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Preacher Profile

The Expository Preacher Who Enters the Text Through Culture: Jung Kap-shin

Series · Preaching Styles of Korean Pastors
Ⅴ Narrative, Liturgical, and Theological Focus 48/52 See this track →

The Expository Preacher Who Enters the Text Through Culture: Jung Kap-shin

Founding pastor of Jesus Hyangnam Church and president of City to City Korea

Three axes for reading Jung’s work:

  • Structure: Continuous book-series expository — Isaiah, John, and the Ten Commandments preached in sustained sequential units
  • Emphasis: Gospel-centered; the theology of self-breaking and acceptance as the human longing the gospel addresses
  • Methodology: Historical and cultural background as a framing device; cultural, literary, and psychological references as the primary entry point into the text

Planting a Church in the City to City Tradition

Jung Kap-shin is the founding and senior pastor of Jesus Hyangnam Church (예수향남교회) in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, affiliated with the Korean Presbyterian Church Hapdong. He planted the church in August 2009 with roughly twenty founding members; by year two attendance had reached 750, and today approximately 2,500 people gather at Jesus Hyangnam.

Jung studied theology at Chongshin University, continued at the Graduate School of Education at Seoul National University, and completed his M.Div. at Chongshin Graduate School of Theology. He served as associate pastor at Chunghyun Church and Ansan Dongsang Church before taking the senior pastor role at Changsin Church in Seoul’s Seocho district, which he held from 2006 until the Jesus Hyangnam plant in 2009.

He currently serves as president of City to City (CTC) Korea — the Korean expression of Tim Keller’s church-planting network — and as a board member of TGC Korea. These affiliations are not incidental. They represent a theological grammar: the conviction that the gospel transforms not only individuals but cultures and cities, and that the church communicates the gospel most effectively when it meets the city on its own terms.

Sequential Exposition as the Structural Backbone

Jung’s preaching is built on continuous book-series exposition. A survey of Jesus Hyangnam Church’s YouTube channel reveals him working through Isaiah methodically — chapters 31, 32, 33, 40, 43, and 45 in sequence — alongside sustained series in John’s Gospel and the Ten Commandments. The structure is classically expository: he stays in the text, follows the biblical argument across multiple weeks, and resists the pull toward topical preaching.

Any listener expecting the standard Reformed expository cadence — historical context, word study, doctrinal development, application — will find the skeleton intact. What differs is the skin.

The Cultural Bridge: How Each Sermon Begins

Rather than opening with the biblical text, Jung typically opens with a cultural, literary, or psychological reference that establishes shared ground with the congregation — and then slowly walks that reference into the passage.

In one Isaiah sermon, he spends the first several minutes tracing C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as literary companions, noting the friendship between the two authors before pivoting to what Isaiah’s narrative has to say about human longing. In another, he introduces the Johari Window — the psychological model used in counseling to map what we know and don’t know about ourselves — before showing how the biblical text addresses exactly that problem with more depth than psychology can offer. A sermon preached on the Korean national holiday of March 1st (삼일절) opens by connecting the historical memory of Korea’s independence movement to the geopolitical pressures of the Assyrian period in Isaiah.

The pattern is consistent: find what the congregation already knows, let that shared world surface the right question, then show how the biblical narrative answers it. This is the logic of cultural apologetics in preaching — not cultural accommodation, but cultural translation. The difference matters: the text is not softened to fit the cultural reference; the cultural reference is chosen because it accurately names the human problem the text is about to address.

The Theological Center: Self-Breaking and Acceptance

In an interview with Kukmin Ilbo, Jung summarized his pastoral vision in a single phrase:

“The mystery of the gospel is a longing to be accepted.”

This is as close as he comes to a theological motto. Moksa wa Shinhak (두란노 목회와신학), one of Korea’s leading pastoral journals, described his preaching as “confirming the freedom of the gospel through self-breaking and the rediscovery of the gospel.” The two terms — acceptance and self-breaking — mark the coordinates within which his sermons operate.

These are not merely abstract theological categories. They explain why the cultural-bridge approach works for his purposes. When a sermon opens with the Johari Window’s map of self-knowledge, it is not an icebreaker — it is a diagnostic. It names the human condition (we don’t fully know ourselves, and others see what we can’t), creates the felt need, and positions the congregation to receive the gospel as an answer rather than a proposition. The cultural reference does the work that an opening illustration might do in other preaching styles, but with more theological intentionality: it is chosen because it accurately describes the human situation the text is about to address.

Historical and Contextual Background

Jung includes historical and cultural background in his Isaiah sermons — the figure of Cyrus, the political dynamics of the Assyrian period, Israel’s position among the ancient Near Eastern powers — but typically in condensed form.

“There are some complex parts here. But I’ll focus on the key points and summarize the essentials.”

This is not the mode of verse-by-verse commentary that moves through every lexical and grammatical observation. Historical context functions as a framing device: it is provided to help listeners understand the narrative logic of the passage and to ground the theological argument in its original moment. The result is a sermon that is exegetically responsible without being academically dense.

This balance reflects the City to City theological framework, which prizes both doctrinal depth and contextual accessibility — the conviction that the same gospel that is expounded with scholarly care must also be communicated with pastoral intelligence.

Preaching Style in Summary

  • Structure: Continuous book-series expository — Isaiah, John, the Decalogue, each worked through sequentially
  • Entry point: Cultural, literary, and psychological references as narrative bridges into the text
  • Theological emphasis: Gospel as the answer to the human longing for acceptance; self-breaking as the pastoral posture before Scripture
  • Historical-contextual background: Summary-level framing rather than detailed word-study exposition
  • Register: Conversational spoken Korean; reflective and pedagogical rather than declarative

Jung Kap-shin represents a preaching approach that North American ministry readers will find immediately recognizable in structure — continuous expository series — but perhaps less familiar in method: a sustained commitment to beginning each sermon in the congregation’s cultural world, not the biblical world, and then walking the congregation from one to the other. The expository backbone ensures the text governs the destination. The narrative bridge ensures the congregation arrives.

For preachers preparing an Isaiah-style sequential exposition, Didymus Lab reports can support the same two-step process Jung uses: establish the historical and cultural context first, then look for the contemporary bridge point that connects to it. The report’s historical and cultural background section is where that first step happens — a condensed, reliable read of the passage’s world before the search for a Johari Window or a C. S. Lewis reference even begins.

Historical and cultural background section from the Deuteronomy 9 sample report.
The historical and cultural background section summarizes the world behind the passage — the starting point for finding which contemporary reference will actually connect to it, the way Jung pairs Isaiah with Narnia or the Johari Window.

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