Did you give a tryout sermon in Hopewell? Yeah. I do not think I was any good. They were desperate. I am not kidding. Their pastor had left under a cloud and they were looking for somebody, anybody.

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, has done for two decades what people said could not be done: He has attracted to church, through biblically orthodox teaching, thousands of hip New Yorkers in their 20s and 30s. He is also the author of three recent, excellent books: The Prodigal God, Counterfeit Gods, and The Reason for God, which was WORLD’s Book of the Year in 2008.

Here are excerpts from an interview in which we examined his informal education during the 1970s and 1980s. We also touched on his cancer diagnosis in 2002 and his views of success and failure.

Q: We were both in college during those weird years of campus protests four decades ago. Were you ever involved in them?
Had to be. After the Cambodian invasion, Bucknell was one of the many campuses at which the students went on strike. There was no school for weeks. We had huge meetings in the center of the campus with an open mic. Anybody could get up and just talk. It was really boring.

Q: You had something other than politics going on in your life.
I had become a Christian earlier that year and had started going to a campus fellowship. At Christian colleges there was a revival in 1970. We put up a sign right off the quad where everybody else was milling around, saying “The resurrection of Jesus Christ is intellectually credible and existentially satisfying.” We engaged people in conversations. About 10 or 15 students came to Campus Fellowship in the spring of 1970. That fall 100 people showed up, which just shocked us, and it never went down. A lot of people had become Christians that year through all the discussions and all the angst.

READ MORE: www.worldmag.com/articles/16653