Exclusive Tim Keller Interview
- Krish Kandiah
- Sep 6, 2017
- 2 min read
The Books for Life team had the opportunity to interview Tim Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Church in New York and best selling award winning author. You can read the full interview on the Books for life website.
Thank you for writing Ministries of Mercy, the original edition of the book helped shape my understanding of the mission of God. The book comes across as an impassioned plea for a more holistic understanding of the responsibilities of Christians in the world. Why is Mercy Ministry such a passion of yours?
I grew up in a fairly prosperous (though not highly affluent) northeastern U.S. city. The first church that I was called to as a pastor was in a very different kind of community. It was a working class factory town in the South, with a good deal of poverty. That experience pushed me to look into the Bible to see what it said about justice and mercy for the poor. Of course, it says quite a lot! But as a newer Christian (I had only been a believer for about five years when I became a pastor) and as a young man, I had not known about it.
What kind of push back have you received to the message of the book?
Well, I wrote this in the mid-1980s, and at that time in my denomination (the Presbyterian Church in America) there was quite a lot of wariness and some outright hostility to the book. One older minister who I otherwise admired told me he thought the material was just Marxism, and many others in my ecclesiastical connections agreed with him. (Even though the book is not about the role of the state but only about the work of Christians and the church.) I must say that now, over thirty years later, there is far less of that reaction in my circles, though there still is some.
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