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The Scholar-Pastor at Pohang Cheil: The Preaching of Park Young-ho

Series · Preaching Styles of Korean Pastors
Ⅰ Expository Tradition 43/52 See this track →

The Scholar-Pastor at Pohang Cheil: The Preaching of Park Young-ho

Senior pastor of Pohang Cheil Church, director of MIMOKWON, and a leading voice in Korea’s Prophezei movement

Pohang Cheil Church is one of the older Protestant congregations on Korea’s east coast, carrying over a century of institutional history. Park Young-ho, who became its senior pastor in 2019, arrived with an academic pedigree uncommon in Korean pastoral ministry. He completed undergraduate work in English literature at Busan National University, received theological training at Presbyterian College and Theological Seminary in Seoul, earned a Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) from Yale Divinity School, and then — while simultaneously planting and pastoring a Korean immigrant congregation in Chicago for ten years — completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School in New Testament studies and early Christian literature (2012). After returning to Korea in 2015, he taught New Testament at Hanil University and Presbyterian Theological Seminary for four years before taking the pulpit at Pohang Cheil.

The academic formation and the decade of immigrant church pastoring are not compartmentalized in his current work. They meet in the pulpit.

Three axes for reading Park’s preaching:

  • Structure: Expository — opens with a contemporary or historical illustration, moves through the text’s first-century world, converges on communal application
  • Emphasis: Ecclesiology (the ekklesia as a social body), communal mission, the present reality of the kingdom of God
  • Methodology: Historical-cultural exegesis drawn from New Testament scholarship; original language work embedded in interpretation rather than performed for the congregation

Sermon Architecture: The Door Before the Text

Park’s sermons have a recognizable opening strategy. Rather than beginning immediately with the biblical text, he first establishes a point of contact with the congregation’s experience. Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus in December 1955. A NASA photograph taken from Mars orbit, showing Earth as a pale point of light in the darkness. A pivot moment in Korean economic history. These stories function as a door: by the time the biblical passage is announced, the congregation has already been given a question to bring to it.

The underlying architecture is expository. The sermon follows the sequence of the biblical text, finding the load-bearing question in each unit and tracing how it bears on the congregation’s current situation. In a Revelation series, Park approached the book not as a coded preview of future events but as “a book that shows how God moves history” — and proposed reading it backward, from the conclusion in chapter 21 (“Behold, I make all things new”) back through the preceding visions. This reading strategy reflects an understanding of apocalyptic genre that comes directly from New Testament scholarship; it is exegetical judgment translated into pastoral communication.

The delivery is deliberately accessible. Questions are posed to the congregation. Abstract claims are grounded in specific names and incidents. The exegetical labor that produces each sermon’s interpretive judgments is real and substantial, but it operates below the surface — scaffolding rather than display.

The Theological Center: Church as First-Century Social Body

Park’s scholarly center is the ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) — the church as a first-century social reality, not merely a religious gathering. His doctoral research at the University of Chicago engaged this question directly, reading early Christian community as a social formation that occupied a distinctive position within the Greco-Roman world. Two books have brought this work into the hands of Korean readers: We Didn’t Know About the First-Century Church (IVP Korea), a historically oriented treatment of early church life, and Meeting the Church Again (Bok Itneun Saram), which grew out of materials Park developed for a new members’ class at Pohang Cheil. The subtitle of the latter — “a new members’ class in ecclesiology” — captures the project: to let the biblical text set the terms for understanding what the church is, before news headlines or institutional habits do.

The ecclesiological center organizes the preaching. In Park’s sermons, the church is consistently presented not as the destination of individual salvation but as the starting point for communal mission — a people whose calling is to embody the kingdom of God within the specific social terrain they inhabit. The corporate dimension of Christian life tends to be more prominent than the interior development of the individual believer. Salvation, in this frame, is already pointing outward.

This orientation was visible in an interview he gave around the time of his installation at Pohang Cheil, when he framed his pastoral aspiration as becoming “a pastor who is truly a pastor” — someone who attends to what Scripture and the church are actually about, rather than to the agendas generated by the news cycle or public opinion. His pulpit practice tends to let the biblical text set the agenda, forming the congregation to read their situation through that lens rather than the reverse.

Scholarly Background and Original Languages

Park reads New Testament Greek, and the original text informs his interpretive judgments throughout. But his congregational preaching does not exhibit original-language study in the way sometimes associated with technical expository preaching. He does not routinely move through a passage by parsing Greek words or dwelling on etymologies for their own sake. The exegetical work is present but absorbed: the judgment about which translation more precisely renders the text’s meaning, or what associations a first-century audience would have brought to a particular term, arrives as a conclusion rather than as a demonstration.

The University of Chicago’s Divinity School is one of the leading centers of historical-critical and social-scientific approaches to biblical study. That formation produces a habit of situating biblical texts within their ancient social and cultural world before reading their contemporary relevance. In Park’s preaching, this habit manifests as a natural fluency with the Greco-Roman world, Second Temple Judaism, and the social dynamics of early Christian communities. Historical background functions as interpretive argument, not background decoration. The distance between the first century and today is treated as real and important, not papered over by a premature jump to application.

His published writings display the same scholarly range: alongside the two ecclesiology books, his bibliography includes works in New Testament eschatology, the theology of the kingdom of God, and a Bible reading commentary on Philippians.

Prophezei: Preaching as Community Work

No account of Park Young-ho’s approach to preaching can omit the Prophezei (프로페짜이) movement he has led through MIMOKWON, the Institute for Future Ministry and Word Studies. The name itself signals the historical claim the movement makes.

On June 19, 1525, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) inaugurated a new form of ministerial Bible study at the Grossmünster church in Zürich. Pastors gathered on weekday mornings — at seven o’clock — to work through the biblical text together in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and German. Named after the Greek word for prophesying or proclaiming, the Prophezei became foundational to the Reformed tradition’s approach to sermon preparation and ministerial formation. It spread from Switzerland through southern Germany, the Netherlands, and England, establishing a model for collegial biblical study that shaped the Reformed preaching tradition for generations.

MIMOKWON, which Park directs, has transplanted this practice into the Korean context. Pastors from across denominational lines gather weekly — online and in person — to study the same biblical text, preach from it in their own congregations on Sunday, and then reconvene to share observations and feedback. According to Christian Today, the movement has been described as carrying forward “the driving force behind the reformations of Calvin and Zwingli.” Reporting in Kookmin Ilbo indicates that in the year leading up to the 2024 Lausanne Congress in Seoul-Incheon, approximately five hundred Korean and Korean-diaspora churches participated in a shared Acts preaching project through this framework — studying the same text, preaching it independently, and reflecting together on what they found.

The connection to Park’s broader homiletical approach is direct. Expository preaching, in this view, is not a solitary achievement — a pastor retreating to a study, producing a sermon, and delivering it. It is the work of a community of ministers who share the labor of interpretation, test each other’s readings, and bring the text’s meaning to their respective congregations through a common preparation process. The Reformation-era Prophezei established that the best preaching grows out of pastors who study together; Park’s institutional role is to restore that practice as a living norm.

For anyone preparing to preach from a passage through this kind of community framework, a study guide that provides access to scholarly literature, historical background, and original-language annotation fills a similar function to what a Prophezei session provides: a wider circle of interpreters gathered around the text.

Academic discussion sections help ground sermons in the historical world of the text

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