Renowned pastor and author Tim Keller, who’s fighting Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, is making “remarkable improvement,” his wife says.

“Through God’s mercy and your prayers, there has been remarkable improvement in the last 18 months,” Kathy Keller wrote in a series of tweets on Tim Keller’s Twitter account. “In fact, his doctors are using words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘dramatic’ to describe the progress.”

Through God’s mercy and your prayers, there has been remarkable improvement in the last 18 months — in fact, his doctors are using words like “fantastic” and “dramatic” to describe the progress. Your prayers are working!

— Timothy Keller (1950-2023) (@timkellernyc) December 9, 2021

Kathy Keller also thanked followers for their prayers and asked for prayer “for continued effectiveness of the treatment with even fewer side effects” as her husband starts a new round of chemotherapy.

The Kellers founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a multi-site megachurch in New York City. And Tim Keller has written 23 books, including several coauthored with Kathy.

Keller received his Stage 4 diagnosis in May 2020, a couple months after his book “On Death” was published, containing pastoral observations about faith and mortality. He went public about the diagnosis and treatment a few weeks later.

The diagnosis forced Keller to examine the beliefs he professed and what he actually understood of God, he wrote in a column for The Atlantic in March 2021, close to a year into his treatment.

That was in part because of pancreatic cancer’s survival rate. On average, someone diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer will live about a year after it’s diagnosed, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. Just one in a hundred will live for five more years.

“I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say ‘Thy will be done,’ was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating,” Keller wrote in The Atlantic.

This past May — a year after Keller’s diagnosis — a scan showed “no cancer growth under less aggressive chemotherapy,” Keller wrote on Twitter. He said after he had surgery to remove several cancer nodules, the only cancer left that doctors could see was the primary tumor on the pancreas itself. He called the update “extremely encouraging.”

Keller is also cofounder and chairman of Redeemer City to City, a church planting ministry, and vice president and cofounder of web publishing network The Gospel Coalition.

He was successfully treated for thyroid cancer in 2002, The Christian Post reported. He drew from that experience for his 2013 book “Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering.”

Sarah Einselen is an award-winning writer and editor based in Texas.