Some in Christendom resented Keller’s stumbled-upon celebrity. Others hailed him as the C.S. Lewis for a new generation. As for Keller, he stayed focused—there was a gospel to preach, cities to reach, souls to save. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer in June, 2020, he scarcely slowed, continuing to work, write, lead, and think—even amidst the chemo, right to the very end.

Long before he planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, taking New York City by storm; before City to City galvanized an international urban church planting movement, starting nearly 978 churches and training thousands of Christian leaders; before his endlessly churning mind birthed some two dozen books, many of which are already hailed as Christian classics; Tim Keller was just a kid in Pennsylvania, growing up and grappling with God and reason and himself with all the strength his head and heart could muster.
Born in Allentown in 1950, Keller became a Christian through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship while a sophomore at Bucknell University. He was bookish, even then, nose down in the works of John Stott, F.F. Bruce, A.W. Tozer, and C.S Lewis (to whom he would later be compared). He inhaled words like air (the better written and more sharply reasoned the better), swam in seas of ideas, and wrestled with both the intellectual plausibility and the emotional heart of the Christian faith. By the time he graduated, his path was set: Tim Keller would be a minister of the gospel.
He attended seminary at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary right after college, earning his M.Div in 1975. There, he met his beloved wife, Kathy, and plunged even deeper into the questions of the faith, engaging with Reformed doctrine and learning in the era of Meredith Cline, David Wells, Jack Davis, and J. Christy Wilson Jr.
“1970s Gordon-Conwell [was] a distinct theological phenomenon, and if you don’t understand that then you really don’t understand Tim Keller,” said Reformed Theological Seminary Chancellor Ligon Duncan. “Gordon-Conwell had a ton of confessional Calvinists there in the mid ‘70s, [and] Tim exudes the kind of intelligent, apologetic, reformed evangelical Christianity that was being fostered.”
M.Div in hand, the 24-year-old Keller signed on to pastor West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Virginia. He served that congregation for the next nine years, slinging sermons like hotcakes (three per week, more often than not), pastoring congregants, and serving his local community. Along the way, Keller found time to earn his D.Min from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1981, and serve as director of church planting for the PCA’s mid-Atlantic region.
In the 1980s, Tim and Kathy Keller moved to Philadelphia, where the couple did urban ministry together. There, Keller taught leadership and communication at Westminster, served as Director of Mercy Ministries for the PCA, and authored his first two books—both related to mercy ministry. By 1989, the Kellers had moved yet again, this time to New York City to plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The Big Apple was more dangerous back then, a gritty mission field beset by crime, money, and skeptics. And though most of the other boroughs were chalk-full of churches planted by Christian immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, Manhattan was overwhelmingly dominated by secularism, with less than 1% of the population identifying as evangelical Christians.
Redeemer started small—with only around 50 members at first. But under Keller’s leadership, the little church began to grow. By the dawn of the new millennium, nearly 3,000 people attended Redeemer’s Sunday service. After the September 11 terror attacks, some 5,400 reeling Manhattanites poured through the church’s doors, searching for meaning, comfort, and hope. Trauma and tragedy fueled a growth spurt, and numbers of new converts soared.
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Professors everywhere noticed the surge in urgent requests for mercy, for extensions, commonly presented days after an assignment was due or graded. For several seasons, faculty showed great patience and compassion. At length we realized that the virtue of compassion had become the vice of indulgence. Instead of showing patience, we were enabling irresponsibility. Further, when a student claims he can’t turn in a paper due to anxiety, we feel compassion, but we also know that we don’t relieve anxiety by permitting late work, we increase it, as the burden of unfinished tasks lingers and lingers.

Last January, a new professor wrote with a little conundrum. A student scored a 27% on his final, realized that he might fail the course as a result, and called the professor three weeks later to plead for mercy – a second chance – so he could pass the course. The student explained that he had been sick, his dog had been sick, his aunt had been sick, and he thought it would be enough to write a good term paper, so he didn’t really study for the final.[1] Would the professor let him study more thoroughly for the exam, take it again, and let that result stand? What, the compassionate new professor asked, should I do?
Give him the F he earned, I replied.
I wasn’t quite that blunt. I commended his compassion. I told him it’s his call, since he is the professor of record. But still, if the student earned an F, let his grade show it. There are practical reasons for this, but the theological basis is simple. God is both compassionate and just. He is merciful, but he does not leave the guilty unpunished (Ex. 34:6-7). For the Christian parent and leader, discipline is essential. We love people too much to let them think that irresponsibility is “no problem,” that every error will be forgiven and the consequences erased.
Actually, consequences rarely disappear; they simply shift to other people. In this case, student irresponsibility transfers to the professor. The second chance requires the professor to write a new test, arrange for the student to take it, then grade it, and take the necessary steps to change his final grade. The professor will be fortunate indeed if the process is completed within three hours and with fewer than ten emails.
But there are other considerations. The consequences of Covid and online education continue to rattle through the academic ecosystem. The greatest issue is the shift to an asynchronous education.
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Like the Methodist missionaries two centuries ago who risked their reputations to re-awaken America from its slumbers, many Christians today may need to relearn what it truly means to be convinced of our convictions. You must learn to speak them out, knowing that the world—and even a good deal of Methodists—may never forgive you for it. Christianity will land you in some kind of trouble one way or another. They’ll find out what you believe in the end.

The Tale of a Tweet
On March 8, 2023, I was fired from my job as a lecturer and programme lead at an evangelical Methodist Bible college. I had worked in this role for seven years and had never faced any formal disciplinary action previously. I was dismissed on the charge of “bringing the college into disrepute” due to a tweet I posted on February 19, 2023.
Here is what I said that was deemed so disreputable to so many:
Homosexuality is invading the Church. Evangelicals no longer see the severity of this because they’re busy apologising for their apparently barbaric homophobia, whether or not it’s true. This is a ‘Gospel issue’, by the way. If sin is no longer sin, we no longer need a Saviour.
The tweet went viral. I was routinely Twitter-mobbed before being publicly denounced by the college on Twitter, who called my tweet “unacceptable” and “inappropriate.” They also posted the following remarkable sentence:
Cliff College is committed to being a safe and hospitable place where those with differing convictions are welcomed and encouraged to live and learn together as faithful disciples of Christ.
The following day, after I had said I could not take down the tweet in good conscience, I was suspended, instructed to leave the college site within half an hour, and banned from all contact with fellow staff or students. Following a disciplinary hearing two weeks later, I was dismissed for misconduct.
The Investigation Report compiled about that single tweet was 17 pages long. It itemized a selection of the many public and private complaints made against me, and the many institutional and reputational risks incurred by the college as a result. Most of the complainants characterized the tweet (incorrectly) as homophobic, whilst some pro-LGBT+ students declared they would now feel “unsafe” in any classroom where I was teaching. The report further noted that the college was reviewing whether the tweet should be reported under the college’s “Prevent” duty (the UK government’s anti-terrorism and hate speech programme).
Cultural Pressure and Ecclesial Compromise
The wider context of my tweet was the recent Church of England decision to offer official blessings for same-sex couples. Even whilst refraining from fully accepting same-sex marriage (for now), the event was disturbing enough to cause ten global Anglican dioceses to publicly break communion with the Church of England. In the weeks prior to my tweet, I had been debating various pro-LGBT+ ministers and theologians on social media, each of whom were speaking as though the affirmation of homosexuality within the Church was inevitable and that sooner or later the Church simply had to “catch up.” Even prominent evangelical bishops like Steven Croft began declaring how sorry he was for all the harm and distress the Church’s position had caused the LGBT+ community, leading him to make a dramatic public u-turn to affirm same-sex marriage. Croft, like many, believed that now was the time to take the brave stand of solidarity with the powerless: by siding with the majority within secular Western society who were already standing precisely there and had been for some time.
It almost goes without saying that the shifting of the Overton Window on homosexuality in the west has been one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the last thirty years. As shown by the tactics employed in Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, this was a concerted campaign to present the for/against narrative at its most extreme in order to enact a dramatic shift in public opinion towards the progressive view. As a result of these determined efforts, the LGBT+ movement today has effectively gained not mere cult status but major religious status.
What I found especially reprehensible about the Anglican situation was that these many pro-LGBT+ vicars, bishops, and theologians refused to admit that their theological position on marriage was determinatively influenced by those shifting cultural currents. They were adamant that their view was simply the fruit of diligent Biblical exegesis and prayer. Apparently, it had nothing at all to do with the pressures exerted upon the Church by secular society, nor any burning desire to keep in step with public opinion on LGBT+. Apparently, God’s sheer delight in homosexuality was in the Bible all along, just sitting there in the text, waiting to be exegeted.
Such disingenuity in defense of the recent shifts is precisely why I used the language of “invasion” (the term which seemed to cause most of the trouble, especially for “winsome” evangelicals). If the affirmation of homosexuality did not come from Biblical exegesis then it came from the world, and if it came from the world then it did not come in peace.
The Apology Complex
My tweet, in essence, was not actually aimed at homosexuals, nor even at pro-LGBT+ Christians. It was aimed towards the safe centrist evangelicals who are not pro-LGBT+ but do not speak up because they find themselves stuck in the endless spiral of apologizing for their beliefs rather than proclaiming them. I had already observed far too often how evangelical leaders could no longer simply declare their non-affirming view on homosexuality without marinating it with lashings of heartfelt woe over just how much hurt the LGBT+ community has suffered at the hands of churches just like theirs.
I am not saying there is never a reason to repent of sinful discrimination against homosexuals, if warranted. But many of the mainstream apologies were exhibitions of reputational safeguarding, stemming more from fear of the world than fear of the Lord. And in any case, just how far back in one’s ecclesial history are these apologies supposed to stretch? If even the nice conscientious evangelicals are guilty of systemic homophobia, then who isn’t? What would be the systemic pastoral and theological implications of that? Surely if we now think that most Christian churches have been actively suppressing homosexual people for most of their history, this would have to be one of the greatest oversights of sin in church history, would it not? Given the lack of any historic precedent for explicit homosexual affirmation in the history of Christendom before the (post)modern west, one does wonder: why did God permit all his people to get it wrong for quite so long? Either God’s people really have no ears to hear after all, or else God has a very serious communication problem.
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