How Do You Want Your Children to Remember You? (with Michael Keller)

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

0:00:00 – (Michael Keller): I got one of the better gospel presentations in my home. And guess what? I wasn’t saved by that gospel presentation. You know why? Because you’re not saved by the best gospel presentation. You’re saved by the gospel. I think it’s really important for people to hear is that it’s not. You’re not going to save your kid because you do the perfect statement and gospel presentation. And I wasn’t. I grew up with that.

0:00:24 – (Michael Keller): It was only later in college, through a college ministry, that I was able to come to faith through a long, difficult process. But what did help was seeing my parents forgive and repent. So that was a better distillation of the gospel in action for me than any kind of thing that my parents said for me growing up.

0:00:58 – (Collin Hansen): I want to tell a story about how I learned something that changed my life. It was the first Keller center retreat in 2023. Our inaugural fellows, a couple dozen of them, did not know each other well. We had just finished a team building scavenger hunt crisscrossing Manhattan and we settled into a Sunday school room at Redeemer, west side, West 83rd Street. We’re about to do a zoom call with Tim Keller from his hospital room and it ended up being the last time that many of us spoke with.

0:01:30 – (Collin Hansen): He would die within weeks. And part of what he did there was leave notes behind of what he wanted to see from the Keller center for Cultural Apologetics. In the exercise we did in that Sunday school room before we talked to Tim, I led a discussion on the great deturching this unprecedented decline in Christian practice in the United States since the year 2000. I’ve led this exercise many times before and since without incident.

0:01:54 – (Collin Hansen): The goal is really to identify what events and trends really shift culture. In this case, a majority of Americans had the Internet in their homes by the year 2000. That was the tipping point at smartphones, social media, now AI. And you can see that the dawn of the information age is perhaps the biggest story of the 21st century so far. But this exercise did not sit well with many of our fellows. At part, we weren’t very comfortable with each other. Some wanted to dig a lot deeper with ideas and go a lot further back into history.

0:02:25 – (Collin Hansen): Others saw the Internet as more of a vehicle rather than the driver of cultural change. I think some, just due to my lack of leadership, misunderstood the exercise altogether. But I will never forget Michael Keller’s response. He pulled some of his dad’s notes on how to share the gospel in our current age, and he described various overlapping and Conflicting cultural narratives that help us make sense of the world apart from God.

0:02:50 – (Collin Hansen): And then he showed how Jesus critiques and ultimately completes those narratives. Just brilliant work. And the whole center immediately rallied around that idea. That’s what led to us recording and writing the group study, Making Sense of Us, Exploring Six Stories that Shape How We Live. Michael Keller graciously wrote the foreword. And we rallied behind a new book, the Stories We Live, Seven Cultural Myths that Fail Us and the Story that Never Will, published by Zondervan. It’s written by Michael and his father Tim, based on those notes that we saw in 2023.

0:03:24 – (Collin Hansen): Ever since that day, I’ve adapted what I learned into my own teaching, not just about cultural narratives, but about how we think about the various deep levels of cultural change. So I’m eager to talk again with my friend Michael Keller about this book on Gospel Bound. We’re also going to discuss another new book Michael wrote, co wrote, called Talking to Kids About Hard, Honest Conversations When Life Gets Complicated. Wrote that with Rebecca Hannah, published in New the Growth Press.

0:03:50 – (Collin Hansen): Michael, welcome to Gospel Bound.

0:03:52 – (Michael Keller): Wow. Thanks for having me, Colin. Thanks for that, that trip down memory lane. I remember that, that meeting and, you know, just, we haven’t actually talked about this. I don’t think we have. But I really appreciate when the room was filled with all these people, nobody really knew each other. And the pivot that you were able to make when people were like, I don’t. Let’s, let’s not do broad. Let’s go deeper. And your humility and ability to say, okay.

0:04:17 – (Michael Keller): And I just thought that was really good leadership on your side. So I’m not trying to stroke your ego or anything, but I’ve thought about that moment, but we haven’t talked about it. I think it was really an interesting time when we were trying to figure out what is this going to be and where are we going? That’s why you were doing the exercise. And ironically, even though the exercise didn’t go well, it actually did go well because it got to what did we want to be?

0:04:44 – (Michael Keller): And we kind of rallied around this idea of how do we do apologetics in the modern world. I’m looking at this computer is propped up on our post Christendom apologetics book. So just excited about all the stuff that we’ve been doing.

0:05:02 – (Collin Hansen): Well, let’s jump right in and talk about the stories we live by. People want to know how the book came about. I know you were talking with your dad about this book even in his final days, and I’m wondering Did he see this book and this work that you have been helping to carry on? Did he see this as a legacy project for himself?

0:05:27 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, that’s a great question, Colin. I mean, the original. Original origin of this book was he came out, I think, in 2015 or 16 with a book called Making Sense of God, which was a prequel to the Reason for God. But when he asked me what I thought, I think there’s a benefit of being a son sometimes because I said I don’t like it. I said, I thought it was really. It’s a good book, but it’s very philosophical, it’s very dense, and I feel like the average person, it’s gonna be too hard to get into.

0:05:56 – (Michael Keller): I said, the best. Some of the best stuff in there is buried. It’s all this stuff about cultural narratives and stories that we live by that are these stories that sit around in culture. They’re more caught than taught, that they’re not arguments as much as they’re imagination moving stories that we. That we live by, for lack of a better phrase. And I said, I wish there was a Cliff Notes version for that. And he said, to my surprise, he said, well, let’s do that project together. Let’s write that together.

0:06:27 – (Michael Keller): And yes, he’s had a lot of these stories. They don’t come up in five years. These are long trends that our modern stories tend to be answering. Pre modern stories, they tend to evolve. Other stories, they’ve been around, and my father had been writing about them, but I don’t think they were highlighted. I don’t think they were front and center. And the goal of this book was to do that. And so was, I think, the Keller center as well, try to sort of help equip people with these sort of.

0:07:01 – (Michael Keller): They’re not untold, they’re told all the time. They’re just. They’re hidden stories that are behind everything, whether you’re a Christian or not. They affect us and that we swim them. It’s sort of the air we breathe, so to speak.

0:07:11 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, absolutely. Now, you can give a chance to explain some of these stories, but I just thought, let’ Switch. One of these stories, do you think that’s captured in this book is most compelling to our world today and why?

0:07:25 – (Michael Keller): Which are the most compelling? That’s a great question. They all intermix, and I think different people probably gravitate to different ones. The highlights are identity, freedom, power, happiness, truth, which is also science, morality and progress. And they work as a mesh because the identity narrative is sometimes captured in the phrase you do you. Or follow your heart, look on the inside, find out who you are, align the world with that from the outside.

0:08:00 – (Michael Keller): But then the freedom narrative, which is you need to get freedom so that you do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want, as long as you don’t harm anybody. But what’s the reason to have that freedom? It’s usually to get an identity, to discover your identity, to find your identity. So they go together, but they also are intentioned. The power narrative says that everything at the end of the day is about power. It’s only your power versus my power.

0:08:24 – (Michael Keller): And that story, which is more a newer one, that story looks at the identity narrative of you trying to get your identity. Is it just a power move? So that’s a conflict. But they move us to different degrees sometimes. Our own personal story. Hey, I was trying to get my identity. I wanted to find it in this job. I wanted to find it in this person. He or she rejected me. This industry rejected me. And you know what? It was just their power versus my power. So you morphed from one story to another one.

0:08:54 – (Michael Keller): But they’re not cognizant often. And I think that we bring this out in the book. And every culture has questions that the culture answers for us that we don’t have to. Very few people sit around and go, what’s the point of life? Who am I? Why do I exist? What’s wrong with the world? What will put it right? Very few people ask that question. You don’t have to, because the stories that we live in have already answered those things that we kind of know that we should try to live, pursue our happiness, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

0:09:26 – (Michael Keller): We kind of know that we need to get on the right side of history and progress in the right direction. Colin, have you seen these? What are your thoughts on it?

0:09:37 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, the one that I come back to all the time is, are questions related to identity then? One of the things that Tim had talked about was that idolatry was a major focus, especially of the 20th century. But that this pursuit of identity, well, it did not start by any means in the 20th century. Definitely seems to have been building a momentum. And I think these stories are part of how we try to concoct and conceive that identity.

0:10:08 – (Collin Hansen): But even the pursuit itself of identity is one of the chief narratives there. And specifically the assumption that I cannot form my identity from some authority outside of myself. It cannot come from religion. It cannot come from community. It cannot come from my parents. It has to be Something that comes from within. The irony, of course, is that everybody is doing the same thing. So it is a communal venture. And as you guys point out in this book, because of the nature of individualism being expressive, that identity is only recognized in the response of. In the affirmation from that community.

0:10:54 – (Collin Hansen): So it doesn’t really work. But the narrative remains extremely powerful. So that’s the one. I’m writing some sermons right now, going through Daniel, going through Esther, and absolutely, the identity question keeps coming up.

0:11:10 – (Michael Keller): And I think what’s difficult for. If you’re a Christian listening to this, or you’re kind of suspicious of culture, you have to realize that these things are not all positive and all negative. There is something to affirm in all these stories. Chris Watkins was going through these cultural narratives, and he says, you know, Michael, did you notice that all these narratives are actually Christian heresies to some degree?

0:11:35 – (Michael Keller): And I was like, no, I actually never thought of it that way. He goes, which makes sense, though. If Western culture has been affected by Judeo Christian values and virtues, then it makes sense that these stories are aspects of Christianity that maybe have key elements that have been taken out. But that means there’s something that we can affirm and then something we have to critique and then something we have to redirect, which is what Paul does in Acts 17. Dan Strange writes about this and mapped it out a lot better.

0:12:07 – (Michael Keller): But I just think it’s really important for us to not. We want to think in binaries, is it all good, all bad? And I think that that’s unhelpful and apologetically. If you are talking to somebody who doesn’t believe or whatnot. I think it’s important for people to realize that why aren’t they? It’s because these stories are working in their lives to some degree, because they’ve answered the questions that they need. But then I think it’s a helpful move.

0:12:35 – (Michael Keller): If I go to my kids and say, everything you’re doing is wrong. I just think you lose the narrative when you say, hey, actually, you’re what you’re going for. I get. I see why you want an identity. I see why you want freedom. There’s good aspects of these things, but here’s where they’re being misapplied, misused. I think there’s a better conversation and potential for change in somebody’s life in that sense.

0:12:55 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, that’s a great perspective. You can see that that identity narrative, that identity question only makes sense in a world after the first Advent, after the coming of Christ, because You would have had that almost exclusively or exclusively external identity, group, communal identity, and also the mixing and matching of your religion from your culture, from your politics and your individual perspective.

0:13:28 – (Collin Hansen): Those are concepts introduced by Christianity. So absolutely, we’re only having this conversation about expressive individualism, about identity, about the power of those narratives in a world that has been shaped by Christianity, but has taken it beyond what was intended originally biblically and what Jesus was teaching into a place, like you said, it becomes a heresy there.

0:13:52 – (Michael Keller): We bring this up in the book. I think I mentioned a story that my father mentioned, which was. I think it was his great grandfather. So it’d be my great great grandfather. He was in. Outside of Naples, Italy, and his father was a potter, and his father was a potter. And every. And if he tried to go to any other town, they would have said, no, no, we know you. You have to be a potter. And so he was given a couple options. He’s like, you can be a potter when you grow up. You can go to the monastery, you can go into the army, or you can go to America.

0:14:23 – (Michael Keller): Go to America. And he chose. He chose number four. He went to America. So why. Because there was a great restriction when the world told you who you had to be. There’s problems with that. But I think what we’re seeing, as you pointed out, Colin, with what you can call expressive individualism, is there’s great problems when it has to be internally focused. Because just quick list. It’s a new form of performance.

0:14:50 – (Michael Keller): You have to keep finding who the real you is. Which version is it? It’s incoherent to some degree. Is it the. Is it Michael Keller who wants a peanut butter brownie? Is it Michael Keller who wants to work out which. Who’s the real Michael Keller? It’s too fragile. It’s inconsistent. It hides its moral framework because there’s still a way that you evaluate your identities that you come up with. So we talk about all that in the book, but I think it’s just important for the listener to hear that it’s not just.

0:15:18 – (Michael Keller): All identity is important. You need one. There’s good things about an identity. You need one that’s internally and externally consistent. But we try to make the argument there’s a true and better story that both externally and internally, when identity is something you either have to achieve or has been placed on you from someone else, those both do violence. What better identity than being a son or daughter of the most high God that can never be taken from you and doesn’t have to be earned? And doesn’t do violence to who you are.

0:15:55 – (Michael Keller): So that’s the idea. But what are your thoughts?

0:15:58 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, well, just keep asking my questions here. We’re talking stories we live by, seven cultural myths that failed us and a story that never will. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about this question about my own books, Michael, but it came up as I was thinking about yours. If your book is successful, what would change in the church? What would look differently in the world? What do you pray for?

0:16:22 – (Collin Hansen): You know, as authors, we want our books to be sold. We hope that the investment of our time pays off for our family in different ways. Of course, all authors care about that, but we do this because we want to make a difference. So what difference do you hope you pray that this book would make? What would change?

0:16:42 – (Michael Keller): Well, the first part of the question, it’s a great.

0:16:45 – (Collin Hansen): I’ve never.

0:16:46 – (Michael Keller): I’ve never been asked that question. And it’s a great question, Colin. I. I probably should have done a better job of thinking about that beforehand because my only answer was like, dad and I talked about doing it. He was drawing the outlines in his hospital bed. I have pictures of where, you know, those. Those whiteboards in. In your hospital room. He was actually outlining this book there. And I felt beholden to try to get it out as soon as possible because cultural stories change.

0:17:16 – (Michael Keller): I just felt the need to do that. So that’s why I wrote the book. First book I’ve written before. I use the lens of my own grief, my own personal story. So I think it’s unique in that sense. Because what better way to talk about stories instead of it being. If the goal was to bring this down so that we can understand it and not just have it buried in a bunch of philosophy. That was the goal, but I guess the second half, what would my hope be?

0:17:43 – (Michael Keller): I would hope it would help us a change, maybe how we talk about how we try to meet people who aren’t believers. A lot of times people aren’t even seeking because they don’t need to. But when we can kind of maybe come at it from a story lens. These days, people aren’t asking questions like, is Christianity true? Not as much. They’re asking, is it good? And that’s a story that’s actually helpful because now you can evaluate which story is a better story and which one explains my experiences better.

0:18:15 – (Michael Keller): I hope it helps us change how we talk about faith and cultural narratives, A, and then B, hopefully we can use it as an evaluative lens for ourselves. I Don’t think we realize, particularly people inside the church, how much they’re beholden by these stories. I don’t know if I talked to you about this, but sometimes in a Christian subculture, people throw around phrases like, I think God wants me to do.

0:18:43 – (Michael Keller): I think God wants me to do this. There’s a huge assumption in that statement that you can get in touch. Exactly. Older Christians, Puritans and whatnot, would be very skeptical that they could actually, if they heard something or they felt something, how do you know it’s not Satan? How do you know it’s not their own corrupt heart? How do you know that? But there’s this. This sort of common sense of.

0:19:06 – (Michael Keller): Because I think of the identity and freedom narratives, I think we feel very good of assessing what God wants for our lives. And maybe if we looked at these stories better, we’d go, maybe I’ve absorbed this in an area that maybe I need to evaluate more of. I don’t know. You’ve read the book. What do you think?

0:19:27 – (Collin Hansen): That’s absolutely the case. And it. It carries on with our Making Sense of Us curriculum, the belief that when you’re doing apologetics now, you’re doing this also for the church, not just for non Christians. When you’re doing evangelism, you’re also edifying, something that your dad talked about all the time. And so when we’re talking about these cultural narratives, yes, it is an evangelistic strategy, yes, it is an apologetics training, but it’s also just basic discipleship to recognize that even as mature Christians, these cultural narratives are so incredibly powerful that we’re swept up in them.

0:20:05 – (Collin Hansen): And they’re all the more powerful because we don’t know that we are.

0:20:09 – (Michael Keller): And this is the Making Sense of Us book that Kawasana put out. It’s great. High production values, great commentary, 10, 15 minute videos on each one of these. Super helpful if you’re more of a visual person to kind of go through this stuff.

0:20:27 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, they’re definitely companions that are trying to do some similar things under the same broad overview in different and complementary ways. I’m wondering, Michael, what else is in your dad’s notes? Can we expect more collaborative works? What’s the future? Hold here. What are you thinking of next?

0:20:51 – (Michael Keller): Well, there his, you know, my father, being who he was, listed out 99 books that he felt that we could make with his material. Yeah, you laugh. Well, I know. I think he thought it’d be funny to, like, leave 99, 100, but

0:21:12 – (Collin Hansen): he

0:21:12 – (Michael Keller): didn’t want us making new material but there’s so much old material that’s out there. I think we put out the Gospel in Life website. There’s a Gospel Life publishes my father’s sermons, but they also have articles. And we found an article that. Where he was working on. On about political ideologies and how each one. What they. You know, how what. Which one. Each what does each one idolize? Which one does each one demonize?

0:21:42 – (Michael Keller): And we put it on the website. So there’s just over 100,000 different files on his computer. The man really was writing like he was running out of time as he was. And so there’s stuff. I don’t think there’s nothing in the works other than this book at the moment, but I think right now my family’s concentrating on other projects. But, yeah, there’s stuff, more than enough stuff to kind of keep us all interested over the years.

0:22:15 – (Collin Hansen): I think part of it’s just a window into his writing and his thinking process. The books that he turned out from 2008 until basically 2022, that came out, and I continue to say, I don’t know who else in Christian history in some ways produced that many different kinds of works in that compressed period of time that had such wide reach and enduring legacy. But part of it’s because he had been doing much preparatory work, including the sermons, of course, but this kind of writing and research and collaboration, or just collection research that he would do. So no surprise that long before the books existed, he would have had a lot of things in process, no doubt.

0:23:06 – (Collin Hansen): Another question, and it’s one that I, of course, get a lot of time just because of my own work, of course. But it’s more personal for you, for obvious reasons. How do you take ongoing criticism of your dad? It doesn’t. Doesn’t seem to go away. I do wonder sometimes why he seems to be so singled out. But I do think it’s also a testament to his influence. I think it’s also a testament to his integrity in his godliness.

0:23:36 – (Collin Hansen): I just wonder how you take it as a son.

0:23:41 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, good. Yeah. You know, he’s a public figure. He’s written publicly, and now it’s a shame sometimes that. I’ve thought about this a lot of times, some of the criticisms, you’re like, oh, you know, dad would have been able to answer that. But he’s not here with us anymore. So now his. He’s left us enough works, his body of work, his sermon corpus, you know, over whatever it is, 1600 sermons, curriculum stuff. I think his work can answer Almost all the objections that people have if they, if they go through it.

0:24:16 – (Michael Keller): So he’s just going to have to be, you know, I’m an academic to the degree that as a, you know, as a student, I think that people will have to evaluate him in that kind of circle in space. So if you’re talking about the kind of just online jabs that people make, I mean, that’s, that’s the, what’s it called? That’s the online. It’s the world. But as, but when you have critical scholarship that wants to look over his stuff, that’s going to happen. And I’m able to remove the man as who he was for me, as my father, away from his ideas that have to be, you know, way up under the scrutiny of history.

0:24:58 – (Michael Keller): And that’s going to happen. That’s going to have to happen. So we’ll see.

0:25:02 – (Collin Hansen): So just. It doesn’t personally affect you.

0:25:05 – (Michael Keller): I mean, other than the fact that if I read something, I’m like, oh, I could answer that, but it’s not being asked of me, it’s asked of dad. So people will have to go to his work to kind of get those answers.

0:25:16 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I do appreciate the work that he did toward the end of his life to anticipate some of those and to help establish a record of that. And again, most of the time I see something, I think, oh, I guess they just haven’t read this, or I guess they just haven’t listened to this.

0:25:35 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, well, come on. And I know this for myself too. I think when you. Sometimes it’s easier to come up with a straw man. Sometimes it’s because you haven’t looked at it yourself, sometimes because there’s just real serious disagreement and you just gonna have to agree to disagree with the people that you interlock with. So. But some of the criticisms are just kind of, you know, the whole. The Third Wayism stuff.

0:26:00 – (Michael Keller): I remember dad having some funny critique about that going, well, hold on. Unless you’re the complete actual polar person, like on the, on an issue, then you’re somewhere, you’re somewhere in the middle there. But then he tried really hard to show this wasn’t a middle way. Chris Watkins had a better term for it, diagonalization. That his point was the Christianity Jesus combines things that are not on the same spectrum in profound and different ways.

0:26:30 – (Michael Keller): They’re diagonalized, they’re off the spectrum. So third way wasn’t in the middle way. Third way was outside of our normal ways of thinking things. But when you want to kind of come up with A caricature of a person. You can do that. But I think when you. In an academic world, you study, you see what his responses are to those things. You go, oh, okay, he had an answer for that stuff.

0:26:50 – (Collin Hansen): One more question here, and then we’ll turn to talking to kids about hard things. I’m wondering, Michael, what did you learn about church planting from doing it yourself that you did not even learn growing up and you didn’t learn from your dad?

0:27:03 – (Michael Keller): Well, I want to be clear. We planted our church about 10. It’ll be 10 years in the spring, and there’s scratch church planting. And then what we did, which was we hive church planted. And I think there is a distinction. I want to give a shout out to church planters who scratch plant this. It’s much more difficult. We planted a site at a Redeemer west side that came out. We had funding. We had people.

0:27:34 – (Michael Keller): Yes. Within a year, 75% of people that we polled were new to the church, which is, you know, if you read center church, if you read some other. Any actually people who write on church planting, that’s actually what happens is churches are one of the best. New churches are one of the best places to reach new people. Nobody believes it until they actually do it. And then you do the numbers. You’re like, oh.

0:27:58 – (Michael Keller): Because you think, oh, we’re just slicing up the pie into smaller spaces. That hasn’t been my experience. So I’ve learned that until you actually do it, it’s hard to actually see the fruit of it. But we Redeemer people don’t know this, but when dad was around, Redeemer was a set number and a set amount of money that came in every year. We far surpassed the. It was three Redeemers. Now we’re six Redeemers moving on to more and more and more in this network.

0:28:35 – (Michael Keller): So we’re meeting more people and more doing more work than before, and it’s just expanding. And we don’t need. Doesn’t have to be known as like, one Redeemer, but it’s. It’s. I think it’s been effective and it’s still going. And that was sort of Dad’s vision. Why leave one mega church when you can actually break these things up and they can all continue and replicate and keep doing what they’re doing?

0:29:01 – (Michael Keller): So I don’t know if I answered your question there. I mean.

0:29:04 – (Collin Hansen): Well, that’s not it.

0:29:05 – (Michael Keller): You’re looking at it from the outside.

0:29:06 – (Collin Hansen): What are your thoughts? Well, that is not an easy legacy to pull off, and especially not under the conditions in New York, if we’re only looking at, say, the cost of real estate. So what Redeemer was able to do, your dad’s vision, other leaders vision at Redeemer of being able to anticipate not only the missional reach that could come from breaking up in these different areas, but then also the way that that would enable the church to move on from Tim’s voice in particular, but then also still being able to help lay the groundwork for stable buildings, two of them so far, at least, on the east side and the west side.

0:29:50 – (Michael Keller): And we’re getting a building coming on in a third one. And there’s been more cool stuff that’s still happening.

0:29:56 – (Collin Hansen): So that’s amazing. And of course, when I was working on the book that was in the middle of really of COVID and I remember looking back and of course, I think the immediate years after Tim’s retirement were difficult for Redeemer. It was a hard transition generationally, but in some ways that nobody could have anticipated. Covid gave the church a chance to reset. In some ways, the loss was devastating economically, was more difficult in New York than anywhere else.

0:30:29 – (Collin Hansen): And yet it also, in retrospect, was a kind of reboot for the network in ways that have really turned out well. So it’s a reminder to me the way the Lord is so kind to provide in ways that we couldn’t have planned. And your dad planned as much as anybody could have.

0:30:49 – (Michael Keller): Yeah. The last thing I’ll say on this is, and you knew my father, so it’s like I’m talking to you. But for those who don’t, my father was the kind of person who made it easy not to want to replicate him because, A, you could see his abilities in a certain area, but B, he had this presence and humility where it wasn’t like, a, oh, I want to try to emulate him. And from a legacy point of view, for me personally, but also the Redeemer Network, I think the best legacy and everybody agrees with this, is not to try to replicate and try to do what he did.

0:31:26 – (Michael Keller): And the most honoring thing that we could do is not to point back to Tim Keller, that he wouldn’t want that he would know also that’s not what’s needed. The most honoring thing is not to point back to him. It’s to point forward to what he always pointed to. And he pointed to two things, Colin. He pointed to the gospel changes everything, and it changes you. If you can be put in a way that you can understand it And I think Redeemer and I think a lot of other people have been affected by Redeemer. And my father understand that, that the gospel changes everything, but it changes you when it can be put in a way that you can understand it.

0:32:00 – (Michael Keller): And I’m excited to do that imperfectly, as we all are, in the ways that we can. And I think this book is in that leg, is in that vein, because it’s trying to help people see the true and better story. And maybe we can. People will be convinced by that. And even if they’re not, hopefully they’ll at least see that the stories that they’re currently living on are incomplete.

0:32:28 – (Collin Hansen): That book again, the Stories We Live By, Seven Cultural Myths that Fail Us and the Story that Never Will. That’s with Zondervan. Let’s turn to the next book. Talking to Kids about Hard Things. Honest conversations. When Life Gets complicated. I felt in some ways, Michael, when I was reading the first book, that I was kind of my typical editor, publisher, all that sort of stuff. Then I read the next book and I felt like you guys were reading me, and I felt like, oh.

0:32:53 – (Collin Hansen): Oh, that hurt. That was. That was painful. You guys really got me in a lot of good ways.

0:32:59 – (Michael Keller): Go into that more, because I want to hear your. We actually, you and I haven’t talked about your thoughts on the book, so I’d love to hear your. And I’m not saying tell me more about why you think it’s so great, but what do you think that that book. What was so interesting?

0:33:11 – (Collin Hansen): I just. I think I’m in a season of. Of conviction as a parent of. I just see lists of things that you guys talk about in there, about biblically, of course, do not exasperate your children and things like that. And I think, oh, I’m doing way too much of that right now. And so there were so many parts that I was highlighting, but I wasn’t highlighting them because I thought, oh, that’ll be good to ask Michael about. Some of that was the case.

0:33:38 – (Collin Hansen): But mostly I thought, oh, that’s the Holy Spirit bringing good and necessary conviction. Because I think when it comes to parenting, yes, you’re hit in such a way that says, oh, that my sin is exposed. I need to ask God for forgiveness. I need to ask my family for forgiveness. I need to throw myself at the foot of the throne of grace here. But it’s kind of different with parenting because your motivation is love still toward them.

0:34:08 – (Collin Hansen): So you look at it and you think, well, I want to be better for them. I want to love them more effectively. So it’s not self centered. It’s okay. This repentance is itself expressed in how I would love and care for my family. So I want to just ask you first though a question about how this book with Rebecca, you guys are good friends in the neighborhood, a lot of daughters there between across the street, between the family, between the families and loved your mother’s forward.

0:34:41 – (Collin Hansen): Her work, her teaching about parenting is one of the most grace filled things that anybody could hear because she’s so honest about her imperfections as a mother and so honest about how God still provided in so many different ways. And so tell us just a little bit about how the book came about because most famously parenting was a subject that your parents did not write a book about.

0:35:09 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, it’s a great. So it’s, you know, it’s funny these two books, the stories we live by. I felt the need to do it because dad and I said we were going to do it this. There’s sometimes there’s books that you didn’t look for, but they just sort of happen. That’s what happened with Becca. Hannah, who Becca is, is our children, was our children’s director. Now she’s our director of family life and she’s like we need to help equip our families. And I was very anti parenting book in the sense that I feel like a lot of them.

0:35:49 – (Michael Keller): Well, we talked about this. This was my first chapter, we talk about this where I said the problem with most parenting books that I’ve seen is that even though they might color it and dress it up in a certain way, it still gets down to if you do, if you do A and B and C, your kid will turn out good over here. And it. Which felt like it just heaps on shame on you and things that you’re doing wrong and stuff.

0:36:14 – (Michael Keller): Hey. And the other problem was is I don’t want anybody to look at my own parenting and say are you a good parent or not? But that’s why this book was fascinating because that’s what it talks about is it says this is the. It addresses that from the room. When it comes to how not just how parenting books work, but how we work. We want to make sure our kids are successful. We want to micromanage them and do these things.

0:36:36 – (Michael Keller): And in the book I talk about bunker parents. The way that you live your life is you try to hunker down and keep all the culture out and within bubble parents where you kind of shrink wrap your kid and you just want to protect them in bubble wrap. And the way you do that, though, is by not ever confronting them on anything and letting culture just do whatever it wants. And then we can kind of fail in both those areas. But the crux of the books is basically your kids need your repentance more than they need your perfection.

0:37:10 – (Michael Keller): And I think that’s what parents need to hear a lot of. And that comes out of, I guess, how I was parented, because my parents and my mom says this in the forward, so I’m not revealing anything. But my parents were not great parents, but they were great at grace, and they were great at forgiving and repenting. And I could say to some degree I was able to come back to Christianity because of that, that they were able to pull that off. But there’s this great.

0:37:36 – (Michael Keller): My. My mom. Let me just read this. A quick quote from the four from my mom’s forward. She says, our three sons have long insisted that Tim and I should never give any parent anyone parenting advice. And they may have a point. Despite co authoring a book on marriage, Tim and I never wrote one on parenting. We watch. Why? Because we watch friends who seemed far more intentional, far more consistent, far more creative than we were, yet their children’s outcomes were no more predictable than ours. Parenting, if anything at all, is a humbling endeavor.

0:38:04 – (Michael Keller): I once told a friend that it is better to be high on grace than on techniques when it comes to raising your kids. I still believe that grace does not mean giving up. It does mean giving up on the idea that the right formula will produce the right result. And I love that quote because she does a great job of summarizing basically what we were trying to get at in the book. So I don’t know.

0:38:25 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, I’ve learned so much, obviously, from both your parents, especially your dad, in a lot of ways. But I started this podcast with something that I learned from you, and then this is something that I learned from you. I can’t tell you, Michael, how many different times I’m sitting there going through something with my kids, and I realize I’ve gotten angry, I’ve said something I shouldn’t have said. I’ve reacted in a way I did not want to react, but.

0:38:55 – (Collin Hansen): And where I’ve stopped. And I’ve just thought, you know, I remember where I was when Michael explained to me that the one thing he could remember more than anything else from his parents was their willingness to apologize. And I just stopped. Like, yeah, that’s what I need to do. I can’t go back and I can’t fix that. Hopefully I won’t make the same mistake and fall into the same sin next time. That’s what we trust in the spirit for in sanctification.

0:39:25 – (Collin Hansen): But I just need to stop right now and hope and pray that whatever my kids will remember of me. And of course you and I, we’re also in ministry. We’re also public figures. Our own kids will have those different dynamics of remembering who we were and interacting with people who knew who we were in public versus who we were in private. And I just keep thinking, I want that. I mean, hopefully they remember the way that I loved them in all sorts of other ways. But I hope at the very least they can remember that when dad was at home, yeah, he messed stuff up, but he was willing to apologize because he recognized that we’re made in the image of God.

0:40:08 – (Collin Hansen): We’re not going to be perfect and we throw ourselves on grace.

0:40:14 – (Michael Keller): But Colin, that’s it. That’s such a good word. And over the years, parents have come to me and said, oh, you know, I wish I either knew my new Christianity better or I wish I could say the gospel better. I wish I had a father like your father. I mean, there’s all kinds of things and I think I can say in the past 50 or 100 years, I got one of the better gospel presentations in home, in my home. And guess what?

0:40:42 – (Michael Keller): I wasn’t saved by that gospel presentation. You know why? Because you’re not saved by the best gospel presentation. You’re saved by the gospel. I think it’s really important for people to hear is that it’s not. You’re not going to save your kid because you do the perfect statement in gospel presentation. And I wasn’t. I grew up with that. It was only later in college, through a college ministry, that I was able to come to faith through a long, difficult process.

0:41:11 – (Michael Keller): But what did help was seeing my parents forgive and repent. So that was a better distillation of the gospel in action for me than any kind of thing that my parents said for me growing up, which I think personally, as a pastor’s kid, it was hard to hear because it was also the family job, so where did they end and I began and all those kind of fraught stuff. So the actions of forgiving, repenting were much more impactful. So I love that you said that because I think parents need to hear that.

0:41:40 – (Collin Hansen): I haven’t told you this before, but there’s someone. I’m close to, a loved one, and I’ve prayed for this person to come to faith for decades and hasn’t happened. And it is a little awkward, embarrassing, frustrating. I sit there thinking, gosh, these are things that I do professionally, and I can’t even influence this person. And so at one point, I brought this person to actually hear your dad. Your dad gave a gospel presentation.

0:42:11 – (Collin Hansen): And I asked this person, this loved one afterward, and the response was, oh, I loved that message. I agree with it wholeheartedly. The only thing that really matters in his life would just be a good person.

0:42:23 – (Michael Keller): Right, Right. Because you’re like, wait, what?

0:42:28 – (Collin Hansen): That wasn’t what he said at all. But it is sobering because this is what the Bible says, it’s what we believe. I don’t understand it necessarily, but if you don’t have the eyes of faith

0:42:39 – (Michael Keller): are the ears or the ears and

0:42:41 – (Collin Hansen): the ears to hear. There were people who lived with Jesus, who saw the resurrected Jesus, and they did not believe. So at some level, our technique absolutely matters. You mentioned earlier put it in a way that people can understand, but it’s still going to be a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit to be able to understand. And just even in this conversation, Michael, I’m thinking there about how many times. And this also goes back to your parents.

0:43:09 – (Collin Hansen): I sit there thinking, you know what? I can solve this problem with a lecture. I mean, I am a world expert in this topic. I’m going to solve this problem with a lecture. I’m thinking, oh, I don’t think there’s a lot my kids are actually going to learn from. Maybe it’s just because of their stage of life or because lectures are not always the best way to do it, or maybe it’s because they don’t want lectures from their dad.

0:43:36 – (Collin Hansen): But I can’t help it at some level, but I think it’s just more likely that what they’re going to remember later is the kind of person I was to them, including that repentance. And so it brings me back, Michael, to this question. And maybe we’ve already answered it there, but in light of the book, what’s the most important thing we can do to help our children feel comfortable talking to us about hard things? That’s the whole point of the book.

0:44:01 – (Collin Hansen): And I, you know, my oldest is currently 11 as we’re recording this. And so we’ve talked about hard things. Even last night, he and I were talking about reading through two Samuel together, and he said to me, you know, dad, David killed a lot of guys. It’s kind of weird that God told him to do that. So that was A little bit that did require a little bit of apologetic lecture afterward in there. And I was glad that he asked me that, he asked me that question. But for parents out there, what is the most important thing we can do to help them to feel comfortable, to ask hard things? It could be, could be apologetic things like that, sexual questions, anything. What’s the number one thing?

0:44:43 – (Michael Keller): Well, the book is organized where Becca, Hannah and I go every other chapter and we write differently and she’s much better than I am at stories and narrative. And I think it’s helpful because some folks are more story based and narrative based and some, you know, I have the, whatever it is doing ideas. So I talk about the bunker bubble. But that’s again, that’s helpful just from a conceptually. But there’s a chapter I do called Teach Like Jesus.

0:45:17 – (Michael Keller): And it’s very simple concept is that Jesus asks something, hundreds of questions and he only answers himself like three or four. If you go over all the gospels, I gotta find the, the. I think it’s like 300 and something questions he asks. Now obviously the, the gospel, sometimes it’s the same question, but it’s the same event. But it’s helpful for people to see that, that what can we learn from that? It’s like you have to think about it in age appropriate ways, right? I don’t know, sometimes asking your kid, your 3 year old, should you put your finger in the fire?

0:46:02 – (Michael Keller): But there’s in an age appropriate way, how do we actually teach like Jesus and he taught with questions and he taught with parables, with stories which this kind of Dove’s Tales with, you know, the other book about, about stories in this sense. So I think there’s something there, I think there’s something about, it’s. Your child can always come up with arguments against you, but it can’t. You tend not to be able to come with arguments against yourself.

0:46:33 – (Michael Keller): So when you ask questions and you have to discover where those answers are, it helps kind of get there. But it also leads with what you said earlier, which is if it’s true that people live with Jesus and still rejected Jesus, it’s going to be the work of the Holy Spirit. And parents need to hear that because it’s supposed to be, if you really believe in grace, it’s supposed to be freeing to some degree that your job is to get your kid to adulthood 100%.

0:47:02 – (Michael Keller): Your job’s not to make them a Christian because that’s the Holy Spirit’s job. Now can you do the best you can to, you know, Put your kid in a position. Sure. And there’s statistics that show we talk about Christian Smith and his book that was recent book that come called handing down the faith and what are things that you can do and this and that. But it’s, I think it’s asking questions, living parables and then trying to, in the book we talk about this, think about are we bunkering, are we bubbling or are we being embassy parents? Are we kind of being in a foreign country with a different culture, but still ministering in and around that space?

0:47:50 – (Michael Keller): I mean, Colin, you read the whole thing. What were the parts that you thought were helpful?

0:47:53 – (Collin Hansen): Well, there’s another spot in here, Michael. Rebecca writes in the book parenting reveals who we really are. I probably first encountered a variation on that concept with Paul Tripp. He helped me to see that my reactions in parenting are not about my kids, they’re about me. And I don’t know why that was so important for me to know.

0:48:18 – (Michael Keller): That’s a big deal.

0:48:19 – (Collin Hansen): It was that when I’m upset at them, it’s not my circumstances, it’s not them. It’s amazing how I can. You see this most often, I think, when your kids are really little, when they’re babies or toddlers and you so upset at them as if they’re some sort of fully grown moral agents. It’s just so embarrassing to see how you embarrassing and shameful of how upset you can get at a child who in a lot of ways just can’t help it on some things. There are other things that they can help.

0:48:52 – (Collin Hansen): But it revealed me to be less patient and less kind than I thought, but also to have capacity for love. I think that I just, I didn’t have before. So that was revealing to me. I was wondering for you. I know that was Rebecca’s chapter, but if parenting reveals who we really are, what do you, what is it revealed about you?

0:49:18 – (Michael Keller): That I’m controlling. That I don’t really trust that I, I, I, when you were talking, I, I think if I could just lecture enough, then my kid will turn out okay. I completely have that. I feel that, you know, in my more salient moments, I have gone to my kids and said, you know, if I hang out with you too much, I’m going to be an overbearing parent. And if I don’t hang out with you enough, I’m going to be an absentee parent. And so I just wanted to tell you right now, I’m sorry, I’m probably doing something somewhere wrong. And I think I told that to them. When they were like four or five, and they’re like, daddy, you’re so funny.

0:49:56 – (Michael Keller): But I was trying to apologize, knowing even before I knew what to apologize for, because I knew that there was something there. So I think, yeah, parenting reveals so much to yourself, and there’s something good about that because then we can repent. And not just to our kids, hopefully, but to our Lord. Yeah, Right. So, yeah. And I guess maybe it’s revealed that I have a lot less control than I thought I did.

0:50:25 – (Michael Keller): As my kids get older, I thought I was more in control. And I guess as I get older, I realize I’m not.

0:50:31 – (Collin Hansen): Well, just a last question here. Well, I would just say about control. That is an absolute universal, and it manifests itself in multiple directions. One of them is the. The grace question here. That we think if we just do all the right things, we’ll get the right outcomes, realizes that’s just not actually true. And it never was promised to us. And yet a more hopeful answer is given to us, which is that even when we fail, God’s grace can prevail. And your story and your life is an example of that.

0:51:06 – (Collin Hansen): But also it’s a recognition that you don’t stop being a parent when they’re 18, you don’t stop when they’re 22. And then you clearly still love them to the same extent, but you have so much, even less control as they go on in there. And so that control is as it is in everywhere else in life. It’s an illusion. I want to wrap on this point, and it’s inevitable, Michael, especially when you’re writing a book with your dad and your name and your ministry and the work that we do together at the Keller center, that you’re going to answer a lot of questions about your dad and about your mom and about your family and all that kind of stuff. And church planting is the kind of thing that it’s a family endeavor. Ministry in general is. But church planting especially, you guys are moving to a different city and growing, Growing up at a different place.

0:51:52 – (Collin Hansen): But I wanted to bring it home to your home and just ask, what do you want your daughters to grow up and say about you?

0:51:59 – (Michael Keller): Wow. You know, Becca, in the book, I think she writes the last chapter. There’s a chapter called Redefining the Good Life. I think it’s the last chapter. Maybe it’s the second to last chapter. But it was really helpful for me to read that. Of what am I looking for? What is success, you know, at the end of the day? And I would love, you know, I’d love for my, my kids to, to know the Lord, but I would hope my kids would.

0:52:37 – (Michael Keller): Would see somebody who didn’t take themselves so seriously, would be able to laugh and cry, to be available, but not to make them the center of their, you know, because I think you can fail in that sense to try to encourage them to enjoy the beauties and wonders of this world. I don’t do it perfectly. I don’t. I don’t even near perfectly. But I would hope my kids would see. See that and in the process love their mom and love them.

0:53:15 – (Michael Keller): I don’t know. It’s a hard question to ask. I mean, if I was to turn that on you, Colin, the interviewee to the interviewer, what would you say? What would you want your kids to.

0:53:27 – (Collin Hansen): I think there is an element because of the public nature of our work in ministry that I would want them to say that there weren’t two faces. There wasn’t the face that everybody else got and the face that they got at home. One thing that is hard, and I bet it’s hard for you in some similar ways just because of the nature of how things work in the 21st century. I wish they didn’t see so much of the downside of my work.

0:53:59 – (Collin Hansen): I wish they didn’t see so much of the painful side of it, but it’s just hard to completely shield them from that kind of stuff just given the way that ministry works today and the smartphones and things like that and the nature of public criticism. And I wish that it can be hard for them when you have a parent who’s in the public eye like that to be able to wonder, why do people not like my dad? What is it?

0:54:29 – (Collin Hansen): Because that’s just not a normal thing that other kids have to deal with in the same, same way there. So I guess I would just hope that they would see. Yeah, I guess there were some reasons. Maybe just legitimate disagreements like you talked about with your dad that people had with what my dad did and what he stood for. But if they could have known him, they would know that he really did love God.

0:54:55 – (Collin Hansen): He really did love our mother and he really did love us.

0:54:58 – (Michael Keller): And Colin, what you said earlier is they’re related is that if you. Integrity, right. It comes from the word integer, which is 0 and 1, which means to be the same in all places. I think that’s such a huge deal, particularly for people who are in ministry, because kids can sniff that out. And I’ve seen it where if you’re duplicitous if you’re one person in the public, another person, they see right through that. And I just think that’s so, so, so important.

0:55:25 – (Michael Keller): So that when they see the criticism, when they see that, you know, there’s a Christian subculture that can be self righteous, that can have, be, there’s, there can be fakeness, they’re going to see it and they’re going to have to ask the question, okay, is this really Christianity or is this, you know, the fact that Christians are flawed people and therefore it’s going to be flawed? I mean, we could have a whole nother conversation on deconstruction and why you deconstruct and stuff and where you thought you knew something and then you’re like, well no, this is not what it is. Part of it is as though figuring out what is real faith and real grace and real change and what’s actually the sinful kind of aspects of the human nature. And they’re going to see that with you first because you’re the first example. But if you have integrity, I think it helps them be able to parse culture in that sense.

0:56:22 – (Michael Keller): That’s such a good point.

0:56:23 – (Collin Hansen): Integrity, not perfection.

0:56:25 – (Michael Keller): Yeah.

0:56:25 – (Collin Hansen): And that’s where the apology, apologizing, that’s where the repentance comes in there as well. Because if you try to maintain that somehow you are perfect in all these ways, it’s just impossible. And it breeds the inevitability of judgment and hypocrisy. It’s just, it’s a mask, it’s not real.

0:56:45 – (Michael Keller): I think it’s possible to owe it to always be asking for forgiveness all the time. I think somebody asked me that recently. I think it’s possible, but for my personal heart and my background, it’s not, I don’t do it enough. And I think you have to kind of assess yourself. I guess there’s a type of person who might be over like that, but I don’t think that’s the main problem we have.

0:57:06 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I don’t think it’s the main problem we have. I don’t, I definitely don’t think it’s my main problem. So that’s what I’m, that’s what I’m getting at. I’m, I’m not going to be apt to worship my kids as if they are the judge and the end all and be all of all things. I’m just more likely to get upset at them and then as I’m getting upset at them realize, oh, that was about me, that wasn’t about them.

0:57:29 – (Collin Hansen): And so, yeah, I see what you’re saying. It would be easy to flip that and use that in a different way, but. Well, there’s a lot of good advice and more than that, good news in this book. Talking to kids about Hard things, Honest conversations, When Life Gets Complicated with Rebecca Hanna. And again, also in the book that Michael here wrote with Timothy Keller, the stories we Live by, Seven Cultural Myths that Fail Us and a story that Never will. New from Zaravan Michael, grateful for you, your friendship and these, these works.

0:57:58 – (Michael Keller): Yeah, thanks. I mean, a lot of the works also came through interactions with you and the people at the Keller center. And very grateful for all those relationships and this time. So appreciate it. Colin Means a lot.

0:58:16 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review Gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.