people can go back and just grab my stuff and do that anymore I think something's changed and so what what he had talked with us about at the Keller Center for cultural apologetics is that idolatry was that breakthrough concept that he worked to develop in the 80s and 90s that really spoke to people but yes now we're dealing more with with questions related to Identity and what is and one reason I've emphasized this throughout this conversation is that when you go back to who he was in college his conversion it was very much a question for him about identity oh my goodness so that's that's how it all kind of ties together for him um but yeah the more that I've read in terms of apologetics and generations that's going to be a major concept that we need to continue to try to treat with the biblical wisdom Colin I feel like we talked for five hours this is this has been so so helpful I want to shift to Tim's Legacy or or let me phrase it this way finishing well so we live in an age where you know anybody who seems to get a platform seems to have skeletons in the closet and you know they get completely disgraced I don't want to name names and unfortunately everybody's got three or four in their mind even as I ask this question Tim does not appear to be one of those people I mean he had his struggle so what were some of his struggles his weak points and then why do you think in the end if he finished well and I have no reason to believe he didn't what contributed to him finishing well and being offstage what he said he was on stage I mean I'll just answer that last question first and it it might sound cliche to people but it's a genuine humility it's a genuine humility before Jesus Christ it's a genuine recognition of the except you know that that Grace is a gift and it's a and it's a strong Sensibility increasingly toward the end of his life that life is about intimacy with God and we're constantly seeking that spiritual renewal in both an intellectual sense and also an existential sense like that that is what he continued to come back to is that humility um and that's easy for people to say but one of the things that stood out to me very early on is that the people who tended to idolize Tim were people who are further away from him as opposed to closer to him that is not an obvious thing often you surround yourself physically with a group of sycophants people who just tell you what you want to hear that was the opposite for Tim kind of the people who are far away they tended to have that lofty view of him whereas the people close to him tended to have a realistic view of him so I'll give you an example here uh Catherine alsdorf is a long time colleague of of Tim's they worked on every good Endeavor together she summarized The Experience really well um I was talking with her in a number of early Redeemer Presbyterian church members and I'd be I'd be scribbling down notes as they talk about all these amazing things about Tim and she'd see me with my head down and then she'd say come on but don't you dare make him out to be a saint don't you dare he made some of us so angry he had real problems he was driven to his knees in prayer because of the problems that he had and really it was related to management it just wasn't one of his strengths and so Tim would often talk and may have talked with you about it as well about how he didn't think he was a very good leader and ice cream was strenuously objected he was a very good leader but he was not a good manager and I just chalked that up to um there are very few leaders in any Walk of Life including the church who are good at everything there are very few who are good at most things even the greatest church leaders that you know were good at some things and not at other things and I think we don't tend to understand that and thus some of them don't understand it either and they think that they have Omni competence Tim did not have the illusion of omni competence in part because he was surrounded by some really opinionated you know driven people in New York and they didn't hesitate to point out when they were having real problems on staff and so there were two different crises of leadership at Redeemer Presbyterian Church one in the 90s when they were growing so quickly from their start and the other after September 11th when they were just overwhelmed with trauma and grief and money that was pouring in and Tim got thyroid cancer Kathy had Crohn's disease it was really hard both times were major challenges and so um that was just one of those one of those weaknesses but it's interesting that you know Carrie in this book it's in there in part because Tim wanted people to know that and that's what makes it more helpful to us as Leaders as opposed to some books where you'll you'll learn about some figure and you never see anything that he or she did wrong or struggled with those they kind of actually fill us with some shame like what's wrong with me I'm not perfect like there should only be one book only one book we ever think about that with and that should be the Bible I didn't think about that all of our heroes have Clay feet and in Tim's case he simply just wasn't a very good manager and sometimes wanting people to like you and not letting conflict makes you a very incapable manager and it frustrates the people that you work with because it leaves things unresolved so but it but it all comes from that place of humility to say yeah I didn't have everything figured out I needed good people around me to help me I got the sense too that he really I don't want to say struggled but had the success came so quickly and so beyond what he expected you know I don't know I think we all have hopes for our church but I remember uh and I think this was recorded too in that first interview but he talked about is it better to have a church a 5 000 or 10 churches of 500 and you could see him going back and forth and in the end he said you know I think there's a very significant argument for 10 churches of 500 but then we were able to do so much more as a church of 5 000 because we had the resources we had the scale and he's he's he's he's kind of like model agnostic it's like this is what God did I guess he did it and you know we'll see what the future holds and that was very refreshing to me was there anything else that he wanted us to know about his clay feet what's interesting I mean I'll I'll just go back to that um I just want to go back to that comment you made right there about the differences between a small church and a big church um personality wise with his wasn't a business oriented thinker I mean it's very much a theologian a philosopher an apologist just couldn't think in those management terms but you know the and he would have thought community-based smaller churches would be more effective at evangelism but of course the challenge was where do you meet where do you have space and so part of what Redeemer was able to do was build one and now in process two major Church buildings that will last Lord willing until Jesus comes back or for Generations which is a signal contribution not because I mean it does help to have a place to meet I mean you can do all kinds of things that way and church was allowed to do that so yeah I mean I think he just um he wanted people to know why he did things the way he did them but he wanted them to be inspired to in faithfulness to Christ in obedience to God's word and the leading of the spirit to find their own way you know he he wrote this textbook on Church Ministries Center Church where the entire premise of it is here's how I think about things in terms of theological vision but you're going to have to work it out in your context so he just didn't think that his way I mean how many people carry and just and this is um I guess you asked the question what does he want to say about it is Clay feet he spent much of the last years of his life through Redeemer City to City writing things about their movement church planning movement around the world and getting critical feedback from Young global multi-ethnic leaders how many people at the Pinnacle of their leadership influence are sitting down and listening and asking for young people to tell them why they're wrong that's not a common thing for leaders when you can just go around the world and pontificate I mean he could have gone anywhere and just told people whatever and they would have clapped for him but instead he sits there and says you tell me what you think because I'm learning from you because you're a different generation a different place a different gender hey that is that's significant so part of the clay feed was simply he was willing for people to sit there and say Yeah Tim I don't think that's gonna work anymore maybe that works in New York not gonna work anymore and say oh okay all right well good to know that's rare are there any other factors characteristics qualities that you think helped him live a life that that was you know I would say had Integrity Integrity as it didn't fall apart right so he had clay feet he had some mistakes he wasn't a great um you know manager I get that um but he had a successful marriage yeah he there wasn't a double life right any other factors that really contributed to that well I do think the the wife factor is so significant there because having somebody who is not impressed with you and and in the sense of not being awed by you and kind of doesn't let you get away with that I also think that being in New York was really significant for him because it did allow him to not see himself as a big deal um because it's a City full of people who are a big deal it's also a place of people who think that they're a big deal so it was an interesting contrast in many ways he would have been more famous I mean of course he tossed out a Dallas or an Atlanta or something like that of course he would have been more famous his church would have been bigger and all that sort of stuff but even London even London it would have been a different situation for him compared to New York so simply the discipline of respecting your context to understand it's actually good to be in New York because it's not the kind of place that allows me to be very impressed with myself because it's a hard it's a hard City people are I mean it's expensive it's just it's I mean we might think of it as being exotic and that's the precisely the place that you would go if you had a big ego it's really not like that at all it's kind of a place that crushes as many dreams as it because she's way more dreams than it ever creates and so I think and I'll say one last thing here from Kathy and she and I loved her saying this she said if you want to know how to plant a successful mega church let me tell you what it is okay here it is she says do this figure out where God is going to send a Revival and just move there a month earlier just a way of saying they were so deliberate about what they did and yet without the spirit didn't matter the analogy Tim always used with all kinds of things was we collect the wood and we put it in a pile and we pray that the Lord would bring fire so he was just a wood collector in that sense going to New York's like we're just we're just collecting the wood if the spirit doesn't work it doesn't matter and so that's and the Lord Works through the means of our faithful persistent prayers so she would she I mean Kathy I just I love this about her she would say I wrote the most pathetic whiniest terrible prayer letters in the history of church planting and those women prayed for me and that is why our church grew and then she would say yeah don't listen to my parenting advice we are the self-described worst parents of all time which is not true but what was true is the sense that we don't control life but we have faith in God who does so you could do all the parenting things right and it doesn't turn out very well for your kids you can do them badly and Tim and Kathy would say they didn't really have great parental instincts or characteristics but their kids turned out pretty well it was a humility there and a humidity before God to say God you're the one who ultimately makes these things work or not ugh this has been so inspiring Colin thank you for doing the hard work of writing uh biography and drilling down on so many sources written and friendships and the whole deal I am very honored to have met Tim on three different occasions and uh really if we started the podcast and I never had he was always on my I don't think I'll ever get Tim Keller but to be able to do it three times in the last three years has been incredible and I just want to thank you so much for giving us insight and some real world Insight like the clay feet hey man my feet are clay all of our feet are clay and uh I think a lot of people listening to this want to finish well and you gave us uh some really good insight into maybe some of the ingredients on how that might happen so thank you Colin thank you Carrie it's been a joy so the book is called Timothy Keller it's available everywhere you get books and and call in where can people find you online these days if I met the gospelcoalition.org OR at on Twitter just Colin hanson2ls h-a-n-s-e-n great thank you