Timothy Keller, an influential New York City pastor, author and founder of the Gospel Coalition, has died at age 72.
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Nathan Troester/Icon Media Group
Timothy Keller, an influential New York City pastor, author and founder of the Gospel Coalition, has died at age 72.
Nathan Troester/Icon Media Group
Influential church leader Timothy Keller has died at the age of 72.
He was a founder of The Gospel Coalition – a group of evangelical congregations concerned with the direction of their faith tradition.
Keller was a New York City Presbyterian minister who helped his congregation and the nation grieve in the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks — a time when so many questioned why God would allow this to happen.
“The Bible indicates,” he told his church in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001, “that God’s love and hope and the love and the home that comes apart must be rubbed into our grief. And that’s what we “is here to do.”
The problem of tragedy—and the human response to it—was one he returned to again and again in his preaching.
In another of his sermons in 2006, he comforted his congregation by saying “It doesn’t help to get rid of your faith in God to deal with evil and suffering.”
Keller was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, which announced his death Friday morning. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020
His Redeemer City to City program helped evangelical leaders learn to work in urban settings where such congregations were less common.
As co-founder of The Gospel Coalition, his concerns were twofold: first, that evangelical Christianity had become too politicized, and second, that moral relativism had gone unchallenged.
Collin Hansen, vice president of the organization, says Keller sought “to be relevant, but also to be timeless.”
Hansen was also a close friend and wrote the biography Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.
“Tim has always believed that preaching the gospel and seeing what was lived out in local churches,” he says, “was the best way to be obedient in our faith, to obey Jesus and to love our neighbor, which includes be aware of their social concerns.”
Keller was also known for working to make Christianity what he called “intellectually credible”. For that purpose, he wrote a number of books, i.a The Reason for God: Faith in an Age of Skepticism.
In it, Keller describes the belief in a Christian God as sound and rational. Among the questions he addressed in the book was this: Is skepticism or faith on the rise today? His answer was “yes” – the world is becoming both more and less religious at the same time.
The tension between these realities continues to shape American public life today.
