Simple and Absolute Truth: The Text-Centered Exposition of Jung Pil-do

Pastor Jung Pil-do (1941–2022) planted Suyeongro Church in Busan’s Suyeong district on June 1, 1975, led it as senior pastor for 36 years, and was named pastor emeritus in 2011. Under his leadership the congregation grew to roughly 35,000 members, making it Busan’s largest church. After Gyeonggi Middle and High School, he earned an M.Div. at Chongshin University’s graduate school of theology and a D.Min. at Reformed Theological Seminary in the United States, later receiving an honorary doctorate from Westminster Theological Seminary. He chaired the Busan Evangelization Movement headquarters (Busan Seongsihwa Movement) and served on the board of trustees of Asia United Theological University, and led more than 220 revival meetings domestically and over 180 abroad. The fact that he led a single church, from its planting to his retirement, for 36 straight years is itself an important premise for understanding his preaching style — his exposition was not forged in one-off revival appearances but tempered by facing the same congregation for decades.

A Sermon Is Not a Lecture

A 2023 Christian Today report on an academic presentation by Professor Lee Sang-gyu quoted Jung’s own definition of preaching this way:

“A sermon is neither a lecture nor a current-events commentary, nor an account of subjective experience — it must therefore be rigorously text-centered.”

Jung’s own definition does more than state what a sermon is in the abstract. It names exactly three substitutes — a lecture, which replaces the text with information; a current-events commentary, which replaces the text with the news cycle; and a personal anecdote, which replaces the text with the preacher’s own story. All three are recognizable, recurring temptations in Korean pulpits, and his definition takes the form of a negative that draws a line in advance against any of them taking the text’s place.

A study analyzing his 1,626 Sunday sermons delivered between 1975 and 2005 — thirty years of preaching — found a balance of 34 percent Old Testament and 66 percent New Testament texts. Records show he preached through Genesis, Proverbs, Matthew, and John as sustained expository series. Sustaining that balance across thirty years signals a maintained principle rather than a one-off choice. Preaching through a single book over a period of months or years means the same congregation follows the arc of an entire book rather than sampling a handful of memorable verses — an approach that accumulates broad biblical literacy in a congregation rather than the selective, highlight-driven familiarity a diet of isolated topical texts produces.

A Literal Reading That Avoided Allegory

His exposition unfolded through two or three logically structured points, favoring the literal and historical meaning of a text over allegorical readings that map a passage onto arbitrary spiritual symbols. His emphasis on concrete, practical application over abstract theological discourse followed from the same principle.

“Distorted truth is dressed up elaborately… true truth is simple and absolute.”

This remark explains why his preaching language favored plainness over decorative rhetoric. This was not a limit of expression but a deliberate theological choice — if truth itself is simple and absolute, then language that becomes too ornamented in conveying it risks drifting away from the very truth it is meant to carry. Avoiding allegorical interpretation and avoiding decorative language look, on the surface, like two separate choices, but they branch from the same single conviction: that the text and the truth it carries are sufficient on their own, and that any rhetorical device a preacher adds risks clouding rather than clarifying them.

Time Spent Being Shaped as a Preacher

His growth as a preacher involved years of sustained listening and analysis.

“From my youth… I have listened to, studied, and analyzed the sermons of countless great preachers.”

“In my younger years, I even bought more than a hundred cassette tapes of one pastor’s sermons to listen to.”

Repeatedly listening to more than a hundred sermons from a single preacher is not simply a biographical anecdote — it shows that his own plain preaching language was not the product of never having encountered ornate rhetoric, but a deliberate choice made only after extensive comparative exposure to it. That a man who studied a wide range of celebrated preachers arrived, in the end, at plainness lends that plainness added weight.

Three Pillars of Ministry

His pastoral philosophy, as recorded on Suyeongro Church’s official site, is summarized in three pillars: dedication, grace, and love. Dedication meant “ministering wholeheartedly, like an ox, and devoting oneself to studying the Word.” Grace held that the pastor himself must first be filled with grace. Love was named explicitly as “the ultimate goal of the pastoral field.” The place of “grace” among these three is worth noting in particular — the premise that a preacher must first be filled with grace treats preaching as something that flows out of the preacher’s own spiritual condition rather than a matter of technique, which connects structurally, if not verbally, to the idea of the preacher as a mere vessel that recalls Christ to mind. He also described his ministry this way: “Ministry is done by God. Ministry is the Lord’s work, not something a person does.”

At his passing in March 2022, his son-in-law, Deacon Lee Hang-mo, recounted that during his final hospitalization, Jung asked for his oxygen mask to be removed, sat up, and repeatedly preached and prayed facing toward his church before passing peacefully. That his body turned toward the pulpit in the very last moments of his life shows that preaching was, for him, closer to his identity itself than to a professional role.

Published Works

His writings include the 21-volume sermon collection Letters from Suyeongro, along with Through Prayer, Tears, and Grace, The Church Is as Happy as Its Pastor, The Authority to Become Children of God, and The Truth Shall Set You Free, among other topical sermon collections.

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Sources

• Suyeongro Church official site — pastoral philosophy page
• Christian Today — report on Professor Lee Sang-gyu’s academic presentation on Jung’s preaching (2023)
• Christian Today — interview on preaching theory
• Newsjesus — obituary and memorial coverage

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