Jang Jae-ryung's Preaching Style — Reading the Margins Inside the Liturgical Year

Pastor Jang Jae-ryung of Jeong-ui-ui Neutinamu Soop Church — known informally as “Soop Church” (Forest Church) in Seoul’s Mapo district — made an unusual declaration at the beginning of 2025. He told his congregation that he intended to stop making his Sunday sermons available to anonymous viewers online. “For our sermons to be sounds that flow within the time and space of Sunday worship and within the relationship of the Soop community,” he explained, “I do not plan to make them publicly available on YouTube to anonymous masses.” A sermon, in his theological grammar, is a sound that belongs to a particular time, a particular place, and a particular community of people — and then dissipates. This essay examines his preaching style across four dimensions: lectionary structure, literary exegesis, social engagement, and pastoral transparency.

Lectionary as Theological Frame

The most basic organizing principle of Jang Jae-ryung’s preaching is the liturgical calendar. The Soop Church sermon series “[Soop-e Jusin Malsseum]” — “The Word Given in the Forest” — moves through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time, selecting texts assigned to each season and preaching through them sequentially. Ruth appears in the weeks leading up to Advent. The David narratives in 2 Samuel run through the long stretch of Ordinary Time after Pentecost. This is not a matter of convenience.

In a sermon on Luke 21:25-36, Jang describes what he calls the practice of “overlapping time” (sijaneul pogaeneun il): the way Christ instructs the disciples to place the moment of the end over their present, so that what seems permanent is revealed as temporary, and what is truly permanent becomes visible. The liturgical calendar enacts exactly this structure for a worshipping community. Each Advent, the congregation is formed as people who wait for the one who is coming. Each Easter, they stand again at the empty tomb. The preacher who follows the lectionary is making a theological wager: that the community’s present experience can be read more truly when it is overlaid on the rhythm of redemptive history than when it stands alone.

The sequential expository treatment of 1-2 Samuel across several months reflects the same logic. Beginning from David as a shepherd boy who learns to sense God in the open fields, moving through his capture of Jerusalem and recovery of the ark, and then — with no editorial mercy — into the abuse of power, the rape of Bathsheba, and the staged murder of Uriah (2 Samuel 11), Jang allows the narrative arc to accumulate. The congregation follows a man’s gradual transformation into someone unrecognizable. No single week’s lesson tidies the story into a moral point. The long arc is the point.

Poetry and Fiction as Exegetical Tools

In Jang Jae-ryung’s preaching, poetry and novels are not illustrations. They are primary instruments of interpretation.

In the Ruth sermon, he quotes the Korean novelist Kim Young-ah: “Reading a novel is not about grasping a theme — it is about becoming that person.” He applies this principle directly to scripture. “Reading the Bible is no different from encountering the people within it and trying to become them.” He then proceeds to inhabit Ruth: the vulnerability of a foreign woman in a patriarchal economy where marriage was not a social arrangement but a survival mechanism; the texture of village gossip around Naomi’s return; the specific weight of a decision that, by all rational calculation, made no sense. This is not imaginative decoration. It is a method — training the congregation in the kind of empathic attention that biblical narrative requires.

In the sermon on 2 Samuel 6 — the ark’s return to Jerusalem — Pablo Neruda’s poem “Poetry Came to Me” becomes the governing interpretive frame. Neruda insisted that a poem does not originate in the poet; it arrives, and the poet receives it. Jang reads the ark’s movement in exactly this register: the initiative is not human but divine, and the story of Uzzah’s death and the three-month pause is a narrative about what happens when a community tries to manage God rather than receive him. “The main character of the story from this point is not David or the people,” he says. “It is the ark — the silent, majestic presence of the ark.” Neruda’s account of waiting for the poem to arrive — of clearing away noise and self-interest so the poem can find its way in — becomes a theology of prayer and preparation.

Mary Oliver appears in the 2 Samuel 11-12 sermon. Oliver writes of sitting by the Clarion River and hearing the water, the rock, and the moss each say “I am part of the divine.” Jang connects this to Nathan’s parable: the one ewe lamb in the poor man’s family — described with the same vocabulary of intimacy that David once knew as a shepherd boy — is the crack through which God enters David’s sealed self-absorption. The poem is not illustrating the text; it is offering the text a new angle of entry.

Martial Law, the Wilderness, and the Present Moment

Jang Jae-ryung’s preaching does not navigate around political reality.

In the Sunday immediately following South Korea’s brief martial law declaration in December 2024, he opened his sermon on Luke 3:1-6 by recounting his experience of hearing about the declaration while driving home from a church gathering. He named the moment plainly: “The president, defining those who disagreed with him as anti-state forces, deployed soldiers and declared emergency martial law, bringing this country to a halt.” He then moved to the text. Luke’s opening of the third chapter — a catalog of imperial and regional rulers governing Judea — functioned as a direct mirror. The conditions of political subjugation that made a wilderness prophet necessary then are conditions that recur. “God’s word did not come to Annas and Caiaphas, the political and religious leaders of Israel — it came to John, in the wilderness.” The place where God speaks is not the palace but the empty plain.

He developed the wilderness as a sustained metaphor. On a pilgrimage to Israel, he had been stranded when a tour bus broke down in the middle of the Negev. Initially frustrated, he sat in the empty landscape for over an hour and found himself, involuntarily, imagining Jesus walking that terrain — sweating, dusty, smelling of exertion. “I laughed at the thought,” he said, “and that moment of laughter in the middle of that forced stop may have been the deepest moment of the whole pilgrimage.” The wilderness is not where life goes wrong. It is where the noise of directed purpose ceases and something else becomes audible.

The Nobel Prize announcement for Han Kang appears in a Hebrews 10 sermon. The Stockholm committee’s description of her fiction — “no room for achievement or redemption,” only the exposure of historical trauma and human fragility — becomes a framing device for the claim that genuine Christian community requires the same unflinching attention to people as they actually are, rather than as they perform themselves.

A Consistent Turn Toward the Overlooked

Across the sermons sampled, a consistent ethical axis runs through Jang’s preaching: the gaze directed toward the overlooked.

In the Ruth sermon, he pauses over Seoul’s ranking in Forbes as one of the world’s ten best cities, then observes: “In this Seoul, we have no occasion to encounter a woman like Ruth. Living in apartments, surrounded by people of similar socioeconomic structures, we simply have no occasion.” The observation is not condemnatory — he includes himself in it. But it names a structural blindness. Scripture, he argues, is in the business of repeatedly redirecting that gaze: to the poor widow’s coin, to the child without a seat at the table, to the foreign woman gleaning at the margins of a field she does not own.

In the 2 Samuel 11-12 sermon, the shift is more direct. “The history of the powerful and the tears of the vulnerable are not a distant story in 2 Samuel 11 — they are a reality that continues today.” A worker who dies without anyone being held accountable, young people killed without a cause being determined: these are named alongside Uriah, without the sermon becoming a political speech. The text is the lens; the present is what comes into focus through it.

The criterion Nathan uses to reach David is telling. He does not deploy an abstract argument about power and accountability. He tells a story about a lamb — and David, who had once been a shepherd boy who would fight lions and bears to protect a single sheep, hears it. “Through that small ewe lamb, God speaks,” Jang says. “In Scripture, the small one and the overlooked one always matter in exactly this way.” The sermon does not demand that the congregation take a position. It invites them into the same kind of hearing that broke David open.

Pastoral Transparency and Saturday Night Prayer

One of the most distinctive features of Jang Jae-ryung’s preaching is his refusal to conceal his own vulnerability as a preacher.

In the same New Year’s sermon in which he articulated his theology of proclamation, he said this: “Sermon preparation is still very hard for me. On Saturdays and Sundays, I find myself making repeated trips to the bathroom — a bathroom I barely visit on normal days. I have spent many Saturday nights begging God to keep me alive.” He also named what he called “a Jonah-like desire to flee” the pulpit — and acknowledged that some of his earlier decisions to invite other preachers to the Sunday pulpit had been motivated not only by theological conviction about the value of different voices but by his own wish to escape the weight of the role.

This is not a performance of humility. It is a theological position stated in confessional form. “Preaching,” he said, “is not in the eloquence of words but in the power of God.” If that is true, then the preacher’s job is to become a vessel — and becoming a vessel requires emptying. His practice of reserving Saturdays entirely for solitary preparation, without social engagements, is not a discipline for its own sake. It is an attempt to be quiet enough for something to arrive.

In the 1 Samuel 8 sermon on the aging Samuel, Jang observes that when Samuel’s mind was troubled, he knew immediately that this disturbance was a summons to prayer. “He closed his eyes. And ceasing his own speech was how his prayer began.” The philosopher Max Picard: “When we fall silent, we return our words to their source in God.” This contemplative thread — centering prayer, lectio divina, the discipline of silence — runs through the preparation as well as the content of Jang’s preaching. The Saturday solitude and the sermon’s literary depth are two expressions of the same orientation.

What the Pattern Suggests

Jang Jae-ryung’s preaching style is coherent at every level. Structurally, it follows the lectionary — a sequential movement through the liturgical year that trains the congregation to read their present inside the arc of salvation history. Hermeneutically, it draws on poetry and literary fiction as primary interpretive tools, inviting a reading practice built on empathic identification with biblical figures rather than doctrinal extraction. Ethically, it maintains a consistent preferential turn toward the overlooked — visible in text selection, in contemporary application, and in the very theology of where God speaks (the wilderness, not the temple precinct). Pastorally, it is grounded in a transparency about the preacher’s own struggle, which serves as a living demonstration of the claim that the word’s power does not originate in the speaker.

The refusal to broadcast widely is the frame around all of it. A sermon that dissipates into a specific congregation on a specific Sunday — and then is gone — is making an argument with its very form: that the Word arrives in time and place, and the task of the preacher is to receive it, not to produce it.

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Reference Sermons

The following are the actual sermons used as the basis for this analysis.

1. The Word Became Flesh | John 1:1-18
2. People Who Have a Wilderness | Luke 3:1-6
3. People Who Overlay Time | Luke 21:25-36
4. Look Out for One Another | Hebrews 10:24
5. Where the Light Seeps Through | Ruth 1-4
6. God Inside One Ewe Lamb | 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13
7. The Wonder That Is Jesus | 2 Samuel 11:1-15
8. This Humble Hut Is Wider Than the Sky | 2 Samuel 7:1-16
9. The Ark Came to Me | 2 Samuel 6:1-19
10. Beside the Aging Samuel | 1 Samuel 8:4-20

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