Preaching History as Gospel: The Preaching Style of Han Hong

When History Becomes His Story

“History is His story.” Pastor Han Hong (한홍) uses this wordplay as a kind of signature. But it is more than rhetoric. Han holds a doctorate in American church history from Fuller Theological Seminary, preceded by undergraduate study in American and European modern history at UC Berkeley. For him, history is not a backdrop to the sermon — it is the sermon.

Han planted Saeroun Church (새로운교회) in 2009 with roughly thirty people meeting in a home. By 2014 the congregation had grown to 3,500 adults; it now stands near 4,000 regular attendees plus 1,000 in children’s ministry. This growth happened without owning a single building — all services are held in leased commercial spaces. Han attributes the growth to three things: “preaching content, video sermons on YouTube and podcast, and the internet.” The sermon is the engine.

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A Scholar in the Pulpit

Han’s academic formation explains his homiletical grammar. After majoring in history at Berkeley, he completed his M.Div. at Westminster Theological Seminary — a theologically conservative Reformed institution — before earning his doctorate in American church history at Fuller. These three institutions planted three distinct seeds in him: historical imagination, Reformed biblical theology, and awareness of how the church moves through cultural shifts. All three germinate in his preaching.

Han has also spoken about his writing discipline. During his student years in the United States, he kept daily Korean Bible reading journals, read major Korean literary writers closely for style, and developed a habit of devotional writing that has never left him. He credits these habits for producing over thirty published books — many of them bestsellers in Korean Christian publishing.

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”Anointed Evangelicalism”

Han’s theological self-description is worth attending to carefully. In a 2012 interview, he coined the phrase that has since become his signature:

“Our church is ‘anointed evangelicalism.’ We layer fervent prayer on top of evangelical theology. I preach the text carefully — but I also declare blessings, proclaim healing, and pray extensively. My theology from Westminster is conservative, but our worship form is unconventional.”

The unconventional form he describes: no Apostles’ Creed, contemporary Christian music as the primary worship language, hymns re-arranged with upbeat arrangements calibrated for twenty-somethings. The theology stays Reformed; the atmosphere reaches for something warmer.

A decisive turning point behind this hybrid identity came in 2007, when Han suffered facial paralysis requiring three months away from the pulpit. In January 2008 he experienced what he describes as a significant encounter with the Holy Spirit, which reoriented his writing from leadership themes toward the Spirit’s power and the life of prayer. His earlier books — The Footsteps of Giants, Sword and Scabbard — center on historical leadership. His later work — The Age of Power Opening, Now Is the Age of the Spirit — marks a clear pivot. “Anointed evangelicalism” is the theological shorthand he eventually found for holding both streams together.

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Biographical Narrative as a Sermon Mode

The genre Han works most naturally in is biographical expository preaching — extended, multi-month engagement with a single biblical character, tracing their full arc and extracting from it patterns of calling, leadership, and vision.

His 2013 book Daniel Impact is the clearest example. Han structures Daniel’s story around four thematic axes: Mind, Power, Action, and Vision. Rather than moving verse by verse, he identifies the recurring patterns in Daniel’s life and uses them as organizing principles for a sustained series. The effect is closer to a biographical drama than a lecture: the listener follows Daniel’s development across a sustained narrative with identifiable tensions and turning points.

The same methodology shaped his 2024 The Hidden Legend of David, which he described this way:

“I preached through David once in my late thirties. When I returned to preach his entire life over two years in my mid-fifties, completely different insights emerged. Even characters the congregation thinks they know well reveal hidden legends when you commit to the full arc.”

The two-year format matters. Long-arc series allow Han to develop character psychology, trace theological movement across a life span, and create the kind of narrative suspense and resolution that shorter series cannot sustain. Listeners are not receiving isolated lessons — they are inhabiting a story.

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Church History at the Pulpit

Han extends this biographical approach beyond the Bible into church history proper. His Reformation History (2017), developed from a CTS television lecture series, treats Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli not merely as theological reformers but as historical agents whose decisions reshaped European politics, economics, education, and culture. The point is never antiquarianism. The aim is helping a contemporary urban congregation see themselves as participants in a long movement — the Spirit at work in and through historical change.

William Wilberforce and the Clapham Community appear frequently in his preaching as a model for what he calls being “world-transformation agents” — the phrase that frames Saeroun Church’s congregational identity. The Clapham circle’s combination of personal faith, cultural influence, and sustained social reform maps onto what Han sees as the calling of Korean Christians in a secular city.

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Preaching as Leadership

The most distinctive claim in Han’s homiletical philosophy is that preaching is a form of leadership. He credits this insight to his mentor, the late Ha Yong-jo (하용조) of Onnuri Church, who recognized Han’s leadership gifting in his mid-thirties and appointed him as senior pastor of Onnuri’s Yangjae campus. Ha also recommended Han as a guest lecturer to major Korean corporations — Samsung, LG, SK, and KT among others. Han understood this as evidence that the sermon, rightly delivered, could carry into secular spaces. The ideas that animate good preaching — human calling, historical purpose, transformational change — translate into corporate contexts because they are not merely religious ideas.

In a 2019 tenth-anniversary interview, Han also articulated the discipline that keeps this from becoming empty pragmatism:

“I consistently preach the Bible from the pulpit. I never address political issues or say what I personally want to say.”

The preaching serves as leadership not by becoming strategic or topical, but by remaining textually anchored while addressing the deepest questions of calling and purpose that leaders at every level are already asking.

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Worship Culture and Congregation

Saeroun Church holds three Sunday services per week, all organized around expository preaching. Early morning services center on guided devotional reading. The congregation skews notably male — a 60/40 ratio unusual for Korean Protestant churches, which typically run female-heavy. Han links this directly to his preaching emphasis: themes of leadership, vocation, and responsibility resonate with younger professional men who might otherwise feel that church services do not address their actual lives.

A 300-member intercessory prayer team prays for one hour before each worship service. For Han, this is not peripheral. His consistent position is that prayer infrastructure is what actually animates the proclaimed word — the sermon does not carry itself.

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The Mirror the Historian Holds

There is an internal logic to a preaching style built on biography: the stories you summon as a preacher judge you as much as they instruct your listeners. To preach Daniel’s faithfulness under imperial pressure is to invite accountability for your own. To narrate Wilberforce’s forty-year campaign against slavery is to implicitly interrogate congregational comfort with the status quo.

Han made this explicit in a 2019 interview:

“Authenticity is what matters now. The standard the world uses to judge is this: do you live the way you talk?”

In Han Hong’s homiletics, history is not illustration. It is the substance that gives the sermon both its weight and its demand — and that keeps returning to ask the preacher himself whether the story being told is the story being lived.

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