How Timothy Keller Spreads the Gospel in New York City, and Beyond

Tim Keller has a great interview by The Atlantic that you can view here.  Much of the discussion surrounds his new book, King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus.  I appreciated this question and answer:

The Reason for God spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. How has being a successful author changed your relationship with the people in your church?

That's a fair question, and a good one, actually, and a wise one, even. The upside is, many, many people show up because they've read the book. An example of this is, I met a German PhD student at a local university who was wrestling with whether he believed in God or not, found the book The Reason for God in the airport, read it, was very intrigued with it, said "Gee, I would love to hear more about this," and realized he lived within walking distance of where the church was. He just looked at the book jacket and said, "Wait a minute, I can walk to this place." And he just showed up.

Those are the good stories. I would say that the problem with ministers who write books is that people make the church a destination church. Which is to say they either drive in from a long distance away because they say, "Oh, let's go into town, have a bite to eat, and go hear the minister whose book I read." Or they may even fly. There are certain churches where the minister has a high profile that become destination churches. I don't think it actually directly hurts to have an additional 500 people every Sunday who show up and don't live here and aren't actually part of the church. In some way you could say it's cheap thrills—they fill up the seats, and it's really kind of festive, and it's nice. But it actually can give the rest of the congregation the mistaken idea that the congregation is growing—which it has, but it's not actually growing as much as they think because the folks are not really part of the community.

That doesn't hurt. And yet I could imagine if this went on for 20 years, I think you'd actually have to start to say, "Which part of the church is the community of people who are here, and which part of the church is coming to hear the celebrity?" I would say that because I'm near the end of my career, I don't think it's going to harm the church, at all.