As an avid walker, I perambulate the Upper West Side of Manhattan regularly, both alone and weekly with a friend, for exercise and conversation. While on solo walks, I often listen to a Tim Keller sermon, usually listening to the same sermon several times over, until it really sinks into my brain, heart and soul, even to change my way of thinking.
On these walks I stop when I see plaques organizations have attached on their buildings. There are many on West End Avenue, my favorite walking path. There are plaques to great composers who lived for some time in Manhattan, like George Gershwin and his brother Ira, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Miles Davis, Béla Bartók, and living on the Upper East Side in his later years, Igor Stravinsky. Edgar Allen Poe, Humphrey Bogart, Babe Ruth and Norman Rockwell are also remembered with grateful words in bronze, placed on the outside walls of buildings they lived in here in Manhattan. While older plaques are in bronze, newer ones are made of metal with printed words.
But here in Manhattan, there is a dearth of plaques of spiritual leaders, though many have come through here and have done great work. Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights has a plaque on it for, among many historical highlights, being the church Henry Ward Beecher pastored and where Martin Luther King first presented his “I Have a Dream” speech before giving it at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1963. The lack of plaques to pastors may be due to how few of them actually lived here. I think of two that did: David Wilkerson and Tim Keller. Both originally from Pennsylvania, they moved to Manhattan to live and minister here.
In 1988 Tim and Kathy Keller drove up to Manhattan to scope it out, as they were considering a call from their denomination to come start a church here. Initially Kathy couldn’t see how they could live in the city with three young boys, and she resisted Tim’s growing interest. But God overcame her reluctance by bringing to mind all that he had done in their lives, so that, as she has said, “asking me to live in a cardboard box on the streets wouldn’t be too much to ask.”
Thankfully, God led Tim and Kathy to move their family to New York City to start that church. With some New York Christian friend’s contacts, they were able to rent space to meet at a Seventh Day Adventist church named Church of the Advent Hope by the German congregation who established it back in 1956, at 111 E. 87th Street. Since Seventh Day Adventists meet on Saturday for services, it was the perfect space to start in.
So on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1989, Redeemer Presbyterian Church began to meet there. As the hackneyed phrase goes, “and the rest was history.” Redeemer remained there while it grew, ultimately holding four services each Sunday until 1993. To commemorate the historical start to one of the most successful churches ever planted in New York City, a plaque commissioned by the Church of the Advent Hope was ceremoniously unveiled on Monday, October 6, 2025. A smattering of long-term Redeemer members attended, and the church provided refreshments.
Kathy Keller, who unveiled the plaque, said she was both moved and encouraged that the gospel-centered message had permeated the Seventh Day Adventist church, as an unexpected and happy consequence of their association.
