EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: Remembering Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Early Days

The year was 1988, and it was a Sunday afternoon in December. Lane Arthur was working on his Ph.D in genetics at Columbia University. Some years earlier, Lane had been a former housemate of mine at the University of Georgia, and he was engaged to my sister Jackie.

On this particular Sunday, Lane was praying about a place where he and Jackie could worship after their wedding, scheduled for the following spring. That prayer was interrupted by the ring of the telephone.

On the other end of the line was a professor from Westminster Theological Seminary named Tim Keller. On the last day of class that semester, Keller told his students he would be leaving the seminary to start a church in New York City. One of his students, Tuck Bartholomew (another of our friends from the University of Georgia), had given Lane’s New York phone number to Professor Keller.

That phone call from Tim Keller began a two-year journey for my sister and brother-in-law. Four months later, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in April of 1989, Jackie and Lane were married, in Georgia, and missed the first Sunday evening service of the newly created Redeemer Presbyterian Church. (Morning services would not begin until later that year.) But after a few days of honeymoon, they packed up a U-Haul and headed north, spending the night in Philadelphia with Tim and Kathy Keller, who themselves had not yet made the move to New York.

My sister, Jackie, new to the city, did not yet have a job, and Tim Keller needed a…well, he needed just about everything. So over the next six months Jackie became a nearly full-time volunteer. Tim went on many awareness and fundraising trips outside the city (often with Lane as his driver). One regular job Jackie and Lane took on in those early months was to print the Sunday bulletin at a Kinko’s near Columbia University on the Upper West Side.

On these fundraising trips, people would often give Tim the names of young relatives living in New York. “Tim was constantly pulling slips of paper out of his pocket,” Jackie said. “There’d be a name and a phone number on that slip of paper. He’d ask me to call and see what they needed.”

Years later, Tim would tell me that Jackie was indispensable during those early days. I can believe that, in part because I know my sister, and in part because it took many years for Tim to know my name, or at least to use it. For years, every time I would see him, he would greet me as “Jackie’s brother.”

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Lane said those first few services were small, around a hundred people, but it did not take long for the word to spread that something special was happening. I occasionally traveled to New York on business in those days, and I attended Redeemer with Jackie and Lane several times. I remember attendance being in the 300 to 400 range, and I remember the sermons being excellent.

This was the era of cassette tapes, and people who missed a service started asking if it was recorded. Jackie and Lane bought a tape duplication machine. You put the original cassette in one dock, and blank tapes in the other three other docks on the machine.

Lane said with a laugh, “I remember thinking, ‘surely three copies would be enough.’”

It wasn’t, and Redeemer’s cassette tape ministry quickly grew and magnified Tim’s and Redeemer’s impact. Members of the church would share them with their friends, or send them to people beyond New York City. The tape ministry that Lane and Jackie helped start was an early catalyst of Tim’s and Redeemer’s influence. It eventually evolved into CDs, and ultimately into podcasts and other digital delivery systems. Tim Keller’s sermons have now been listened to by tens of millions of people.

In the weeks since Tim Keller’s death, social media and all manner of online and print publications have filled with appreciations for him (including MinistryWatch, here and here). A few people have noted the irony of having all these accolades heaped on someone who never sought them. If anyone was ever the “anti-celebrity celebrity,” it was probably Tim Keller.

It’s important to note that even though he did not seek celebrity status, when it found him nonetheless, he managed it with grace. Still, he said to me, in an interview just before his death, that being famous was a detriment to his ministry, not an enhancement. He said he missed the opportunity to interact with his congregation after church services. Instead, he found himself signing the books of people who would attend his church once and likely never again.

About 15 years ago, I attended the General Assembly of Tim’s denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. That year the denomination was debating a number of contentious issues, and dozens of elders lined up behind the microphones to speak their mind. Tim did not. He sat quietly, hour after hour during the debates. He listened. He never spoke a word.

Years later I asked him about that incident, and he said, “If I never heard anybody saying what I wanted to say, I guess I would have gotten up there. But there was always somebody saying what I would have said, so why do I have to be the one to get up to say it? That’s how I always saw it.”

He told me he never thought of Redeemer as an “empire” or himself as someone who should have outsized organizational influence in the denomination. “My church is just one church in the presbytery,” he said.

Tim Keller retired as pastor of Redeemer in 2017, and the church is thriving today. The Gospel Coalition, which he also helped found, has likewise been passed on to others, and is likewise thriving.

As for my sister and brother-in-law, Jackie and Lane Arthur: Their sojourn in New York was brief. By 1991, Lane had completed his Ph.D. and they moved on. Today, he is a senior executive with John Deere, and they live in Des Moines, Iowa. They still speak fondly of those years at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, working side-by-side with Tim and Kathy Keller.

“We were newlyweds who learned from watching and talking how to be married, manage in-laws and kids,” Lane said. “We learned about idols of the heart, how to overcome fears and be courageous, how to ‘do’ ministry.”

Lane and Jackie have gone to play leadership roles in the planting or early growth of several other churches, and their experience is not unique. Indeed, those early days of Redeemer turned out to be an incubator for others who are now in strategic ministry roles around the world. Many of those early Redeemer leaders meet regularly via conference call and zoom to tell stories of that era and, more importantly, to support each other in their ongoing work for the Gospel.

Lane summed up those days. “Those early days were a bit crazy, and sometimes a lot of work, but they were also a lot of fun,” he said. “It was a privilege to be there, just to be a part of it.”