Preaching by the Church Calendar: The Liturgical Method of Pastor Choi Joo-hoon

A Preacher Who Walks with the Church Year

Pastor Choi Joo-hoon has served as senior pastor of Jungang Lutheran Church in Seoul since 2010. Holding a doctorate in systematic theology from the University of Regensburg in Germany, with a specialization in Luther studies, he is also a prolific author and translator — the Korean translator of Luther’s Large and Small Catechisms, the Ninety-Five Theses, and several other foundational Lutheran texts. His scholarly formation is directly visible in how he preaches.

The phrase that best captures his approach is liturgical preaching — preaching shaped by the church calendar and the lectionary rather than by the individual preacher’s choice. For readers unfamiliar with this concept, a brief explanation is worth pausing for.

What Is Liturgical Preaching?

In most evangelical and independent Protestant churches, the pastor selects the sermon text each week. The choice reflects personal interest, pastoral instinct, or a running series. Over time, this means a congregation hears a great deal of whichever parts of Scripture their pastor finds most compelling — and comparatively little of the rest.

Liturgical preaching begins from a different place. It follows a lectionary, a calendar of pre-assigned Scripture readings that cycles through the Bible in a structured sequence. The ecumenical Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), used by Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other churches around the world, assigns readings from the Old Testament, the Epistles, and the Gospels for each Sunday across a three-year cycle. The church year itself provides the structure: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost — each season shapes what texts are read and how they are heard.

Pastor Choi is an explicit advocate of this approach.

“The texts the lectionary provides each week lead the pulpit away from the pastor’s personal bias and onto the full terrain of the gospel.”

He has argued that Korean Protestantism “began without receiving the inheritance of the church calendar” — a structural absence that created predictable distortions. When a pastor favors Paul, the congregation hears Paul for years. When a pastor neglects the Old Testament, the Old Testament disappears from the pulpit.

The lectionary serves as a structural corrective, and it carries a further implication Pastor Choi finds significant:

“[When following the RCL,] Jungang Lutheran Church in Seoul, a Methodist congregation in New York, and an Anglican cathedral in London are all reading the same Scripture text on the same Sunday.”

For a preacher working in the Lutheran tradition, this is not a minor observation. It expresses a theology of the una sancta — the one holy church that transcends geography, denomination, and time.

The Invisible Preacher

A second characteristic of Pastor Choi’s homiletical theology is what might be called the invisibility of the preacher. This motif appears most sharply in his Newsnjoy column on sacred art.

Writing about Gari Melchers’s 1886 painting The Sermon, he draws attention to the most striking compositional fact about the work: the preacher cannot be seen in the frame. The congregation occupies the foreground; the pulpit is implied but absent from view. He reads this as a theological statement.

“Preaching is the word of God. It is a grace we cannot manufacture. That grace saves sinners.”

Citing Luther’s principle that “the holy, the most precious thing, is hidden,” he frames the preacher’s self-effacement not as modesty but as theological necessity. The more a preacher occupies the foreground — through personal charisma, rhetorical performance, or emotional display — the more the speaker displaces what is being spoken. The invisible preacher is a structural form of God-centered proclamation.

Reading Theology Through Painting: Iconography as Method

His engagement with religious art is not decorative. Pastor Choi employs iconography — the systematic reading of symbolic language embedded in visual art — as a core method of theological communication.

“You can only see as much as you know. I explain theology through iconography, reading the symbols inside works of art.”

Christian visual tradition carries a dense symbolic vocabulary accumulated over fifteen centuries. The color red signals martyrdom; a dove marks the Holy Spirit; specific hand positions indicate blessing, instruction, or sorrow. Knowing this language transforms a painting into a theological text.

Pastor Choi developed this method through a sustained Newsnjoy column, later published as the book Choi Joo-hoon’s Stories in Paintings. In the homiletical context, this translates into a consistent pattern: entering a theological argument through a work of art or a historical scene rather than through doctrinal assertion. The painting provides the door; the theology is what lies inside.

This distinguishes his preaching from expository preaching in the strict sense. The sermon does not move linearly from text to application. It moves laterally — through history, through art, through cultural commentary — before arriving at the theological claim.

History as the Medium of Theology

Pastor Choi consistently situates Lutheran theology within its historical context rather than presenting it as a timeless set of doctrinal propositions.

“If you consider the historical context, you can readily understand why the sola slogans had to emerge.”

Justification by faith, too, is explained functionally rather than definitionally.

“The function of the doctrine of justification is to expose every form of human distortion of God’s saving action in Christ.”

He does not idealize Luther. Regarding Luther’s pamphlet against the peasants during the 1524–25 revolt — Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants — he identifies it plainly as “a disclosure of Luther’s limitations,” while maintaining that “Luther himself was not free from the limitations of being a son of his time.” The Luther that emerges from his writing and preaching is neither hero nor villain, but a historically situated human being whose theology is best understood in its original context.

Social Commentary Through Historical Analogy

Pastor Choi has made pointed comments about Korean Protestant institutional culture. In keeping with the methodological approach of this series, the concern here is not whether his assessments are correct, but how he deploys them rhetorically.

His characteristic move is the historical analogy. He draws a structural comparison between the problems Luther identified in late medieval Catholicism and patterns he observes in contemporary Korean Christianity.

“Luther pointed to three problems: the division between clergy and laity, the clerical monopoly on biblical interpretation, and papal control of council-summoning authority. Korean Christianity maintains similar structures.”

Rather than a direct contemporary indictment, he positions present realities within a historical pattern — using the Reformation as a mirror. The critique is distributed across Luther and the historical record rather than directed personally.

On the sacred/secular divide, the same historical pressure is applied:

“The holy place is not Jerusalem. This land where we live, this time we inhabit — that is what is most holy.”

The Priesthood of All Believers as Public Theology

One of the theological emphases running through his work is the priesthood of all believers (German: allgemeines Priestertum), which he extends well beyond its conventional intra-church application. He connects it to the foundations of democratic governance, and cites Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the plot against Hitler as a practical historical consequence of Lutheran theological ethics.

In his remarks upon becoming chairperson of Newsnjoy in early 2025, he cited Luther directly:

“If truth is in danger, choose truth over peace.”

Applying a sixteenth-century theological principle as a journalistic norm illustrates a broader pattern: in Pastor Choi’s hands, Luther functions not merely as a historical theologian but as an ethical and civic model — a figure whose ideas carry direct implications for how Christians engage the public sphere.

A Profile in Method

Pastor Choi Joo-hoon’s homiletical approach can be mapped across several axes:

Text selection: Determined by the RCL lectionary, not personal preference. The church year structures the content.

Interpretive medium: Historical narrative and art iconography take precedence over direct doctrinal exposition. A painting or a historical episode typically provides the entry point.

The preacher’s posture: Self-effacing by design. The theological logic is that proclamation belongs to the word, not to the person delivering it.

Social critique: Deployed through historical analogy rather than direct attack. The Reformation mirror makes the audience draw the contemporary connection.

Theological extension: Church doctrine moves into civic and political space. The priesthood of all believers becomes a democratic principle; Bonhoeffer’s resistance becomes an action-model.

This particular constellation of emphases — German systematic theology, ecumenical liturgical practice, and public intellectual engagement with Korean church culture — reflects a preaching identity shaped at the intersection of the Lutheran tradition’s historical depth and the demands of the Korean Protestant public square.

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