A Critique of Tim Keller’s “The Missional Church”
Pastor Tim Keller makes the case for a model of church and Christian ministry in his article "The Missional Church" aimed towards evangelism in a society that is no longer within “Christendom.” His aim is to see people saved by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and his method is to adapt the vocabulary and delivery of the preached Word and the ministry of the people that serves and helpfully clothes that Word to the non-Christian culture the church is within. As a part of this post-Christendom adaptation, Tim Keller would have the church exercise restraint in the issues of the day she speaks to and have her not take a defiant posture in that speech.
My goal here is to charitably review Pastor Keller’s case, and to demonstrate why I find it unpersuasive in light of Scripture and Christian reason.
1) Hypocrisy in Society: It’s Not Whether, but Which
Keller is right to account for the hypocrisy that will come with any form of Christendom this side of Christ’s return. But a rejoinder worth consideration is this: Any form of society will have hypocrisy this side of Christ’s return.
There will always be righteous standards applied unrighteously (and, considering we are sinful human beings, unrighteous standards altogether). The question is not whether we will have a society with hypocrisy and unrighteousness that will need to be constantly reformed and held to account. The question is instead which society with hypocrisy and unrighteousness we will have. A society that upholds mere Christianity as the framework for its laws and institutions has within itself the tools for its own constant reformation. A society that adopts any other worldview, however well-intentioned its proponents, will have either a named false god (such as Allah) or a vague false god (such as the will of the people, “progress,” or “science”) as the transcendent ground for its laws and moral values. Neither false god will give true metaphysical grounds for the society’s own correction.
2) The Case for Christendom
It is true, as Pastor Keller clearly believes, that our setting should have some influence on how we proclaim the message of Jesus Christ. The church clearly should adapt its preaching of the Gospel in some ways as circumstances dictate. To use the most obvious example, I would be a terrible preacher of the Gospel if I went to rural Haiti and did not adapt my proclamation of the Gospel from English to Creole. Human beings, by God’s providential governance of the world, have different languages, assumptions about how the world works, and cultural attachments that all affect how they hear (and, at least in the case of languages, whether they hear) the Good News of Jesus Christ. But the fact that I would not preach the Gospel in a society that has never experienced Christendom in precisely the same way as I might within Christendom does not mean that I will not advocate for Christian societal features there. My accounting for the fact that Christendom is dissolving in America as I preach does not mean I will never advocate for its being refortified or rebuilt.
One of the most basic questions we need to ask concerning our Christian faith and its relationship to the society at large is this: What kind of society is God most glorified by and man most blessed by? A society is made up of people, their covenant families (or lack thereof), their institutions, their laws, and their rulers. Knowing this, what species of these things and the sum total of their parts is most glorifying to the triune God and brings about the greatest good for the human beings touched by them?
Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.”
Amos 5:13-14
A society informed by the one true God, what He loves and what He hates, what He blesses and what He curses, is the kind of society worthy of our advocation. A society whose transcendental grounds for its legal structures and what it deems honorable, which all societies will inevitably have, is the Word of God is more glorifyingly pleasing to God and more helpful to humanity. Would it glorify God and bless humanity for Nepalese society, beginning tomorrow, to normalize and uphold monogamous lifelong marriage between a man and a woman? Was God glorified and were humans blessed as nineteenth-century India revoked protections of child abuse in temples? Is God pleased with our preaching of the Gospel having implications not merely for an individual’s eternal destiny but for how he, his neighbors, his rulers, his nation’s laws, and his society’s institutions think and act here and now? I think we can clearly know what kind of society God is pleased with through an examination of the types of society He is pleased with in Scripture.
The Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded, and he went out to meet [King] Asa and said to him, ‘Hear me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin: The Lord is with you while you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you. For a long time Israel was without the true God, and without a teaching priest and without law, but when in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, he was found by them. In those times there was no peace to him who went out or to him who came in, for great disturbances afflicted all the inhabitants of the lands. They were broken in pieces. Nation was crushed by nation and city by city, for God troubled them with every sort of distress. But you, take courage! Do not let your hands be weak, for your work shall be rewarded.’ As soon as Asa heard these words, the prophecy of Azariah the son of Oded, he took courage and put away the detestable idols from all the land of Judah and Benjamin and from the cities that he had taken in the hill country of Ephraim, and he repaired the altar of the Lord that was in front of the vestibule of the house of the Lord. And he gathered all Judah and Benjamin, and those from Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon who were residing with them, for great numbers had deserted to him from Israel when they saw that the Lord his God was with him. They were gathered at Jerusalem in the third month of the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa. They sacrificed to the Lord on that day from the spoil that they had brought 700 oxen and 7,000 sheep. And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul, but that whoever would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman. They swore an oath to the Lord with a loud voice and with shouting and with trumpets and with horns. And all Judah rejoiced over the oath, for they had sworn with all their heart and had sought him with their whole desire, and he was found by them, and the Lord gave them rest all around.
2 Chronicles 15:1-15
We have to keep in mind that a society that has shed Christendom, such as we’re seeing in Western Europe, will of necessity adopt some form of family structure, institutional structures, laws, and rulers, but these features will simply no longer be bound by the outlines of the Christian faith, the Bible, and the God who is their Author. The definition of and protections for family in Western Europe are self-evidently grounded in merely secular thought and guided by popular public opinion (public opinion which has, in turn, been shaped by secular public education and overtly humanistic, non-Christian media). They have simply displaced broad historic Christian definitions with ones grown from secular sentiments and an ever-shifting public will.
It seems Pastor Keller is advocating for the church to forego any call to rulers and those who influence society at large to live under the rule of the God who actually rules them. The church must instead preach the grace of God in Christ and call individuals to repentance and faith in Him while accepting the ungodliness of the society at large (though, I’m sure he would add, speaking to evil in the society in strategic ways at strategic times). This is not the posture of sons and daughters of the God who actually owns and governs the world. We are not guests in a neutral world. We are citizens, by God’s grace, on soil and rock made by (and soon to be remade by) our Abba Father. And all authority in Heaven and on earth have been given to His Son, the One through whom all these things were originally made.
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
Hebrews 1:1-2
The fall of Christendom is not something for us to assume cheerfully. Despite the argument that a post-Christendom West would make preaching the Gospel easier than it was in a world of folk who simply believe they were Christians by default, I offer that the Apostle Paul would not applaud Roman Caesars and institutions becoming more and more overtly pagan because it would make evangelism easier. Where God’s laws and ways are upheld and what is truly honorable is honored, human beings are blessed and God is glorified. A renewed Christendom would certainly have many people who think they are regenerate who are not, people who think they are going to Heaven merely because they wear the name of Christ like a badge and are in a Christian society. But that truth is not reason enough to surrender our trying to build Christian societies where virtue is honored, human life is respected, rights of property are upheld, and the practice of religion is protected. Christendom produced these Western fruits we are still enjoying, because it is Christianity that advocates the true moral standards of the true God. A secular society has no transcendental ground for morality, and so its laws will be dictated by the whims of some merely human authority, whether the majority of its citizens or the most influential and powerful among them. We should not be excited about such a society.
3) The Who and Why of Preaching
When Pastor Keller commends his missional church’s avoidance of tribal language, “we-they” language, sentimental language, and talking as though unbelievers were not present, I certainly admire his goal. He wants unbelievers to hear the message of the Good News of Jesus Christ, understand it, and trust in that Jesus, and he doesn’t want any needless barriers in between the proclaiming of that message and its being understood and believed. But is the use of Christian vocabulary, even vocabulary that is not immediately intelligible in all its fullness to an unbeliever, such a needless barrier? And is the pointed preaching on a Sunday to the church as its primary audience a needless barrier? I suggest not.
The preached Word on Sunday gatherings is primarily for the church. When Paul gathered the Ephesian elders for one last exhortation to their duty as pastors, knowing he would never see them again, he did not once exhort them to preach with the intelligibility of the message to unbelievers in mind. And this was to elders in a pagan city which celebrated (with near government sanction) the worship of the false goddess Artemis. These were pastors who had never even seen, much less lived in, a Christendom. If there were ever a setting where the call to pastors to preach the Word with those who do not know Christian language in mind as their primary charge were appropriate, it would seem this would be it. But Paul did not exhort these elders to preach with unbelieving Ephesian understanding foremost in their minds. Instead, he gave them the solemn charge that their lives and teaching were to be aimed at the protection of the sheep.
Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.
Acts 20:28-31
Living in a non-Christian society, even a city as pagan as ancient Ephesus, does not mean that pastors are to do their regular ministry with non-Christians as the primary audience of their speech or actions. Neither the primary audience nor the primary purpose of the calling laid upon our churches’ preaching has shifted.
4) Be Judicious In Adopting the World’s Language in Preaching
Pastor Keller assumes too much when he says that in preaching within Christendom “There is little or no real engagement, listening, or persuasion. Often, along with exhortation there is a heavy reliance on guilt to motivate behavior change.” I don’t think these are universal characteristics of preaching within Christendom, and I don’t believe they are essential characteristics, either. The mere fact of a society’s wide adoption of the Christian worldview does not mean the preaching within that society will necessarily eschew persuasion or rely heavily on guilt. Even if we can point to a majority of preaching within past Christendom having been like this (I don’t think we can), that doesn’t mean it must be that way.
Pastor Keller exhorts us to missional preaching and Christian witness that tells the Gospel in the culture’s stories, and the question worth asking about that exhortation is this: How would God have us preach and testify to His Gospel and Word? I certainly do not see Scripture teaching us to assume a long-term non-Christendom in all our Christian witness, and as demonstrated above, the Apostle Paul would have our pastors’ primary audience in preaching be the sheep of God’s flock. If we needn’t assume (and shouldn’t hope for) a permanently post-Christian society, and if our preaching is to have the first audience of God’s people in mind, it’s difficult to imagine that God would have us regularly cast our preaching in the language of unbelievers’ stories.
Evangelism to unbelievers will inevitably use imagery, analogy, and points of contact with the stories and media of the day. Even then we should measure those uses carefully such that the force and content of God’s Word is not deteriorated, but using these contemporary elements of one’s culture is to be expected in good evangelism to unbelievers. But the church’s preaching, whether that church be Tim Keller’s model of church or another, is not called primarily to be an act of evangelism to unbelievers. We should be extremely judicious in our application of the stories and themes of unbelieving media to the preached Word of God in our gathered assemblies.
5) An Overstated Position on Supposed Intolerance
While Pastor Keller gives a useful commendation of working and thinking with Christian distinctiveness, his point in that that commendation that “the charge of intolerance is perhaps the main ‘defeater of the gospel in the non-Christian West” merits some comment. First, the charge of something should be treated very differently from the evidenced reality of something. Christians can be charged with many things in our current tumultuous days in America, but a great deal of those charges are spurious and indeed often manic, hysterical, and grossly exaggerated. But even if the charge of intolerance towards Christians in the West were granted, the next question we should ask is, “What do you mean by ‘intolerant?'” Intolerance in the twenty-first century is, in the common vernacular of at the very least the Secular Left, a lack of affirmation and even a simple lack of celebration for any given behavior or sentiment. Any of us who do not fully support the LGBTQ+ agenda would be immediately labeled as “trans-phobic,” “homophobic,” and “intolerant.” So the question is not merely, “Is there evidence of Christian intolerance?” It’s also, “What is meant by ‘intolerance?'” If we mean that Christians do not bless and sanction homosexual activity or transgendered identities, we certainly are intolerant. But terms must be clearly identified, just as charges should be evidenced before they are accepted as valid.
Additionally, is it actually true that this supposed charge of intolerance is Christianity’s greatest “defeater” in the West? Granted, Pastor Keller wrote this twenty years ago, but I’m not convinced that even then supposed intolerance was the underminer of Christian witness it’s often made out to be. It seems just as likely that the actual content of the Christian worldview and Scriptures, namely their stout rejection of sexual immorality and positive teachings on masculinity and femininity, cool the culture’s reception of the Christian framework as much as any true charges of intolerance. Is there virtually any exhortation concerning homosexuality, God’s plan for male and female sex in marriage, or male headship and female submission in marriage that the mainstream American culture would not bristle at? It strikes me as much more plausible that more than any charge of intolerance we can supposedly clear ourselves of through better delivery, it is in point of fact the Bible’s actual explicit teachings on sexuality, sexual behavior, and gender that our culture has little patience with.
In Closing
At the street level, it’s worth each of us asking ourselves why we find a more restrictive methods of preaching the Gospel that limits our preaching to the personal eternal destiny of the hearers or to theological truths untethered to their societal implications attractive. I suspect that for many of us, especially those of us in urban, higher class suburban, white collar, or vocationally or culturally elite circles, the attraction is that in this model of ministry we do not need to associate ourselves with the implications of Christian truth that are most unpopular with our peers and neighbors. If I can keep the conversation merely on precise theological grounds or on the moment of initial faith and decision for individuals, I do not need to appear as backwards and unsophisticated as if I were to say that our society is wrong to affirm two men can marry or that it is wrong for our nation to draft women to fight in wars.
I offer that, with all due respect to Pastor Keller and his ministry, the biggest distinction between what I would commend and what his article commends here is at the foundational level. Pastor Keller wants to glorify God by preaching the Gospel in a society that is non-Christian and sees strategic adaptation of the language and priorities of the preachers and the church as the best way to do so. I want to glorify God by preaching the Gospel as the message of the King of my society and of all creation and see proclamation in the church and outside of her as requiring the application of the assumptions and the worldview of the Bible. If you truly believe Christ is King everywhere, not merely in our hearts, I urge you to adopt an approach other than Pastor Keller’s as he has outlined here.