\n<\/p>\n
R<\/span>edeemer Presbyterian Church\u2019s building on West 83rd Street in Manhattan does not call attention to itself. The Crunch gym next door has a bigger, louder sign and doors plastered with offers for memberships. Redeemer\u2019s building of glass and neutral brick blends into the buildings around it, except that if you look up, a cross shoots up above the fifth story. The church\u2019s founding pastor, Tim Keller, was reluctant to even buy it.<\/p>\n \u201cFor years Tim didn\u2019t want to be a megachurch,\u201d said Andrea Mungo, Redeemer\u2019s first staffer for its diaconate in the 1990s. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t interested in purchasing a building. For years it was, \u2018We want to rent so we can focus our money and energy into local ministry.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Keller, who died in May, was a globally known preacher, bestselling writer, leader of a 5,000-member church before before stepping down, and founder big organizations like The Gospel Coalition in 2007. He spoke before the UK parliament and at Google\u2019s headquarters. But for most of his adult life, he built small. His fame was derivative of his local church work.<\/p>\n People like Mungo\u2014as well as Yvonne Sawyer, Justin Adour, Sobeyda Valle-Ellis, Peter Ong, and Mark Reynolds\u2014aren\u2019t globally recognized names but were the faces of the local church in New York and then beyond. They built an ecosystem of local institutions that are carrying on Keller\u2019s vision of evangelicalism away from the spotlight. They planted churches and started community development organizations and counseling centers that are spreading the gospel and serving the disenfranchised.<\/p>\n Keller did not follow the American evangelical tradition of networking with the powerful, like Billy Graham. He did not build a megachurch; Redeemer\u2019s different campuses in 2015 separated into independent, smaller churches in anticipation of in anticipation of his stepping down. In 1991, Graham led a crusade in Central Park that drew 250,000 people. Redeemer at that time was a church of about 800.<\/p>\n What Keller built with the church members around him for most of his career was not stadium size but showed a healthier American evangelicalism built on smaller, lesser-known institutions. Keller called it \u201chuman scale\u201d in his final address to Redeemer churches.<\/p>\n Months ago, the different Redeemer churches in the city asked Keller to record a message for a gathering of all the congregations\u2014which happened to fall on May 19, the day Keller died. In what would be his final words to the congregations, Keller said that \u201cto have three churches of 800 people is better than having one church of 2400 people.\u201d<\/p>\n Multiple smaller churches working in collaboration gives the ability to build \u201cministries that are megachurch in their quality,\u201d allowing them to have better discipleship, provide better pastoral care, and better serve the surrounding neighborhoods, he said.<\/p>\n He concluded, \u201cForget about your reputation. Jeremiah 45:5, this is what Jeremiah says to his secretary, Baruch. \u2018Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.\u2019 \u2026 Ministers very often come to New York City to make a name for themselves. \u2026 Do what you can to lift up God\u2019s name.\u201d<\/p>\n Keller\u2019s evangelicalism was locally focused, media averse, and built on suffering. In Collin Hansen\u2019s biography of Keller, his wife Kathy Keller recalled chasing a TV crew for The 700 Club<\/em> away from Redeemer\u2019s services on 9\/11 and telling them never to return.<\/p>\n Redeemer staff from over the years told CT about the unofficial policy to reject all interview requests. Yvonne Sawyer, an early staffer at the church, remembered many instances of people telling Keller that he should write a book or do media appearances. Eventually Keller agreed to do media interviews to support the release of The Reason for God<\/em>, but he was 58 at that point, and he still turned down more interview requests than he accepted.<\/p>\n \u201cFor such a long time he resisted,\u201d Sawyer said. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want it to become a celebrity cult.\u201d<\/p>\n Keller knew that leading \u201ca healthy church takes a lot of time,\u201d said Mark Reynolds, who worked with Keller for 20 years at Redeemer and City to City, a church-planting organization formed out of Redeemer. When Keller started having to travel and speak after The Reason for God<\/em>, that was always a tension, even as subsequent books came out\u2014\u201cHow much travel do I have to do?\u201d<\/p>\n K<\/span>eller began as a young pastor in Hopewell, Virginia, population 23,000. He had a congregation of about 90 people made up of blue-collar workers without college degrees.<\/p>\n He often talked about how formative this time was. He visited church members in the hospital, went to high school graduations, did counseling, and helped a widow identify the body of her husband in the morgue, according to Hansen\u2019s biography. The Kellers had congregants to their house for dinner and prayer, and one member who went through a divorce recalled to Hansen that the Kellers took him on vacation with them.<\/p>\n Keller\u2019s time at this small church also prompted him to work on his dissertation on deacons, which later was distilled in his book Ministries of Mercy<\/em>. He argued that deacons had taken on custodial tasks instead of serving those in need. Shortly after he founded Redeemer, he insisted on building a robust diaconate.<\/p>\n Andrea Mungo was the first staffer for Redeemer\u2019s diaconate, creating with Keller a manual for diaconates that would end up being used in churches around the country. Mungo was a relatively new Christian and worked as a social worker in a drug-heavy neighborhood in the South Bronx. She began attending Redeemer in 1992, when it was meeting at a Seventh-day Adventist church.<\/p>\n After the service she met Keller at a welcome for newcomers in the church basement. He introduced her to Yvonne Sawyer, who he said was hoping to start a nonprofit doing mercy ministry that would be tied to Redeemer. The organization that Sawyer went on to start became Hope for New York, which is now a $5 million organization supporting all kinds of mercy ministries in the city.<\/p>\n \u201cI was so excited to meet another woman who had a strong vision for mercy and justice ministry,\u201d Mungo remembered. \u201cWhen I came to New York and started going to Redeemer, it all came together: Wow, the church really needs to be in the forefront of loving our neighbors \u2026 and we also need to be preaching the true gospel and not some watered-down social justice gospel.\u201d<\/p>\n Mungo joined Redeemer\u2019s diaconate, which grew to the point that in a few years it needed a staff person. The Redeemer diaconate was made up of male and female deacons when the parent denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, permitted only ordained male deacons.<\/p>\n Redeemer offered Mungo a part-time job, and she took a dramatic pay cut from her social worker job. She loved the work building the program and she soon became full-time. Hope for New York became Redeemer\u2019s outward-facing mercy ministry to the poor, and the diaconate was the inward facing ministry to people in the congregation who were unemployed, without housing, or in mental health crisis.<\/p>\n Keller mentored her through building the program, focusing on a strong training and vetting component to becoming a deacon. Keller would do trainings and talks with the deacons. Mungo remembered him being accessible to everyone in those days. Keller didn\u2019t have an actual office, but there was a room where he could hold meetings and counseling sessions. He did premarital counseling for Mungo and her eventual husband.<\/p>\n By the time terrorists attacked the city on 9\/11, Mungo had already built an expanded diaconate staff in addition to the ordained deacon volunteers. \u201cClearly God was preparing us for 9\/11, to even have paid staff to respond,\u201d she remembered.<\/p>\n The attacks on 9\/11 brought a surge of demand for Redeemer\u2019s diaconate and outward-facing ministries. The church had had a counseling center for years, but after 9\/11, it needed to hire a lot more counselors, quickly. Some Redeemer attenders had worked with organizations at Ground Zero; others had lost loved ones. They had all seen and smelled the destruction of thousands of lives.<\/p>\n Sobeyda Valle-Ellis, a Christian therapist and social worker who had moved to the city two months before the attacks with her church-planting husband David Ellis, was one that the church\u2019s counseling center hired that September.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were all scared,\u201d Valle-Ellis remembered. She and her husband attended Redeemer while preparing to plant a church. Keller\u2019s preaching on suffering at that time reminded them that \u201cGod doesn\u2019t guarantee a life free of suffering, but he gives us a suffering Lord who understands and undoes our aloneness in the midst of suffering,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Keller\u2019s teaching on idolatry, too, helped her realize that she was clinging to safety more than Christ in the wake of the attacks. Hearing his preaching in that time \u201cfelt like seminary to me. \u2026 Our trust had to be practical and day to day.\u201d<\/p>\n Valle-Ellis worked at Redeemer Counseling Services until 2014 when she left to start her own counseling center in the city. Heart Matters NYC Counseling now has five therapists and an internship program. Her center incorporates Keller\u2019s framework that was also in Redeemer\u2019s counseling center, but as the Spanish-speaking daughter of immigrants, she focuses on Christians who are Black, indigenous, and people of color.<\/p>\n By 2014, the early Redeemer members had spread like seeds in the wind. Mungo left in 2007 to go start a similar diaconate at a smaller church plant, Astoria Community Church in Queens. She built a diaconate like Redeemer\u2019s but with the church\u2019s own set of mercy ministries in the neighborhood: ESL classes, financial literacy classes, a Bible club, tutoring, and support for parents at risk of having their children put in the foster system.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t have any desire to go bigger,\u201d said Mungo. \u201cThe way we can best as smaller churches live this part of the gospel out is on a local level.\u201d<\/p>\n Sawyer, whom Mungo met in the basement of the Seventh-day Adventist church, also spread the seeds of Redeemer. She was the first full-time staffer Redeemer hired in 1990. She built the systems for the quickly growing church. Then she launched Hope for New York. In the late 1990s, she moved to Miami, Florida, and started an organization that became Hope for Miami, which is also a nearly $5 million operation like Hope for New York.<\/p>\n Redeemer emphasizes tailoring ministries to the local context. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to replicate Hope for New York,\u201d Sawyer said. Hope for Miami came out of multiple churches and nonprofits in Miami rather than the one church in New York. \u201cYou do what works for your people.\u201d<\/p>\n As nonprofits and counseling centers spread, Redeemer was planting churches in New York. Peter Ong was on staff at one of Redeemer\u2019s first plants in 2000, Living Faith Community in Flushing, Queens. The church serves a largely immigrant community, and Ong led its mercy and justice outreach.<\/p>\n S<\/span>even years prior, Ong was not a Christian. He was a college student at New York University and started going to Redeemer in 1993 because of a Christian woman he was dating. He remembered posing \u201cobnoxious\u201d questions to Keller at the question time the church held after the service.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t remember his answers, but I do remember that he was incredibly polite,\u201d said Ong. Ong and the woman broke up, but he became a Christian a few years later.<\/p>\n Ong continued attending Redeemer and began working with the youth ministries of Chinese Christian Herald in Manhattan\u2019s Chinatown. Eventually working at the early church plant Living Faith, Ong started a community development corporation out of the church, and then planted another Queens church, King\u2019s Cross, with the help of City to City. Ong said as Bible Belt pastors parachuted into the city after 9\/11, Redeemer began backing more \u201cindigenous\u201d church leaders to plant.<\/p>\n Senior City to City leader Mark Reynolds remembered a 250-page blue manual for church planting that they used for training, which then began to be used all over. As the church-planting operation grew, the church plants were often not in the denomination or Reformed. But all of City to City\u2019s training was based in deep Reformed theology.<\/p>\n \u201cLeaders wanted a set of \u2026 \u2018Here\u2019s seven things you need to do,\u2019 or \u2018Here\u2019s the laws of this and this,\u2019\u201d said Reynolds. \u201cWe have a lot of practical resources \u2026 but we were primarily focusing on, how do you have deep awareness of yourself, your context, and the gospel so that you can bring a healthy church there?\u201d<\/p>\n The local church planting became bigger with City to City in 2008, which came out of Redeemer\u2019s in-house church planting center where Reynolds was working. The founding pastor of Living Faith, Stephen Ro, now also does City to City trainings in Korea. City to City is now working in 65 cities around the world and has planted about 1,000 churches.<\/p>\n Staff at City to City \u201cwere not interested in brand recognition or loyalty,\u201d said Pastor Neil Powell, who led an effort to plant 20 churches in a decade in Birmingham, UK with support from City to City.<\/p>\n W<\/span>hen Justin Adour moved to New York 16 years ago, he had never heard of Tim Keller. He grew up in the Assemblies of God and became a pastor in that denomination, working in various ministries in the Bronx. One day he went to a men\u2019s group in the city where Keller spoke. Adour went home and Googled Keller; he and his wife, Angela, began reading everything Keller had written and listening to all his sermons. Adour\u2019s theology \u201cshifted,\u201d he said. \u201cWe joke we\u2019re Presby-costals.\u201d<\/p>\n When Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) opened its campus in New York, in partnership with City to City, Adour was in the first class. Keller taught some of the classes. Keller processed some of Adour\u2019s theological wrestling with him and they got to know one another.<\/p>\n Keller was \u201cdeeply Reformed,\u201d Adour said but \u201che had a way of communicating that extended beyond the Reformed tradition.\u201d Both of Adour\u2019s parents are Assemblies of God ministers, but they weren\u2019t upset with his move toward Presbyterianism\u2014they saw \u201cthe faithfulness of Redeemer in the city,\u201d Adour said.<\/p>\n The RTS program meant that Adour was in seminary classes with pastors who were all based in New York. Many were Pentecostal, Baptist, and other traditions who wanted more theological training that was tailored to New York. Before the RTS program Adour\u2019s relationships were mostly in the Assemblies of God, and now he found himself with friends in a variety of evangelical streams.<\/p>\n In 2019, Adour became the pastor for a new Redeemer plant, Redeemer East Harlem, serving one of the poorer neighborhoods in Manhattan. The church has about 100 attendees now and a ministry center hosting several nonprofits serving the neighborhood.<\/p>\n Evangelical church attendance has been growing in New York City for several decades now. Keller arrived in New York in 1989. Evangelical churches were more numerous and vibrant in the city\u2019s outer boroughs, often among immigrants and the working class, but churches were sparse in the city center. Tony Carnes, publisher of A Journey Through NYC Religions<\/em>, has tracked the trends of the city\u2019s churches in detail for decades. He counted only 10 evangelical churches in New York\u2019s \u201ccenter city\u201d (most of Manhattan) in 1975.<\/p>\n By 2000, Carnes counted 120 evangelical churches in center city. In 2019, that number was 308, and Carnes projects a count of 368 for 2024. From 2009 to 2019, evangelical church attendance grew 65 percent in Manhattan\u2019s center city, according to Carnes\u2019s data; from 87,271 to 144,144 attending church on average.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst and foremost, [Keller\u2019s] ministry was in the local church,\u201d said Adour. \u201cHis influence in all these different sectors was a function of how he discipled people in his congregation, who then went and worked in all these different areas of life. \u2026 He developed a church culture that was able to not only exist beyond him but flourish beyond him.\u201d<\/p>\n Emily Belz is CT\u2019s news writer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n