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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The subject of father-absence remains taboo among many black activists, even though the rate of father-absence among blacks is horrifying. For these activists, any attempt to discuss black cultural failures is a kind of victim-blaming and a distraction from what really ails the black community—the persistence of white supremacy.When my mother called me in from play one afternoon to meet the man seated in our living room, her introduction was redundant—I immediately knew who he was. And, right off, I did not like him. His absence had been a painful matter in my life. The house that we lived in explained some of it. It was unfit for human tenancy—a decaying hovel with a leaking roof, creaking structures, and a termite infestation. I was ashamed to let anyone other than my closest friends know where I lived.
I was 12 that year of 1956. This was the Jim Crow South where poverty was the default condition of the black masses. Black males were restricted to the lowly crafts of ditch digger, janitor, and farmer, unless they catered directly to the black community, in which case the jobs of preacher, teacher, and shop-owner were also open. Most worked the hardscrabble categories so there was poverty all around, and since my mother was the only breadwinner, our poverty was wretched.
But this is not a story of black victimhood. This is, instead, an essay about a flaw in black culture that is just as uncomfortable for me to speak about as it is for my black brothers and sisters to hear. But a problem must be acknowledged before it can be fixed. And the failure of black fathers is among the worst problems afflicting our community.
My mother was a maid. Since her $25-a-week salary did not go very far, I was a skinny kid with a constant cold, owing to a poor diet and a house that grew Arctic in the winter months. There was a wood stove in the living room and another in the kitchen but their heat did not radiate beyond those rooms. We only ever used the kitchen stove for cooking in order to save fuel. To keep warm during winter, we slept under five blankets. If a glass of water was left out overnight, it had iced over by morning. There was no hot running water.
The poverty programs back then were designed to ensure survival. They were not like those today which help a person through life. Even if programs like those had been available, my mother’s stubborn pride would not have allowed her to use them. I am not criticizing the safety net of our current welfare system. I am a liberal. But my mother’s code of honor was simply part of who she was—a tough lady.
Most devastating for me was the psychological impact of my father’s absence. The most miserable moments of my childhood were when other kids asked me where my father was. In the days before we understood conception, I could just tell them that I just didn’t have one. But after we all learned a bit of biology, the question became so upsetting that on a few occasions I had to walk away from play activities.
I didn’t know what to tell them because my mother refused to speak of this man, even when I asked. He was a forbidden topic in her house, and so I learned to keep my mouth shut. I found out later from an uncle that my father regularly beat my mother which is why she divorced him when I was born. This shows her grit and gumption, for in those days, women could scarcely fend for themselves economically, and so battered wives were condemned to suffer as punching bags. But not my mother.
Growing up without a dad made me feel as though I lacked the full humanity and manhood of my cousins, friends, and classmates. From what I can recall, every other black home seemed to have a father. Southern blacks were already second-class citizens and I felt even lower than those around me. And since I did not have the self-confidence and self-esteem of my male peers, I sought adventures later in life to compensate. In the Army, I volunteered for paratroop units, fought in Vietnam, and was disciplined for insubordination four times. I boxed as an amateur. I drove at 120 miles an hour on the German Autobahn. I ran marathons. I worked as a demolitions specialist and as a long-haul truck driver. And I would hang out with some of the most ferocious males I could find.
Does the criminal behavior of some young black males today owe something to a sense of lost masculinity? I feel sure that this is so. A friend who works as an Army recruiter told me that so many black males have criminal records, the military is no longer the instrument for building machismo that it was when I joined. So, in inner-city communities where viciousness defines manhood, darker paths have become the option.
In 1965, a controversial report entitled “The Negro Family: A Case of National Action” was published by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist working at the Labor Department. Moynihan concluded that a lot of the social problems affecting American blacks owed to the disintegration of the black family. “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society,” he wrote, “is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.” He went on:
As a direct result of this high rate of divorce, separation, and desertion, a very large percent of Negro families are headed by females. While the percentage of such families among whites has been dropping since 1940, it has been rising among Negroes.
The percent of nonwhite families headed by a female is more than double the percent for whites. Fatherless nonwhite families increased by a sixth between 1950 and 1960, but held constant for white families.
It has been estimated that only a minority of Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents.
Once again, this measure of family disorganization is found to be diminishing among white families and increasing among Negro families.
These figures were troubling, but they only offered a hint of what was to come. By the time the “Moynihan Report, Revisited” was published in 2013, 73 percent of black children were born to unmarried mothers. The figure for non-Hispanic white children was 29 percent:

I was stunned. A few months ago, I mentioned this to a black activist who was working on the problem of black violence in a nearby town. He had been trying to figure out why violence seemed to be endemic among their young black males and had reached a dead end. When I suggested that father-absence was not properly socializing black youth and asked him if he had read the Moynihan Report, he told me that the report was written by racist right-wingers determined to condemn blacks for their own misfortunes. I didn’t bring it up with him again. For now, the town’s solution is recreation centers.
It was not the first time I had heard the report dismissed in this way. It was basically the attitude of the black community upon the report’s publication. The backlash from the community was so militant and damning—reviling its author in the process—that the Johnson Administration dropped the issue and turned its attention to the Vietnam War. This reaction was not entirely surprising, given the demonization of blacks by many whites since first contact in the 1400s. Denigration used to justify outrageous and dehumanizing treatment produced a hypersensitivity among blacks that reflexively prevents us from accepting criticism from outsiders. Criticism from insiders has become something like heresy.
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It is God’s pleasure to use us in his service just as he used Peter. And while he does shape and sanctify us, he does not destroy us along the way. The one who gives boldness to the timid gives patience to the impulsive. The one who gives courage to the person prone to inactivity gives caution to the person prone to spontaneity. He uses who we are to carry out his purposes and bring blessing to the world.

There is a kind of personality we are all familiar with, I’m sure—a kind of personality that is impetuous and impulsive, prone to act in ways that are spontaneous and ill-thought-out. It’s the personality of Simon Peter whom we know so well from the pages of Scripture—the one of the twelve disciples who stepped overboard to attempt to walk on water, the one who exclaimed, “not only my feet, but my hands and my head as well!,” the one who drew his sword to protect his Savior, and the one who, when he saw him after his resurrection, immediately threw himself overboard to swim for shore. We love him for his brashness, for his boldness, for his uninhibited nature.
I have reflected before on how Jesus was the first to identify some precious quality in Peter, for as soon as he met him, Jesus said, “‘You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas’ (which means Peter).” Peter and Cephas both mean “rock,” which tells us that from the very first Jesus saw a quality of sturdiness and steadiness to this man. He understood that bound up in an impetuous nature were virtues that would establish him as a leader among leaders in the early church.
I once read an author compare this personality type to a wild river that runs through a mountain range. The river runs swiftly but erratically, fierce in its power and dangerous in its wildness. Yet one day a settler arrives at a spot along its course and sees that he can make use of the river’s energy. And so he builds a flume to restrain the river and direct it. At the point where the water runs fastest he builds a watermill to generate power.
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