The Hub of the Gospel: Kim Joo-hwan's Expository Preaching

Background: The Scholar Who Planted a Church

Kim Joo-hwan’s biography reads like a deliberate attempt to hold together two worlds that often drift apart: the academy and the congregation.

After completing undergraduate studies in business administration at Yonsei University (1992) and an M.Div. at Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Seoul (1996), he pursued graduate work in the United States — an M.A. in New Testament theology at Yale (2000), a second M.A. in Christian origins at Harvard (2002), and finally a Ph.D. in New Testament studies at Harvard (2009). His dissertation, “What is This Word?”: An Early Christian Narrative of the Universal Spread of the Spirit-Accompanied Word (archived in Harvard’s DASH repository), reads Luke-Acts as an early Christian counter-narrative to Roman claims of universal dominion — with the Spirit-accompanied Word, not imperial power, as the agent of universal reach.

Alongside his doctoral program and immediately after, he served as associate professor of New Testament at Torch Trinity Graduate School of Theology (2009–2017) while simultaneously working as an associate pastor at Onnuri Church — one of South Korea’s largest congregations — where he had already been serving since 1995. After nineteen years at Onnuri, he stepped away in 2014 to plant HUB Church in Gangnam.

His publicly stated personal goals — “(1) faithful husband, (2) exemplary father, (3) pure-hearted pastor, (4) studying theologian” — and his expressed aim to pursue “a faith life that balances the head and the heart” are not mere slogans. They describe a life structure he has maintained institutionally.

The Church: Intentionally Unencumbered

HUB Church (허브교회) held its first service on September 14, 2014, in a rented event hall inside the POSCO P&S Tower in Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam. The founding motto was “a church without a building” — a deliberate choice to lease space rather than own property. The church currently meets in Seocho-gu and is affiliated with KAICAM (Korea Association of Independent Churches and Missions), a network of nondenominational congregations.

The name “HUB” frames the church’s identity: a hub for the gospel, not for institutional infrastructure or denominational politics. At the founding service, Pastor Kim stated directly: “The church’s only resource is the gospel. When we treat the gospel as our resource and move forward from that foundation, God’s power and work appear in the church” (Cup News, 2014).

A reporter covering the founding observed that the congregation was “unusually well-educated” and had developed a reputation for high intellectual engagement, which he attributed in part to the pastor’s own academic background (Christian Korea News, 2014). Whether or not that correlation holds, the church’s 2015 lecture series on Christian apologetics — addressing the phenomenon of “I like Jesus but not the church” and questions about science and religion, taught by a philosopher-theologian from Torch Trinity — suggests that the intellectual register was set intentionally.

Sermon Form: The Long Series

The most visible structural feature of Kim Joo-hwan’s preaching, at least as visible from the public record, is the extended expository series.

HUB Church’s archived sermons reveal a pattern of working through single biblical books across dozens of installments:

• Mark: “The Power of the Gospel” — over 50 sermons, the longest series in the church’s history
• Galatians: “Return to the Gospel” — ongoing as of 2025, twelve-plus sermons
• Exodus: “Crossing the Red Sea” and “The Gospel Story: Exodus” — multiple series
• Jonah: “When the Real God Appears”
• Genesis: “For Those Walking East of Eden” — recently launched

The coverage spans both Testaments: Genesis, Exodus, Jonah from the Old Testament; Mark and Galatians from the New. This breadth suggests a commitment to expository preaching as a whole-Bible discipline, not a preference for particular corpora.

Preaching through fifty-plus sermons in a single gospel requires a kind of sustained exegetical stamina that topical preaching does not. It also implies a conviction that individual biblical books possess their own theological architecture — that a preacher’s job is to trace that architecture rather than mine texts for standalone illustrations.

Theological Emphasis: Gospel-Centered Reading

The word “gospel” (복음) appears in nearly every major series title. This is not incidental. “Gospel-centered” preaching — the interpretive framework most associated with Tim Keller, Scotty Smith, and the broader Reformed evangelical homiletical movement of the 2000s — holds that every biblical text, regardless of Testament or genre, ultimately points toward and derives its meaning from the person and work of Christ.

The years Kim Joo-hwan spent at Yale and Harvard (2000–2009) coincided with a period when this approach was being actively theorized in transatlantic evangelical circles. That the framework would find its way into the preaching of a Korean pastor trained in those environments during those years is not surprising. What is notable is how explicitly it has been embedded into the church’s founding statement and sustained across every major preaching series — including Old Testament books like Genesis and Exodus, which are titled not as “Genesis series” or “Exodus series” but as “The Gospel Story: Exodus” or “For Those Walking East of Eden.”

Narrative Register

The titles of individual sermons within these series suggest a narrative approach to the text. “Do You Know Leah?”, “My Son, Come Out of Egypt!”, “Escape,” “God’s Love Story” — these are not the titles of doctrinal expositions or three-point thematic sermons. They address characters, invoke dramatic moments, and pull the listener into the world of the text.

This aligns with the methodology of Kim’s doctoral dissertation, which reads Luke-Acts through the lens of narrative criticism — treating the text not as historical chronicle or doctrinal compendium but as a theologically shaped story with its own rhetorical arc and implied audience. The same instinct that shaped years of scholarly work reading biblical texts as narratives carries directly into the pulpit.

A Distinctive Position in Korean Homiletics

Several features of Kim Joo-hwan’s ministry place him at an unusual intersection within Korean Protestant preaching.

Most Korean megachurch pastors who become nationally prominent do so from within major denominational structures — Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist. Kim operates from an independent congregation with no denominational anchor and no building of its own. The choice of institutional smallness and structural simplicity appears to be a principled one, not a circumstantial one.

The combination of Onnuri Church formation (nineteen years under Ha Yong-jo’s large-church model) and Harvard doctoral training (rigorously text-critical, narratively oriented) is also not common. Many Korean pastors trained in American or European divinity schools return to occupying academic positions; fewer make the move from academic faculty back to full-time pastoral ministry in a church they founded from scratch.

Closing Observations

Kim Joo-hwan’s preaching, as reconstructed from publicly available evidence, coheres around three axes: long-form expository series, gospel-centered theological reading, and the integration of scholarly formation with pastoral practice. His Harvard dissertation on Luke-Acts as a counter-narrative of Spirit-accompanied word-spread suggests that these axes are not independent but mutually reinforcing: the same narrative instinct that read Luke-Acts as a cosmic mission story animates the choice to preach through the whole of Mark in fifty sermons.

For pastors and students interested in how New Testament scholarship can inform congregational preaching — or in what it looks like to build a church around gospel-centered exposition rather than programming or infrastructure — HUB Church’s sermon archive (available at hubchurch.org and on YouTube) offers a concrete case study.

What stands out is the structural coherence between the scholar’s dissertation, the planter’s founding statement, and the pastor’s decade-long preaching practice.

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