Long after it was cool, Tim Challies kept blogging.
When his contemporaries—such as Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds, Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost, and Jared Wilson at The Gospel-Driven Church slowed down or moved on, he kept posting at Challies.com. When multiple organizations invited him to write for them, he kept going on his own. And when online communication shifted from Facebook to YouTube to Substack, he kept posting on his own site.
Even the increasing drama of the internet didn’t slow him down.
“If your blog grows large enough, you will one day realize there is absolutely nothing you can say anymore without being criticized,” he told Joe in 2018, after 15 years of online writing. Still, he kept going—he’s now up to 14,972 posts in 23 years. Every day, he posts an original article, points to a book deal, or highlights good content from around the web.
Tim Challies during a podcast interview / Courtesy of Tim Challies
Tim knows he’s working with an aging medium.
“If I had a dime for every time someone has asked me whether there is a future for blogs and blogging, I could probably buy Twitter,” he said in 2023.
It’s not that Tim is a dinosaur or a Luddite. In 2003, he was one of the first in the game, experimenting with blogging software Movable Type, and then WordPress, almost as soon as they were released.
It would be more accurate to say he was self-motivated, independent, and faithful. Day after day, under the tagline “Informing the Reforming,” he wrote about books, theology, and the rapidly growing Young, Restless, Reformed (YRR) movement. Hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of people began visiting his page every day.
By 2015, Tim was writing to make a living. But he also wrote to sort out his thoughts, wrestle with others’ ideas, and clarify what he believed.
And then, five years ago, he wrote to share news.
“In all the years I’ve been writing I have never had to type words more difficult, more devastating than these,” he wrote. “Yesterday the Lord called my son to himself—my dear son, my sweet son, my kind son, my godly son, my only son.”
Thousands of people read Tim’s blog post. His son’s college put out a press release. Religious news outlets reported what happened.
“A good friend—somebody who had been tracking my career as a writer—said, ‘This is what God has been preparing you for,’” Tim said. “‘All that you’ve been doing so far has been preparing you to be faithful in this—to show the world that a Christian can suffer well before this audience he’s given you.’”
Death and Life
The first Challies immigrants arrived from the United Kingdom sometime in the mid-1800s and quickly worked their way to position and prominence. Tim’s great-great-uncle George led a toothbrush company and, separately, a toilet brush company before transitioning to a 26-year stint as a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament.
Grandpa George (third from left) at work with Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau (second from left) / Courtesy of Tim Challies
Great-grandpa John worked for the federal government as chief hydraulic engineer. Grandpa George commanded an artillery camp in World War II before becoming the associate chief judge in the Superior Court of Quebec.
But the most famous—and tragic—Challies is Tim’s aunt Nancy. She wrestled with mental illness, likely exacerbated by the torturous treatment she received at the infamous Allan Memorial Institute. When she was 20 years old, she met a boy at the Royal Military College and became pregnant. The child was placed for adoption. A few months later, she shot herself with her little brother’s gun.
Four years later, her acquaintance Leonard Cohen wrote about her in “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.” The song debuted in the middle of his 1969 album “Songs from a Room.”
The song “heaps shame upon her family for her suicide,” Tim said. Four years after its release, Nancy’s father—Tim’s grandpa—also killed himself.
“Imagine the pain the family faced as they dealt with another suicide, another tragedy, another humiliation,” Tim wrote. “He, too, dealt with tormentuous depression, anger, and grief. When it came to be too much for him to handle, he took his life. Could a family get any lower?”
Tim’s grandma Ethel, dad John, aunt Nancy, aunt Peggy, and grandpa George / Courtesy of Tim Challies
Maybe not. But it could get better.
“At about the same time my grandfather took his life, something miraculous happened in that family,” Tim wrote. “My father was given new life.”
Tim’s dad, John, was in college when Pentecostals introduced him to Christ. Thrilled with his salvation, he shared the news with the first acquaintance he saw—a girl named Barbara. Two days later, he introduced her to the couple who would lead her to the Lord. A while later, John and Barbara were married and spent part of their honeymoon in Switzerland at the Schaeffers’ L’Abri.
“Their lives were transformed by sound doctrine,” Tim said. After another year with the younger generation of Schaeffers in the English L’Abri, “they came back to Canada thoroughly convinced of Presbyterian theology.”
John and Barbara shared their faith with their families, and saw Barbara’s sister and John’s mother and sister come to know the Lord.
Stable and Unstable Childhood
But even in a Christian family, fallout from drama is hard to untangle.
“My childhood was somewhat unstable,” said Tim, who was born in 1976. “But my parents were very committed to evangelism, Word, and prayer, so their tenacious faith made up for some of that instability.”
Tim (right) with his older brother and three sisters / Courtesy of Tim Challies
Part of the problem was John’s occupation as a landscaper, which wasn’t the future anybody expected from the judge’s son with the philosophy degree. John took the family to Scotland while he worked on an MDiv, then took them back to Hamilton, Ontario, where he finished it.
“Then he realized he wasn’t suited for ministry, so he went back to landscaping,” Tim said.
Along the way, John and Barbara were raising their five kids in a series of Reformed churches—Anglican, Presbyterian Church in America, and Canadian Reformed. Tim went to church, catechism class, and Christian schools. He memorized questions and answers from the Heidelberg and the Westminster Shorter.
“In my teen years, I was living disobediently and really not interested in the things of the Lord,” he said. “But strangely enough, I got into Christian rock music through a friend.”
Tim began listening to the songs of Petra, Whiteheart, and Keith Green, and reading the stories of Frank Peretti.
“I started hearing about a personal relationship with the Lord from a different voice than my parents,” Tim said. “That really confronted me and challenged me—Oh, I say I’m a Christian, but I’m not living like one. That was transformative.”
When he was 15 years old, he became a Christian.
Challies.com
After high school, Tim headed to McMaster University. Four years later, he emerged with a degree in history and a serious girlfriend—one he led to the Lord and to the Heidelberg Catechism.
“That degree is not going to do you any good,” said John, who had by now gathered three degrees he wasn’t using in his day job. “Let’s sign you up for a computer training course.”
Tim and Aileen Challies were married on August 8, 1998. / Courtesy of Tim Challies
“This was back in 1998, when you could earn a one-year certification and be qualified for a job,” Tim said. He got a job in network administration, and then web design. Then he found blogging software like Moveable Type and WordPress.
In 2002, he built his own personal website—Challies.com.
“I thought it could become a family portal, where my sisters and I could share pictures of our families and interact,” he said. “There was no Facebook or Twitter or anything. And now we had these little digital cameras.”
It didn’t work. Challies.com never did catch on as a family gathering spot. After a year, Tim grew frustrated. Nobody was posting or visiting regularly. Every time he wrote something, he spent half the article explaining why it had been so long since his last post. What was the point?
“I thought, I’m going to do this every day for a year or quit,” Tim said.
Blogging
The first thing Tim needed was something to write about. Since Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life had been out for about a year, and since the Challieses were then attending a purpose-driven Baptist church, he decided to review the book.
Every day, he reviewed a chapter, posting what was good and what was concerning—namely, the handling of Scripture references, the citing of Catholic sources, and the missing gospel presentation.
By the end of the series, it was clear Tim was a logical, principled, and deeply Reformed writer.
Tim was just figuring that out himself. He and his wife Aileen had moved from the Dutch Reformed congregation when their oldest child, Nick, was born. They weren’t sure about infant baptism, and they liked the evangelistic zeal of the seeker-sensitive Southern Baptists that had dreams of planting 200 churches in 20 years.
“But it wasn’t quite as theologically accurate with Reformed theology, and he began doing more reading and more studying to try to understand why this stuff wasn’t sitting right with him,” Aileen said.
Now he had a place to do that. Less than two weeks after his final Purpose review, Tim began blogging his concerns about the movie The Passion of the Christ, released in February 2004. His review picked up on the strong Catholic undertones (most prominently seen in the character of Mary) and lack of context (why was Jesus dying?).
“This site has never experienced traffic like it has had over the past two days following my review of The Passion of the Christ,” Tim wrote. He’d been found by readers on the leading edge of what would later be called the YRR movement.
One of those readers was Justin Taylor, who was working as director of theological resources and education at Desiring God. Justin had his own popular blog and was often engaging with others online.
“Tim was one of the best-known bloggers, and people paid attention to what he did,” Justin said. “At one point in my life, I had foxnews.com as my default home setting. I would go there every day to see what had happened. In the evangelical world, Tim’s blog was that default site for a lot of people.”
Growing
After a few months, Justin asked Tim if he’d be willing to liveblog the Desiring God conference in October 2005.
“It was before streaming, and at that time a lot of people were really intrigued by this movement,” Tim said. “When there were conferences, people really cared who was there and what was said.”
Tim, Aileen, and Nick Challies in 2000 / Courtesy of Tim Challies
So he sat in the back of a large auditorium, typing as fast as he could. He spent his breaks searching for a wi-fi connection so he could post updates. He listened to John Piper, Carl Ellis, and David Powlison. He loved it—if given the chance to go again, he’d go “in a heartbeat,” he wrote.
He was asked to go again, but didn’t have to wait that long to liveblog another Reformed conference. He worked the 2006 Shepherd’s Conference, the inaugural Together for the Gospel conference, and WorshipGod06.
Like a lot of early blogging, those posts sound informal, relaxed, intimate. Tim took funny pictures, outed Justin for having Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman as his laptop background (“It was my wife’s!” Justin says), and passed along public greetings for attendees (“Amy, Russ and Reagan say ‘Hi!’”).
“Anybody who followed Tim got to hear live updates,” Justin said. “That raised his profile, and it raised the conference’s profile.”
And together, they were raising the profile of YRR. Over the next three years, Tim liveblogged another 14 Reformed conferences. Over and over, he summarized gospel-centered messages from men such as Mark Dever, John MacArthur, and Don Carson.
Tim was having a great time, but liveblogging doesn’t pay the bills—most of the time, all it pays is free conference admittance and, if you’re lucky, travel expenses. To make things worse, toward the end of 2005, Tim was laid off from his company.
Instead of looking for another employer, he launched his own web design company, which both paid the bills and freed his schedule for conference travel.
The Challies family was growing, adding Abby in 2002 and Michaela in 2006. / Courtesy of Tim Challies
Around the same time, Tim and Aileen shifted the family to a Reformed Baptist congregation. By the next year, their pastor, Paul Martin, was traveling with Tim to conferences. A few years later, they needed a van to haul men from their church down to Together for the Gospel.
The growth was everywhere—in the number of conference attendees, blog readers, and YRR adherents. By 2007, Challies.com was getting around 175,000 visitors a month, and Collin Hansen was interviewing Tim for the book Young, Restless, Reformed.
“When I think back to the early days of the movement, I think it was youthful in its enthusiasm but also immature in its lack of wisdom and graciousness,” Tim said. “It had plenty of zeal, but little knowledge. It was like 1 million people were all in cage-stage Calvinism at the same time.”
Discernment Blogger
Tim was in the cage with them.
It was almost inevitable: He was in a Reformed church, reading Reformed blogs, and listening to hours of the best Reformed preaching at every notable Reformed conference. He was also reading books—in the first three years, he reviewed 260 books, many of them with titles like Getting the Gospel Right by R. C. Sproul, Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever, or Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J. I. Packer. (To date, he’s reviewed more than 1,000.)
Bright and logical, Tim had no problem spotting theological errors. He was so good at it that his first book, published by Crossway in 2007, was titled The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment.
But it wasn’t long before that led to trouble.
“I was becoming essentially a discernment blogger,” Tim said. “I would not want to go back and read some of my early stuff. I was rude, condescending, young, and just kind of gross. . . . I realized if I wrote a positive article about somebody, it would get a fraction of the attention as if I wrote a negative article about somebody. And so I was doing more of that. I was focusing a lot on numbers and traffic. It was very, very unhealthy.”
After a while, his conscience began to convict him.
“The Lord really helped me see that I was becoming insufferable,” he said. “I was becoming somebody I didn’t like through this relentless focus on negativity.”
He decided to shift his discernment from “griping and complaining” to “lead people to the truth in love.” Importantly, he also quit tracking his numbers—even now, if you ask how many people read his blog, he doesn’t usually know.
“Once a year or twice a year, I take a look and send that out to advertisers,” he said. That’s key, because by 2006, Tim was earning enough from Amazon affiliate links, patrons, and advertisers to cut down on his web design job and work full-time on the website. Publishers, too, began to notice the difference a Challies review would make for book sales. Some began asking him for a heads-up when he was about to post a review, so they could supply extra copies to Amazon.
Tim kept at it until 2010, when he added another full-time job as an associate pastor at his church.
“I can’t even tell you how important it was—it showed me how complicated people’s lives are,” Tim said. “Those first few years changed me as I got to love and understand people more.”
“Caring about the local church had a discernible effect on him,” Justin said. “Pastoring people affected how he thought and how he wrote—in a good way.”
Tim stayed on staff at the church until 2015, when he could no longer manage the weight of a full-time pastoral position and a full-time blog. This was exacerbated by nerve damage in his hands and arms from doing so much writing—in addition to the blogs, Tim’s written 17 books and 2 ebooks.
Tim can only type for three to four hours a day, which is a severe mercy, Aileen said. It opens up time for reading, having coffee with church members, and spending time with his family—Aileen, daughters Abby and Michaela, and, for 20 years, his son Nick.
My Dear Son, My Godly Son, My Only Son
Nothing about Nick’s death was private.
That’s not because he was a public person—while Tim was well known, he didn’t write often about his kids. Nick didn’t have social media. And he was introverted—“When he was my intern, I told him he had to meet two new people every Sunday,” Paul remembers.
Nick; his fiancée, Ryn; Abby’s boyfriend, Nate; and Abby four days before Nick collapsed / Courtesy of Tim Challies
In early November 2020, Nick was playing a game with his fiancée, his sister, and some friends at Boyce College when his heart slipped into an unsustainable rhythm and stopped. No one—his friends, a passing doctor, or the responding emergency team—could revive him.
Within minutes, much of campus knew. Tim and Aileen got a text from Abby’s boyfriend: “I don’t know if you heard, but Nick collapsed. They think he had a seizure. They think he’s breathing.”
But he wasn’t. Nick was already gone.
Tim and Aileen traveled through the night to get to Louisville. On the plane, Tim was already writing.
“Question and answer one of the Heidelberg Catechism says I am not my own,” Tim said. “I belong, in body and soul, in life and death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. I’m not here to tell my story. I’m here to tell God’s story. And if this is part of what he’s given me, the best I can understand God’s providence is he would want me to keep testifying.”
Tim and Aileen stewarded their suffering, in part, by sharing it with others. Even before Nick’s funeral, strangers were watching them.
“I am heartbroken for Tim,” wrote one follower. “He’s been a solid resource for me over the past three years, a calm, quiet voice in a world of hot takes and chest-thumping. I’ll pray for his family!”
Nick’s grave / Courtesy of Tim Challies
“As a new father I broke down crying when I saw [the news of Nick’s death],” wrote another. “I cannot imagine the pain his family is going through right now. I was greatly encouraged by the words he said, but we will be praying for his family.”
More than 25,000 people watched Nick’s memorial service in Louisville, live-streamed because of COVID-19. A few weeks later, 7,000 people logged on to see Nick’s funeral in Toronto.
All the way through, Tim kept blogging, sharing updates a month out (“Our grief is not what it was in the first days. It’s both better and worse”), six months out (“In some ways it feels like more than that, but in so many more it feels like less”), a year out (“As I look back on the most difficult of years, I also look back on the most blessed of years”). He shared the cause of death, when the cemetery staff laid new sod over the grave, and how he’d begun taking coffee to Nick’s grave.
“The anchor holds,” he told readers. “My faith, my anchor, has held, but not because I have been rowing hard, not because I have been steering well, not because I am made of rugged stuff, not because I am a man of mighty faith. It has held fast because it is held firm in the nail-scarred hands of the one who died and rose for me.”
Afterward
“Tim and Aileen both have grown in godliness, [into] deeper humility, in sensitivity to people,” Paul said. “It’s more than going through a trial. It’s working through things with the Lord. I look at my friend and think, He’s a different man. And I love him more because of it. I see more of the Lord in him.”
Tim is a different person doing largely the same things he did before—caring for his wife and daughters, serving as an elder in his church, traveling to attend conferences (now as a speaker), and writing.
“I’m a capable writer,” he said. “I enjoy writing, but I’d like to think there’s some someday coming, maybe in my 60s, when I’m going to fully hit my stride.”
Tim speaking at CrossCon 2026 / Courtesy of CrossCon
He might be right. Paul, who likes to kid Tim about how long his early posts were, said “his writing has improved because he can say so much more in fewer words.”
Justin agreed: “With Nick’s death, his writing jumped to a whole new level. It’s economical, it’s thoughtful, and it’s well said.”
And it’s in the same place—Challies.com.
“Tim has marched to the beat of his own drummer as he has faithfully followed his Savior,” Justin said. “Most bloggers ended up writing under an umbrella ministry or magazine, but Tim has stayed independent. Most bloggers did their work as a side gig, but Tim has made a career out of it. Most bloggers dropped out along the way, but Tim soldiered on, without fanfare and with remarkable faithfulness in the same direction.”
For years, Tim has been edifying readers with sound doctrine and good recommendations, Justin said. “He’s a dinosaur who is not extinct because he is also a creative entrepreneur. As he has invited us into his life through the years, we have watched him walk through unimaginable tragedy, and witnessed a man who has leaned deeper into the Lord and the body of Christ.”
Tim’s assessment is simpler: “It’s just the record of one person as he lives out the Christian life.”
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