Lee Dong-won's Preaching Style — Three-Point Exposition and Dramatic Narrative

Within Korean expository preaching, Lee Dong-won (born 1945) occupies an interesting position: a preacher who committed to the three-point sermon structure across his entire ministry, yet developed within that frame a dramatic narrative sensibility that kept it feeling fresh. Homiletics professor Shin Seong-wook, who dedicated an entire scholarly monograph to analyzing Lee’s preaching, described him as a preacher without clear equal on the contemporary Korean pulpit.

This piece examines what distinguishes his approach — not to rank it, but to understand how its particular combination of elements works.

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Background and Formation

Lee Dong-won was born in Suwon in 1945. He completed a B.A. in biblical studies at William Tyndale College in the United States, then an M.Div. at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, before earning a D.Miss. in missional theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Deerfield, Illinois. He pastored a Korean congregation in Washington, D.C., before returning to Korea, where he founded Jiguchon Church in 1993.

He stepped down from the senior pastor role at 65 — a notably early retirement. In 2019, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary recognized him with the Spurgeon Fellow award for expository preaching, the first Asian to receive it.

His training at TEDS placed him in close contact with the American evangelical expository tradition. Among the preaching mentors he has named are Warren Wiersbe and Chuck Swindoll (American evangelical exposition), Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott (British Reformed preaching), and John Bunyan and Charles Spurgeon (the Puritan lineage). Among Korean figures, he credited Kim Jang-hwan with shaping his approach to introductions, and Kim Jun-gon with influencing a quieter but emotionally resonant delivery style.

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Sermon Structure: Three Points and Dramatic Development

Lee’s structural commitment is to the traditional three-point expository sermon — drawing three main principles from a biblical text and developing them in sequence. This places him in clear contrast to narrative or single-focus sermon forms, and he has not moved away from the framework even as preaching style shifted around him.

What distinguishes his practice within that structure is what homiletics professor Shin Seong-wook calls a semi-inductive approach. The opening moves inductively: a concrete, often dramatic illustration draws the congregation in from their own experience before the text is introduced. The body then shifts to deductive development, moving through the text’s three principles in order. The congregation is captured before they’ve asked whether they care about the passage — and the biblical argument then carries them forward.

Shin identifies as one of Lee’s finest sermons “The Person With Closed Heart and Ears” (Mark 7:31–35, included in the collection You Are Jesus’ VIP). In that message, Lee opens with a story from American sociologist Tony Campolo, develops the text through its three movements, and returns to the same Campolo story to close. This envelope structure — same story at beginning and end — is a recurring formal device. It means the illustration isn’t ornamental; it’s load-bearing, holding the sermon’s emotional arc together from opening to conclusion.

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A Three-Stage Preparation Method

Lee has described his sermon preparation method in public lectures, and it is notably systematic. He works through three distinct outline stages:

• Exegetical outline: What does this passage say, in the language of the text and to its original audience?
• Expository outline: What timeless principle does this teach, expressed in terms that apply across all contexts?
• Homiletical outline: How does that principle address today’s congregation, in language they actually use?

The movement through these three stages is deliberate. A preacher cannot jump to application before doing the historical and theological work; but neither can they deliver the exegetical outline from the pulpit without translation. The three stages enforce the full journey.

He also applies what he calls Calvin’s “single sentence” principle: every sermon must be reducible to one sentence. If the preacher can’t state the core claim in a single sentence, the sermon isn’t ready. This functions as a clarity test — preventing the kind of thematic drift that can occur when three main points don’t actually cohere around a single idea.

For titles, he uses the AIR test: Attractive, Instructive, Reflective. A sermon title should draw attention, carry content, and invite personal application. He also insists on selecting a single pericope — a self-contained unit of thought — rather than ranging across passages that don’t share a unified focus.

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Head, Heart, and Will

A 2013 master’s thesis at Chongshin University (Seong Yeon-guk, advisor Kim Chang-hun) analyzed Lee’s preaching through the lens of what it called balance of knowledge, emotion, and will — ji, jeong, eui in Korean, roughly equivalent to the Western evangelical homiletics categories of head, heart, and will. The conclusion was that Lee gives sustained attention to all three without allowing any one to dominate.

This observation maps cleanly onto the structural features described above. The three-point framework ensures intellectual clarity and structure. The dramatic illustrations engage emotion. The explicit life application concluding each point or the whole — common in evangelical expository preaching — addresses the will. The three elements don’t compete; they operate at different registers within the same sermon.

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Scholarly Reception

Shin Seong-wook’s monograph The Preaching World of Pastor Lee Dong-won (Duranno, 2014; revised edition, 560 pages, 2023) remains the most thorough scholarly treatment. Shin catalogued eight hermeneutical characteristics and thirty homiletical characteristics across Lee’s body of work.

Alongside his praise, Shin listed several critical observations. He noted that Lee’s sermons sometimes function more as topical preaching than true exposition. He observed that Lee’s content tends to focus on individual faith and personal life, with less attention to broader social or national concerns. And he pointed to the structural consistency itself as a potential limitation: “always fixed in a three-point sermon framework and uniform outline structure.” He also suggested that more open-ended conclusions — leaving some tension unresolved rather than closing every question — might add depth.

In 2004, a symposium organized by the journal Christian Thought brought together eight young Korean homiletics scholars to analyze sixteen prominent Korean preachers, including Lee. The analysis highlighted his “outstanding ability to draw the congregation’s attention into the act of preaching itself.”

Lee’s own statement of method appears in his book Expository Preaching That Wakes the Congregation (Yodan Publishers, 1990), which remains a reference point in Korean homiletics discussions. He has published more than 150 books total, including full expository series on the Pentateuch, the Gospels, and multiple New Testament letters.

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Closing Note

Lee Dong-won’s preaching represents a sustained commitment to a single structural form — three-point expository preaching — developed with careful attention to how that form can hold dramatic, emotionally engaging material without losing its biblical and intellectual rigor. The semi-inductive opening, the envelope structure with illustrations, the three-stage preparation process, and the balance of knowledge, emotion, and will are not separate techniques but interlocking parts of a coherent approach.

For those studying Korean preaching traditions, his work shows how a formal structure inherited from Western evangelical homiletics can be given a distinct texture through how it is inhabited — not just what the framework is, but what a preacher chooses to put inside it.

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