Ha Yong-jo's Preaching Style: QT-Based Expository Preaching and the Acts Church Vision

Who Was Ha Yong-jo?

Ha Yong-jo (1946–2011) was the founding senior pastor of Onnuri Church in Seoul and the founder of Duranno Publishing. He began holding services in Yongsan-gu in 1985 and served as senior pastor for twenty-six years until his death in August 2011, during which time Onnuri grew into one of Korea’s most influential congregations.

Yet to understand Ha Yong-jo as a preacher, one must also see him as a media architect. Under his leadership, Duranno launched several periodicals that shaped the daily devotional habits of Korean Protestant laypeople: Saengmyeong-ui Sam (생명의 삶), a monthly Quiet Time guide; Bitkwa Sogeum (빛과 소금), a general-audience Christian magazine; and Mokhoe-wa Shinhak (목회와 신학), a pastoral and theological journal. His pulpit ministry and his publishing work formed a single integrated system.

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The Defining Format: QT-Style Expository Preaching

The academic term most often applied to Ha Yong-jo’s preaching is “QT-style expository preaching” (큐티식 강해설교). The fullest scholarly treatment is a 2014 doctoral dissertation by Jeong Mi-hyeong at Baekseok University’s Graduate School of Christian Studies: The Study of the Quiet Time (QT)-Approached Expository Sermon of Pastor Ha Yong-Jo, for Building up the ‘Church of the Acts’ (KDMT1201465370). Applying the Heidelberg Method of Sermon Analysis, the study examines Ha’s sermons across three dimensions: form, content, and delivery.

The concept itself is worth pausing on. Standard expository preaching moves through a biblical passage and explains what it meant in its original context. QT-style expository preaching adds a second structural layer: after the expository work is done, the sermon flows toward what this text says to me, today, in my life. That movement—from text to devotional application—is the defining rhythm of Ha Yong-jo’s pulpit.

The connection to his QT movement is deliberate. His 2008 book Happiness Comes from Quiet Time (큐티하면 행복해집니다, Duranno) lays out the theological rationale in accessible language. The loop he designed was this: the pastor models QT-based engagement with Scripture on Sunday; the congregation applies the same approach in private devotions throughout the week. The pulpit and the personal are in continuous dialogue.

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Receiver-Centered Communication

At a 2005 academic conference organized by the Korean Church History Institute (published by Duranno as The Preaching and Theology of Pastor Ha Yong-jo), Yonsei University professor Yoo Sang-hyeon analyzed Ha’s approach as “receiver-centered” (수용자 중심) rather than proclamation-centered.

The distinction matters. Prophetic proclamation, in the classical Reformed homiletical tradition, begins with the authority of the text and moves outward toward the congregation. The preacher stands as a herald. Receiver-centered preaching begins with a question: How will this congregation hear this text? What are they bringing with them to this moment? The congregation is not simply the audience but a constitutive factor in how the message is shaped.

In Ha Yong-jo’s sermons this showed up in consistent choices: conversational over technical language, shorter gaps between textual exposition and contemporary application, and a communicative register closer to pastoral conversation than academic lecture. The Greek or Hebrew background of a passage might appear, but its role was to ground the message rather than serve as the main event. The emotional register of the sermon—and the moment of personal challenge or consolation—carried the structural weight.

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Theological Coordinates

Two analysts at the same 2005 symposium traced Ha Yong-jo’s theological location from different angles.

Kang Sa-mun (Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary) identified five Calvinist characteristics in Ha’s preaching: evangelical, Christocentric, realistic, vocation-rousing, Trinitarian—and noted the rhetorical persuasiveness with which all five were embodied. Han Yeong-tae observed a different tension: Ha’s theology blended Presbyterian-Calvinist frameworks with Wesleyan holiness emphases, leaning toward “election” as a positive calling rather than dwelling on classical predestinarian logic.

This combination—Reformed structure, Wesleyan warmth, charismatic openness—gave Ha Yong-jo’s sermons an unusual breadth of appeal. The theological precision and the emotional register did not cancel each other out but existed in the same sermon.

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The Acts Church Vision and Missional Urgency

The other major axis of Ha Yong-jo’s preaching is mission. His book Dreaming of an Acts Church (사도행전적 교회를 꿈꾼다, Duranno, revised 2010) is considered the foundational document of his ecclesiology and pastoral philosophy. The animating idea—sometimes called “Acts 29”—is that the Acts of the Apostles did not end at chapter 28: the present generation of the church is writing the next chapter through its own missionary obedience.

His 2008 book I Staked My Life on Mission (나는 선교에 목숨을 걸었다, Duranno) collects sermons that explicitly address this calling. In these texts the congregation is addressed not only as recipients of grace but as those being commissioned. The closing movement of many sermons points outward: What are you going to do with this?

The Love Sonata evangelistic gatherings—large-scale cultural evangelism events held across Japan from 2007 onward—were a direct expression of this vision. J. Nelson Jennings (Ecclesial Futures, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2020; DOI: 10.54195/ef12042) analyzes Love Sonata as Ha’s “cultural evangelism strategy,” examining how his preaching approach was adapted for mass cultural events in an international and interfaith context.

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The Collected Sermons as Primary Text

The most accessible primary source for Ha Yong-jo’s preaching style is the Complete Expository Works of Ha Yong-jo (하용조 강해서 전집), a twenty-four-volume set published by Duranno in July 2021 to mark the tenth anniversary of his death (ISBN 9788953135147, 10,370 pages total). The set covers Genesis, Nehemiah, Isaiah, Matthew, John, Acts, Romans, Ephesians, and Hebrews.

The structure of the volumes itself reflects his method. Each chapter moves from a specific passage, through theological exposition, toward life application—the same arc that characterized his Sunday sermons and the QT practice he taught his congregation. The language remains accessible throughout; the volumes read as the work of a pastor speaking to his people rather than a scholar writing for colleagues.

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Preaching and the Discipleship System

Ha Yong-jo’s preaching style cannot be fully understood in isolation from Onnuri Church’s discipleship system. The One-to-One Discipleship Bible Study curriculum, designed under his leadership, trains participants in the same habits of text engagement—reading, meditation, application—that structure his sermons. Shin Kiseob’s 2019 DMin research at Trinity International University studied the effects of this curriculum on small group leaders in their thirties and forties at Suwon Onnuri Church, documenting the durability of the system across demographic cohorts.

The implication for preaching analysis: the congregation Ha Yong-jo addressed was, at least in significant part, trained to receive sermons in the mode he delivered them. The preacher and the discipleship curriculum formed a coherent formation system.

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Conclusion: Placing Ha Yong-jo’s Preaching

Ha Yong-jo occupies a distinctive position in the landscape of Korean Protestant preaching. His method is expository in structure but devotional in texture; Reformed in theological skeleton but warm and missionally urgent in tone; locally rooted in Seoul’s urban professional class but globally oriented in vision.

The label “QT-style expository preaching” captures something real: the insistence that the Bible, properly read, does not simply teach—it invites. The preacher’s task, in Ha Yong-jo’s practice, is to make that invitation land in the specific life of each person in the room and send them out differently than they came in.

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Sources: Jeong Mi-hyeong, doctoral dissertation (Baekseok University, 2014) / Korean Church History Institute, ed., The Preaching and Theology of Pastor Ha Yong-jo (Duranno, 2005) / J. Nelson Jennings, “A Contextual Analysis of Onnuri Church’s ‘Love Sonata,’” Ecclesial Futures Vol. 1, No. 2 (2020), DOI: 10.54195/ef12042

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