Reading Scripture as Story: The Preaching Style of Ahn Yong-sung

Introduction

Within the landscape of Korean Protestant preaching, Ahn Yong-sung occupies a distinctive position. A New Testament scholar with a PhD from the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley — where he specialized in biblical studies and cultural criticism — Ahn has published with Brill Academic Publishers and taught at Seoul Women’s University, all while serving as senior pastor of Geuruteogi Church, a congregation of roughly 110 to 130 regular attendees in Gangnam, Seoul. Understanding his preaching style requires some familiarity with two interpretive methods that shaped his doctoral training: narrative criticism and postcolonial criticism.

Two Methods, Briefly Defined

Narrative criticism reads biblical texts as stories. Rather than asking “what happened behind the text?” — the concern of classical historical criticism — it asks “what does this text do to its readers?” It attends to plot structure, characterization, point of view, and the movement of time and space within the narrative. The goal is to trace how the story-world the text constructs creates meaning and effect for its audience. The text is taken seriously as a text, not merely as evidence of something prior to it.

Postcolonial criticism interrogates the dynamics of power within texts and their interpretive traditions. Who wrote this text? Who were the assumed readers? Whose voices are centered, and whose are pushed to the margins? For New Testament scholarship, this often means asking how the Roman imperial context shaped early Christian writing and reception — and what it means to read those texts from a non-Western vantage point.

Ahn’s 2006 Brill monograph, The Reign of God and Rome in Luke’s Passion Narrative: An East Asian Global Perspective, combines both approaches. The subtitle’s explicit invocation of an “East Asian global perspective” is itself a postcolonial move: naming the reader’s location as part of the interpretive act, rather than pretending to a view from nowhere.

Liturgical Frame, Expository Preaching

Geuruteogi Church (founded 1996, Presbyterian Church of Korea) has maintained a liturgically ordered Sunday service since its early years. The worship follows a four-part structure: gathering and approach, confession and fellowship, word and response, commitment and sending. Ahn’s sermon falls within the “word and response” movement.

Within this liturgical architecture, the preaching is characteristically expository in orientation. Rather than beginning with a contemporary theme and then selecting supporting passages, Ahn begins with the text — its narrative shape, its historical and cultural context, its implied audience — and draws contemporary application from that analysis. The academic discipline and the pulpit discipline share the same starting point: attending carefully to the story the text is telling.

This is worth noting as a formal pattern. The liturgical structure places the sermon not as the self-contained center of the service, but as the moment of scriptural encounter within a larger flow of gathering, listening, and responding. The preacher’s role is to illuminate the text; the congregation’s role is to respond to it.

What the Sermon Titles Reveal

Several confirmed sermon titles offer a clear window into Ahn’s thematic preoccupations.

“Identifying the Order of Pharaoh” (Exod. 5), delivered at Jangsin University Chapel in 2015, reads the Exodus brick-labor scene as a paradigm for analyzing social and political structures in the present. The ancient text becomes a lens for the contemporary world, not merely a record of the past.

“For Whom Did He Come?” (Luke 2:1–38), a Sunday sermon reported to have emphasized that Jesus came “for all peoples and all people,” foregrounds the Lukan theme of inclusive scope. The question “for whom?” is a characteristically postcolonial question: it presses on the boundaries of the text’s field of vision and asks whose interests the narrative serves.

“Why Did He Come as a Baby?” (Isa. 62:6–12, Christmas) connects the prophetic tradition with incarnation theology within the larger biblical narrative — a move that reflects the broad canonical scope typical of expository preaching rooted in biblical theology.

Across these examples, recurring questions emerge: Who stands within the text’s frame of vision? What power structures does the narrative construct or challenge? How does the ancient story reach across historical distance to address a community today? These are the questions that narrative criticism and postcolonial criticism tend to generate, and they appear consistently in Ahn’s pulpit work.

Bridging the Academy and the Congregation

Ahn has consistently described his project as building a bridge between academic biblical scholarship and the life of the church. His 2024 book Biblical Studies for the Church: Are the Gospels Historical Fact? (Saemulgyeol Plus) makes this most explicit. It explains the genre of the Gospels (ancient Greco-Roman biography), the role of oral tradition in their composition, and the difference between ancient and modern concepts of “historical fact” — all in language accessible to lay readers.

His earlier work Two Stories Meeting: Reading Revelation as Narrative approaches the book of Revelation as a story to be inhabited rather than a code to be decoded. As Ahn describes it, the reader should engage the text with all the senses — “to see, hear, feel, taste, and touch.” This is narrative criticism translated into pastoral language: slow down, enter the story, let the narrative work on you before extracting theological propositions from it.

For sermon preparation, this methodology implies a particular sequence: analyze the narrative structure of the text, ask who its implied readers were and what the story does to them, then ask how that ancient story meets the situation of the congregation gathered now. The academic training and the preaching method are not separate tracks — they run on the same rails.

Community and the Role of the Sermon

In a feature interview with the Cultural Mission Research Institute, Ahn described his approach to community life this way:

“Rather than wondering how we can become more comfortable, even if it means becoming harder and more demanding, to seek together what kind of community we can become.”

The remark illuminates something about how the sermon functions in this context. It is not primarily a vehicle for comfort or inspiration, but the moment when the community encounters the text — and the text, read with care, makes demands. The liturgical structure reinforces this dynamic: the sermon leads into response and commitment, not simply into a closing benediction.

Geuruteogi Church also maintains a structural distinction in which the senior pastor focuses entirely on preaching and pastoral care, while church administration is delegated to a leadership council. This arrangement reflects a particular understanding of the sermon’s ecclesial role: not as an instrument of institutional authority, but as the congregation’s shared encounter with scripture.

Summary

Ahn Yong-sung’s preaching style can be characterized as: an NT scholar trained in narrative and postcolonial criticism delivering expository sermons within a liturgical worship framework, with sustained attention to the text’s social dimensions and consistent inquiry into the question of who stands within its field of vision.

In practice:

• Method: Trace the narrative structure of the biblical text — plot, character, point of view — before drawing application
• Lens: Press the text on questions of audience, inclusion, and embedded power structures
• Form: Expository preaching within a four-part liturgical service, located in the “word and response” movement
• Intent: Translate academic biblical scholarship into accessible language for the congregation

For preachers and students interested in how literary and cultural methods of biblical scholarship can inform parish preaching, Ahn’s body of work — both his published scholarship and the ongoing preaching ministry at Geuruteogi Church — offers a sustained example of what that integration looks like in practice.

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