Presbyterian (PCA) minister brings revival to Manhattan
The Layman Online, February 28, 2006
A Presbyterian minister whose only previous pulpit assignment was as the pastor of a small rural congregation in Virginia “sparks a revival in New York and other cosmopolitan places usually neglected by evangelical Christians,” according to a New York Times article published in today’s Chicago Tribune.
Timothy KellerThe minister is the Rev. Timothy Keller, 55, formerly a member of the faculty at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Keller preaches four services at four rented Manhattan locations on Sundays, commuting the circuit by cab.
According to The Times, the four services, all under the banner of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, attract more than 4,400 people – “most of them young professionals and artists who do not fit the prototypical evangelical mold …”
The reason the congregation is divided into four parts is to “avoid becoming a mega-church, to keep people worshipping in their neighborhoods, and to have smaller, more human scale worshipping congregations,” according to the congregation’s Web site.
Urged by the Presbyterian Church in America to begin an urban ministry in New York City, Keller began the church development 16 years ago with 15 New Yorkers who agreed to pray with him.
The Times said Redeemer, in addition to its own growth, “has helped start more than 50 churches in the city, from faith traditions and denominations as diverse as Assemblies of God, Lutheran and Southern Baptist. In addition, it has helped found 17 Presbyterian churches in places like Brooklyn, Queens and Hoboken, N.J.”
One Presbyterian, whose membership is still in a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation, has been attending Redeemer services. He describes Keller as a balding, soft-spoken minister who preaches brainy sermons that make people think. The Redeemer Web site doesn’t include a photo of Keller. (The photo used with this story was on another Web site.)
In a column for a PCA publication titled Post-Everythings, Keller argues against evangelicals shying from big-city ministries, as well as universities and ethnic-diverse situations.
“We must first give high priority to finding ways to minister in three areas: universities, big cities and ethnically diverse situations,” he said. “University towns are incubators where we can learn how to address the ideas of the rising culture. The new world usually emerges in the big cities and if we learn to face it and engage it there, we will be able to do the same in the rest of the country. In short, we must go to the ‘leading edges’ of our society and learn how to preach, model, and sing the gospel in ways that both challenge and attract (rather than merely confusing) people.”
The New York Times has long promoted Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church as the Presbyterian citadel in New York City. Fifth Avenue is a congregation that once was a bastion for Reformed orthodoxy.
But the PCUSA congregation has undergone theological shifts to liberalism and a bitter fight over whether to keep its former senior pastor, Thomas Tewell, who was accused of having an affair with a church member. The congregation eventually accepted Tewell’s request that that his call be terminated. Fifth Avenue still is left to defend a $5 million lawsuit that stemmed from accusations by a man who said Tewell ruined his marriage by having an affair with his wife.