It was the footnotes that got me about Tim Keller.
Maybe that’s predictable for a second generation academic who is also married to an academic. But I still recall the surge of relief that came with reading Keller’s Center Church — and finding it had footnotes.
I had read plenty of other ministry manuals and practical church growth books. Many of those were great, built on one or two insights around which stories and anecdotes were woven. Nevertheless, I would often feel that I’d got hold of the idea and its application well before I was flipping the last page.
But with Keller it was different. Each new page bristled with fresh insights anchored in ancient wisdom and current research arising from on the ground experience around the world. In fact, many of the sources he cited were books and people I’d interacted with at seminary. Keller clearly believed that theologians, scholars, and missiologists — past and present — had things to say that could inform ministry practice, deepening and sharpening it. This contrasted with much of my post-seminary professional development, where we were frequently told not to bother reading theology anymore — it was secular leadership material we needed to marinate in.
Although I work for the church planting movement he founded, I never met Tim Keller personally. I have no personal conversations, no special phone calls, no chain of emails — nothing of that nature that I can point to. And yet Keller had a profound influence on me.
Keller influenced not only my professional trajectory and my approach to preaching and ministry. More significantly, he impacted my personal walk with Christ.
Professionally, I’m sold out on the vision Keller articulated for movements of churches and ministries cooperating, interacting and organically functioning as a gospel ecosystem in any given context. Of course Keller anchors this not only in a careful consideration of biblical patterns and principles for gospel movement, but the sources on revivals and special outpouring of the Spirit.
One of the things I most long to see is churches in a given area or community banding together — across tribal, cultural and denominational lines — to multiply disciples, leaders and churches, to collaborate on initiatives to serve and bless people, and to prayerfully call on God to renew and give life in the way only God can. Everything I get to do in helping church plants through City to City is oriented towards this.
Keller also influenced my approach to preaching in particular and ministry more generally by pointing me back to the Puritans and behind them, Augustine (and ultimately, I believe, the Bible). Specifically, he pointed me to their understanding of what human beings are and how we change by the grace of God. If ‘we are what we love’ as James K.A. Smith puts it, then preaching and ministry needs to go beyond addressing the head to educate, touching the emotions to celebrate or lament, and pressing on the will to motivate. More fundamentally, we need to engage people’s hearts to help them reorder their disordered loves. To the extent that we can find rest in what God has achieved for us in Christ, we’re enabled to repent of seeking rest and satisfaction elsewhere so that we might walk the good path God has prepared for us. This is the Spirit’s sovereign work of course. But engaging with Keller stirred into flame a longing to preach and minister in a way that keeps in step with the Spirit in this. And he pointed me to sources that are helping me do it.
Beneath these two more visible ways in which Keller impacted me is the influence that his ministry has had on my own spirituality. This influence was mediated primarily by City to City’s Incubator program. I first experienced the Incubator in 2014 and 2015 as a participant and then for the next six years as a facilitator.
The Incubator is effectively a sustained exploration of the dynamic of spiritual renewal — which is anchored at one end in the Puritan and Augustinian understanding of what human beings are and how we change, and which is aimed at the other end towards the vision of movement I mentioned earlier. This dynamic is unpacked explicitly at several points in the Incubator program as well as being the theme that is constantly returned to in examining the various tasks of ministry: from designing ministry systems to preaching to promoting evangelism and creating discipleship pathways. The key to this dynamic is learning to take repentance and faith beyond the safe surface of outwardly visible behaviour and 'down' into the affections of the heart.
The way repentance and faith is pressed in through the Incubator begins with helping Christian leaders identify how they tend to get in their own way — whether in caring too much about controlling things in a desire to ensure church aligns with their preferences or in over-investing in the approval of a particular person or group in the church. For me, it was my deep longing for comfort that I've discovered plays out again and again as the chief obstacle in my own maturity and in my leadership. It fuels my reluctance to face hard things like conflict and difficult conversations head on. And it feeds an unhealthy sense of entitlement to compensation when I do.
The Incubator program facilitated reflection that helped me start to spot this tendency in my heart. Better, it also introduced me to tools for uncovering and addressing this — tools arising from ancient wisdom (again in his sources). Best of all, it also gave me practices that I've now incorporated in my life that help me continue taking repentance beyond the surface to start to 'mortify' my sin, poisoning it at its roots.
But the Incubator goes beyond helping leaders become aware of how we tend to get in our own way. As these tendencies are surfaced, the community created by taking this journey together with other planters and pastors provides the opportunity to speak and receive the grace of the gospel to one another's hearts. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, 'the Christ in the mouth of my brother is stronger than the Christ in my own heart.' I experienced and witnessed that reality often among my sisters and brothers in the Incubator. Learning to apply the goodness and grace of Christ in ways that spoke not only to surface behaviours but to what was going on in my heart, brought me fresh joy and freedom.
At one level, none of this was new. (Remember, everything was footnoted!) Yet at another level, the way the Incubator enabled me to personally explore and appropriate for myself the grace of God in Christ still sustains me on a life-giving journey of deepening repentance and faith.
Written by Chris Swann
Director of Church Planting and Coaching