One Passage, One Week: The Sequential Preaching of Lee Jae-chul

From Entrepreneur to Pastor

Lee Jae-chul (b. 1949, Busan) came to the pulpit by an unlikely road. After earning a degree in French from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, he founded a trading company that he later transformed into Hongsungsa, a Christian publishing house. A personal turning point in faith led him to enroll at Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in 1985, where he completed his M.Div. in 1988. Ordained in 1990, he founded Junim’s Church in Songpa, Seoul, with a self-imposed commitment to serve for exactly ten years. When that term expired in 1998, he kept his word, resigned without fanfare, and spent three years as a missionary to the Korean congregation in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2005 he became senior pastor of Centennial Memorial Church in Seoul, a position he held until November 2018 — retiring seven months ahead of mandatory retirement, declining any severance payment or installation ceremony, and relocating to the rural township of Ungyang-myeon in South Gyeongsang Province. The manner of his leaving was as deliberate as every other aspect of his ministry.

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Sermon Structure: Sequential Preaching

The defining feature of Lee’s homiletical practice is a method he named sequential preaching (순서설교). The name suggests a relationship to expository preaching, and the resemblance is real, but Lee drew a precise distinction between the two approaches.

“Expository preaching takes a broad passage, which reduces the weight given to each individual verse. Sequential preaching takes only one or two verses as the text each Sunday. Each week, I pursue both the depth of that specific passage and the breadth of the Bible as a whole.” (Christian Today, 2010)

The goal he articulated is pastoral and practical: each week’s passage functions as a window through which the whole of Scripture can be glimpsed, and as glasses that the congregation wears throughout the following week. The text is not meant to be processed and put aside on Sunday afternoon. It is meant to become the interpretive lens for Monday through Saturday.

The practical consequence of this approach is a pace that would surprise most Western preaching calendars. At Centennial Memorial Church, chapter one of Acts alone took twenty-one weeks. Over five years, Lee covered fourteen of its twenty-eight chapters. By the end of his thirteen-year-and-four-month tenure, he had completed the book, producing the fifteen-volume series Into Acts (사도행전 속으로), subsequently made available in Logos Bible Software. During his decade at Junim’s Church, he completed the Gospel of John, leaving behind the ten-volume With John (요한과 더불어).

The movement within each sermon is inductive rather than deductive. Propositions emerge from the accumulation of textual detail rather than being announced at the outset and subsequently supported. Homiletics scholar Oh Hyun-chul (Sungkyul University), writing in Church Growth (2004), characterized Lee’s sermons as having “a centripetal force that pulls listeners back to what is essential” — a phrase that captures the convergent movement of each sermon toward a unifying core without scattering into multiple discrete points.

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Original Language Use: The Color-Coded Manuscript

Lee Jae-chul’s preparation method has a distinctive physical form. He writes the complete text of each sermon — enough material for thirty-seven to thirty-eight minutes of delivery — on the front and back of a single half-A4 sheet of paper. The color-coding system he applies throughout gives this practice much of its meaning.

• Black: sermon content
• Blue: Scripture citations
• Red: Hebrew and Greek original-language terms
• Green: illustrative examples

The red markings for original languages are not decorative. In the preparation process, Lee moves through the Hebrew or Greek text, examines individual words and their usage, and transcribes that work directly into the manuscript alongside the corresponding sermon content. The original languages are not appended as footnotes or kept in a separate study document — they appear in the body of the manuscript at the point in composition when they are encountered.

On the platform, Lee rarely consults this manuscript. He described the experience of delivery as images surfacing in sequence, “like thread unwinding from a spool” (The Mission interview). The intensive handwritten preparation internalizes the material; what reaches the congregation is a live, face-to-face act of communication rather than a reading. His description of sermon preparation as “pouring the essence of the whole body into a single sermon” is consistent with this method — the thoroughness of preparation is what enables the apparent effortlessness of delivery.

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Core Emphasis: Intellect, Faith, and Life

Three categories recur across descriptions of Lee’s preaching and writing: intellect, faith, and life. His official publisher biography (Hongsungsa) frames his body of work in these terms:

“Rather than speculative or theoretical content, he consistently relates Christian truth to life, seeking the harmony of intellect, faith, and life. His characteristic clarity of logic and prose emphasizes both insight into essentials and the practice of them.”

This framework came into sharp relief in a public dialogue series with Lee O-young (이어령), one of Korea’s most prominent literary critics, held at Yanghwajin Cultural Center across eight sessions in 2010. When Lee O-young defined spirituality as “a force that overcomes human intellectual arrogance,” Lee Jae-chul responded:

“Intellect is the best instrument available for expressing spirituality.”

The remark draws two boundaries at once. Against forms of faith that treat emotion and mystical experience as spirituality’s primary register, Lee declines to position intellect as the opposite of genuine religious life. Against theological discourse that remains abstracted from daily practice, he insists that understanding must generate transformation. He interprets being filled with the Spirit not as an emotional state but as “a life centered on the Word,” and defines faith as “being transformed before God, day by day.” His recurring phrase — “not a believer who goes to church, but one who holds to the Word and lives by it” — marks the practical axis on which this theology consistently rests.

The triad is not a rhetorical scheme; it describes the actual movement Lee expects a sermon to produce. Intellect receives the text, faith responds to it, and life embodies it across the week that follows. The sequential preaching method, which sends a congregation home with one or two verses to carry as daily glasses, is the structural expression of that expectation.

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Written Works and Pastoral Philosophy

Lee’s bibliography divides into two streams. The first comprises his sequential preaching series: With John (10 vols.), Romans with Lee Jae-chul (3 vols.), and Into Acts (15 vols.). These volumes are the accumulated archive of the method — the physical record of what it looks like to move through Scripture one or two verses at a time, week after week, year after year. Their combined scale is itself a statement about what the method requires and produces.

The second stream is a catechetical trilogy. The Newcomer’s Class (새신자반) addresses the foundations of faith — God, Christ, the Spirit, Scripture, prayer, family life — while redefining its intended audience: newcomers are not merely first-time attenders but “all who have decided to live a new life with Jesus Christ.” The Mature Believer’s Class (성숙자반) moves to the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the nature of Christian love. The Called (사명자반) focuses on embodying the gospel in action. All three have been translated into Mongolian, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

His stand-alone titles — including Restoring Faith (회복의 신앙) — apply the same interpretive habit: an ordinary situation (a circus acrobat, a family meal) becomes the entry point for a theological proposition, which in turn returns to ordinary life with fresh force. His prose tends toward concise, aphoristic formulations. “Faith is courtesy toward God.” “The relationship between God and me is one of courtesy.” These are not decorative rhetorical flourishes but condensed forms of the inductive movement characteristic of his sermons — from specific and concrete to a single essential claim.

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Closing Note

Lee Jae-chul’s approach to the pulpit is shaped by two constraints he placed on himself from the start: slow enough to give each text its full weight, and prepared enough to deliver it without reading. The sequential preaching method ensures that no passage is treated as a stepping stone to the next. The color-coded manuscript ensures that original languages are integral to how the text is inhabited during preparation, not ornamental additions applied afterward. The axis of intellect, faith, and life runs through both the method and the message — converging, as Oh Hyun-chul put it, in “a centripetal force that pulls back to what is essential.”

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