Hello, I’m Timothy A. Keller a pastor in Detroit, MI.

SHORT BIO:

My wife and I were both born in Greenville, SC. I’ve lived all over the world including Taiwan, Italy, SC, OH, Los Angeles, New York City, San Fransisco, and Detroit.

I enjoy reading, documentaries, running, hiking, traveling, juicing, gardening, Japanese maples, researching and working out. I discovered a love/hate relationship with construction when we bought a 100 year old farm house.

I went to college later in life and met the love of my life Rebekah. We’ve been married 20 years. We don’t have biological children, but we have been foster parents and mentored many young people.

I have a passion for families and for men. One of my gifts is counseling couples and giving them an action plan for reconciliation. Since I was estranged from my own family for half a decade, I have sought to use that tragedy for good. I know life is short and I want to live mine to the fullest with humility to the glory of God.

I stayed in Detroit after seminary, feeling deeply called to this mission. I was accepted into the ThM/PhD program at Southern in Louisville, KY but my current ministry ended up taking priority. After living in Detroit, I have a new appreciation for kindness, excellence and growth mindset. Urban ministry has grown me and stretched me. I am thankful for the lessons God has taught me in these 17 long years. More and more I have been considering reentering a Ph.D. program since there are so many online options available.

BIG PICTURE:

For us, Detroit has meant being missionaries on a foreign field. The culture for us has been so vastly different than anything we had encountered. Beyond the culture/values of Detroit, the intensity of the brokenness of the people is by far like nothing we have ever encountered. This brokenness centers around the family structure, and to be even more specific, around the fatherlessness. We have silent fathers, absent fathers, and abusive fathers. To be more specific, again, we have boys who have not known a father themselves, thus there is nothing to pass on to the next generation. Thus, we have come to understand that the ministry of the Gospel must pass through 3 generations, it would seem, before the “curse” is broken. This may seem exceptional when in fact it’s the rule. I say fatherlessness while society usually describes this situation as “single moms.” What it means to be a husband and father, a wife and a mother, is a lost art.

All of this has caused us to grow. There is not much we can take for granted in our training. Templated answers that have worked in other contexts or in past generations have had to be rethought and reengineered. The result,…the Gospel really is always the answer, but what does that even mean? Quite a lot actually, and what it means needs to be explicitly communicated perpetually to each upcoming generation. So it would seem to us, with everything we see going on in our country, that what we have experienced is a harbinger for what is to come in the rest of the nation. Truly, there is much of Christianity that has been embedded in our society, things that have kept us strong, things that we have taken for granted and assumed. Many/most of these things are absent here, hence the darkness. It has taken multiple generations to get here, and it will take multiple generations to build back up. This is “mustard-seed-work.” Christians, seemingly perpetually, raise alarm at the loss of our children. So we should. I’ve heard long time Christians remark that the devil has really been after our children, has really been after our sons, as if there is not much we can do about it. In the past we sought to break off from the main streams of culture, in order to form our own culture in isolation. This strategy has worked to some degree, but it is working less and less. How much longer can it work in the age of the internet and AI? These children that we lose, when do we lose them usually? Upon their matriculation into the secular educational institutions that have professors who grew up as “fundamentalists,” and are now very much interested in proselytizing with a different gospel. We love our children and we have wanted to protect them, and so we should, but it does make one wonder. How can we reach the world, while we are primarily hiding from it? If we have been hiding from it, and we are still losing our children, then perhaps we’ve been doing it wrong.

The good news is that light, when it truly is light, still shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

I’m arguing that it is not necessary for a place to sink to the level of Detroit before we act. What determines whether a son becomes a third generation preacher, or he becomes the third generation that rejects, in the old “the first generation accepts, the second generation assumes, and the third generation rejects” pattern?

I think the answer is found in Deuteronomy 6:7 and Psalm 78:5–8. These texts must continue to be the pattern for how we do family.

Raising up strong husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, families becomes the context for the application of the Gospel. The narratives in the Scripture including the proclamation of the Gospel is always situational, meaning the truth is always being applied to a situation, a context, a story. “Is there not a cause?” It must be the same for us. Which is more persuasive, reading a detailed delineation of the inspiration of Scripture in a systematic theology book, or experiencing the power of the Gospel through multi-generational ministry, as the Scripture breathes life into family trees? Of course I want both, but I think the point is made.

The Gospel of necessity creates a worldview and this worldview must be able to transcend and outflank every other.

WHAT I’M GOOD AT AND ENJOY:

Preaching and engaging with an audience.

Providing counsel.

Discerning giftedness and opportunities

One thing I love to do, I like to describe it as a gift, is to discern other people’s gifts. This happens all the time. Of course we know that spiritual gifts emerge in community, it is just that I often get to be the one to discover them. I speak with people. They inadvertently reveal their passion. I ask follow up questions. I sense their giftedness, and I provide a vision for what that would look like lived out. I highlight the potential adventure they could embark on. To be intentionally extreme for the sake of argument, I could say there are two ways of recruiting people into ministry. I find people to fit into existing ministries, or I build ministries around the gifts of the people the Holy Spirit has provided. I think both must happen but it is crucial to be sensitive to the latter. So I say, this is what I think I’m seeing in you. Then I go to the congregation and tell them what I’ve seen. The Spirit works.

OUTREACH:

My philosophy has been to look for the needs of the people we are called to reach. It could be we are looking for the preexisting needs of the largest demographic in closest proximity to the people we are called to reach.

Yet, it is also sending out the members of the body to bring the glory of God’s temple with us out into the world of darkness. We go out to pray for people, to intercede and lament for them, to weep with them. I ask myself, how would the Gospel transform this person, this family, this situation. This provides me with the context to proclaim the Gospel in a way that speaks specifically to the crisis of the moment. Christians should be trained to do this, such that they are equipped to go out. Along with this training our people need to understand shame, trauma, and abuse. This allows them to love well, and they don’t need to have the Bible memorized before doing so.

SERIES:

There are subjects I have been interested in teaching through for a while, and have been gathering source material. These include the book of Romans, the book of Hebrews, the Sermon on the Mount, followed by Galatians, and 1st and 2nd Corinthians. What might precede these series would be a quick overview sermon on each of the Pauline epistles, with a particular view as to how each fleshes out Paul’s priority on the cruciform or cross-shaped life of Philippians 2:5–11, as expressed, for instance, in 1 Corinthians 2:2.

While Romans would be a passage-by-passage exposition, it would be with a view to church practice. In other words, do our church practices and policies, the way we do things, line up with the book of Romans? How so, and why? This would include salvation, baptism, church-membership, and the mission of the church, among other things.

Hebrews would do the same but with an emphasis and explanation of atonement with its’ relationship to the Day of Passover and the Levitical sacrificial system, along with how these two connect with Isaiah 52–53.

The Sermon on the Mount is all about the Kingdom of Heaven and the mission of the church. This includes lining up the beatitudes with Romans 8:12–30.

Bibliographies of key sources for each of the series are available upon request.

I also want to do a separate series offered at a separate time slot for the training of men and biblical masculinity, which is servant leadership fleshed out.