Redeemer Presbyterian (PCA) is doing another vision renewal campaign. The sermons are available for free (they’re usually $2.50 a download) on the website and there is a very interesting and important video basically for Keller’s vision and plan really for the end game of his ministry at Redeemer.

I visited Redeemer in June of 2006 with my brothers in pastoral ministry in the Sacramento cluster and got the opportunity to get a sense of Redeemer by meeting with Tim Keller and some of the staff there. The real impact of Tim Keller on my life, however, really began that August of 2006 when I listened to a conference talk he gave in Seattle. As is so often true the changes that would come in my life were a result of the combination of Tim’s teaching and preaching and some needs in my heart and life. Over the next year or so I consumed nearly everything I could get my hands on from Keller. I read everything, listened to hundreds and hundreds of hours of sermons and talks many of them over and over again. I still listen regularly today but not at that pace. I needed something I was getting from Keller and it brought a lot of changes in me. All this is to say that I have the utmost love and respect for this man and his ministry and I have a pretty personal idea of how powerfully God can use him.

In my friendship with Ron Vanderwell (who was one of the brothers that made that trip with me in June of 2006) we often joke that Ron asks “how hard can it be?” and I’m the guy who tells him how hard. It is Frisian ancestry mixed with Paterson NJ grunge. So when I listened to this video my temperament kicked in. It is a necessary but audacious goal to do what Keller suggests in this video. Can Redeemer become more than just a preaching station for a nationally recognized preacher into a movement that embodies the dramatic vision that Keller regularly casts? It would seem to me that Keller has no other choice than to pursue it. If his vision is only a very vivid and inspiring word picture but doesn’t actually pay out in lives and relationships it becomes the haunting doubt of the ontological argument. The greatest vision that can be conceived is not and is not real unless that vision is enfleshed. Of course that vision is not Keller’s but rather Christ’s and that lets Tim off the hook a bit but for a skeptical East Coast audience the challenge remains.

As I listened I thought that central to this vision will be Tim’s ability to transform as well. We already know what he can do. He is a gifted enough and empowered enough preacher/speaker to seed a movement that is in fact already bearing sprouts world wide. That much is clear to me, but the portion of the vision most directly reliant upon his ability to morph is the pastoral pipeline. He says himself in the video that this re-prioritization in terms of what he devotes himself to become is essential.

It’s at exactly this place where the road forward in terms of imagining the pragmatic steps towards this vision get most foggy and what I really wonder about is the interplay between institution and movement.

In the last portion of the video Keller addresses some of my default concerns by referring to Dick Lucas‘ ministry in London. I found Keller’s argument compelling (absent of any personal data) regarding how Redeemer’s ministry has buoyed other evangelical ministries in Manhattan that aren’t necessarily institutionally tied to it. That all seems believable and rings true to how it seems to me people and communities work. In the messiness of real life Redeemer’s influence has been to bolster the spiritual health of others in its wake. I think the pursuit of this vision will in fact accelerate this dynamic further to the benefit of all. That’s not hard to imagine.

What is harder to imagine is how the institutional piece of this for Redeemer will play out. When I listened to some of the description it sounded essentially like Redeemer is going to try to go multi-site. In a sense Redeemer has been multi-site for a long time and my hunch just from hearing tidbits of things from churches is that the PCA has more experience doing multi-site missional churches than just about anyone else in North America. All that is good. My wonderings however come in two areas: will this model of ministry retard the development of the kinds of leaders that Keller wants and needs and will in fact Redeemer’s success to this point in this transition become somewhat of a liability for this effort.

Now I very well may know absolutely nothing about what I’m talking about, but blogs are for pulling stuff out of your ass and dumping them on the Internet to display your own foolishness anyway. Movements by their nature driven by the necessity of this amazingly diverse world yield enormous chaos, messiness, and conflict along with creativity and excitement. I’m doing a study on Colossians with a small group now and when we hit the song in Col. 1:15-20 (Same is true of the Christ song of Philippians 2) we marveled at the speed at which the NT churches put together an amazing understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ sufficient to have it sing into their songs. We get the picture of this incredible gospel movement spreading throughout the Eastern Roman empire through a network of friendships and relationships at an incredibly pace and radically and sacrificially transforming lives and communities. Our view of it is dominated by Paul because we have his story and so many of his letters but it is clear that the movement was far larger than Paul and that thousands of men and women whose names are lost to history fueled this thing. This is what a movement looks like.

We also know that this movement was incredibly messy. There were doctrinal problems, behavioral problems, conflicts between leaders (including Paul, Barnabas, Peter and others) over all kinds of things, much of which has been lost in the wash to 21st century evangelical Bible readers.

Institutions are all about stability, conformity, sustainability, focus and order in a way that is sometimes antithetical to movements. Institutions play vital roles in modern movements yet the interplay is complex and often unpredictable. Leading Redeemer in a way that seeds and feeds the movement rather than obstructing it will be an enormous challenge calling for incredible wisdom and humility. Just imagining that challenge nearly makes me want to have a seizure.

The second point I wonder about is the bitter fruit of success. Success brings so many wonderful capacities and the audacity of this vision wouldn’t be possible without the successes that Redeemer has enjoyed so far. Yet success in our culture is most dangerous because of the cultural expectations it raises. It is very likely that a lot of the best fruit that will come from this movement will not be evaluated by most as “successful” in the ways that we are enormously culturally prejudiced to do so. God so often moves in movements through a majority of seemingly small and insignificant groups and leaders, all of them flawed, feeling threatened and predictably underwhelming to the world. This is the story of the Christian church and it is the reality of the Christian church around the world. Just look at the kinds of churches Paul and John wrote to in the New Testament and imagine that it was in fact these kinds of churches that overthrew the Roman way of life. What can so easily sink an ambitious vision is the perceived lack of success as it was known in the “mother ship”. That may become the toughest leadership challenge, to encourage the people to hear the lion while they’re looking at a lamb getting slaughtered by the devil, the age of decay and our broken natures.

At the same time I think that Tim Keller and Redeemer have already seeded a movement that has already going out into the wild and is beyond them. The great thing about movements is that they almost always outgrow and outpace their instigators and my hunch is that we’re seeing that already.

I want to say that to me the vision sounds right. They really have no other choice and the leader/s who said “you’re probably a couple of years too late” was also probably right. That’s the way these things go. We’re always recognizing things too late and then realizing that we’re insufficient to the task. I want to encourage them and I’ll be excited to see what all comes of it.

We should also pray for Redeemer. I also know that in any substantive ministry the cost is almost always way beyond what anyone in the initial halcyon days imagined it would be. Christian ministry is always cruciform and the greater the impact the deeper the wounds. Again, you can’t shrink back when you see this, but you also move forward with the promise that in the light of that day the investment will be more than justified by the return which is always hidden from our eyes in the moment.