Preaching from God’s Side: The Expository Method of Park Young-sun

Founder of Nampo Church and one of Korea’s most theologically self-conscious expository preachers

At his retirement celebration in 2015, Park Young-sun asked his audience not to assess his eloquence but to notice “where he had grabbed hold and gotten back up.” The request reveals his self-understanding: preaching is not a polished theological performance but a public record of a faith journey in progress. Park (born 1948) founded Nampo Church in Seoul’s Gaepodong district in 1985 and served as senior pastor for roughly thirty years. He also taught homiletics at the Hapdong Theological Seminary, maintaining a dual identity as scholar-pastor that shapes how his preaching is best read.

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Three axes for reading Park’s work:

• Structure: Expository — close textual reading → the author’s original theological intent → specific application to lived reality
• Emphasis: An anti-anthropocentric theological agenda centered on God’s sovereign initiative; sanctification as the defining pastoral concern
• Methodology: Reformed theological argument as the primary interpretive framework; theological reasoning takes precedence over word-study exposition

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Sermon Architecture: A Three-Movement Expository Pattern

Park belongs firmly in the expository preaching tradition. Homiletician Kim Jeong-hun, writing in Hermeneia Today (Korea Institute of Theology, 2003), describes his method in three movements: “He rigorously analyzes and interprets the biblical text to convey God’s original intent, and then provides concrete application so that understanding becomes an event within the congregation’s actual reality.”

The spine of each sermon is a theologically loaded question: What is God doing here? Redemptive-historical perspective and a God-centered hermeneutic work together to answer it. For Park, preaching is always primarily about God’s agency, and the movement toward application is a movement toward showing how divine activity touches human particulars—not the reverse.

Park himself summarized the approach as “preaching is a theological fight.” Theologian Kim Jeong-woo (Old Testament, Chongshin University), editor of the 2015 festschrift Sown in Weakness, Raised in Strength: A Dialogue between Park Young-sun’s Preaching and Biblical Scholarship (Cannon & Culture), identifies this phrase as the core of Park’s homiletical self-consciousness: preaching stakes a theological claim and defends it.

A recurring structural feature is a three-stage developmental schema for faith: legalism → grace-centered understanding → freedom with responsibility. This framework appears across multiple sermon series and books, functioning as a diagnostic grid that helps congregants locate themselves in a story of spiritual maturation.

The Theological Center: God’s Zeal and the Sanctification Imperative

The phrase that has followed Park throughout his career is “God’s zeal” (하나님의 열심). It names his conviction that the motive force in salvation and spiritual growth originates entirely from God’s side. In his own words: “Salvation is not obtained by intellectual assent, emotional surrender, or volitional decision.” Faith, on this account, is not a human achievement that triggers divine response; it is a human recognition of divine initiative already underway.

This theological insistence creates deliberate friction with much of mainstream Korean church culture. Evangelism programs, service rosters, prayer disciplines, and church-growth metrics—the ordinary markers of Korean evangelical piety—Park treats as susceptible to functioning as what he calls “anthropocentric tendencies,” human-centered substitutes for genuine theological reckoning. Theologian Jeong Yong-sub has acknowledged the rarity of this move: “Relativizing what functions as absolute ideology in every Korean church is only possible when deep theological insight is secured.”

The pastoral corollary of this theological conviction is an emphasis on sanctification. Park consistently insisted that justification is not the end of the Christian story but the beginning of sanctification’s long arc. He redefined grace not as “forgiveness or a free pass” but as “God’s stubbornness”—the divine refusal to abandon the believer in the middle of the story. Old Testament scholar Wang Dae-il (Methodist Theological University), in his festschrift essay “From Salvation to Sanctification: The Life and Ministry of Park Young-sun,” identifies this reframing as Park’s central theological contribution to Korean pastoral ministry.

His pulpit delivery has been described by participants at KAPC theological forums as marked by “a characteristically blunt and forceful manner of speech that confronts what pastors know but find difficult to say.” The rhetorical directness is itself a form of anti-sentimentalism—a refusal to soften the theological edge of his argument.

Scholarly and Theological Background

Park’s use of biblical languages and historical scholarship tends toward the theological-interpretive rather than the word-study mode. His primary framework comes from Reformed and Puritan tradition, shaped by personal contact with English-language preaching. A formative moment came during a 1982 study trip to the United States, where he heard John Hunter preach on sanctification and came away with a confirmed sense of calling as a preacher. The Puritan theology of sanctification is a detectable current in his subsequent work.

Theologian Kim Jeong-woo traces a development in Park’s pneumatology: early works like The Holy Spirit and Sermons on Acts reflect conventional Reformed positions, while Sermons on Ephesians shows movement in the direction of D. M. Lloyd-Jones. Kim notes the influence of theologian Cha Young-bae as a mediating figure in this shift.

New Testament scholar Lee Dal (Hannam University), in his festschrift contribution “Park Young-sun’s Doctrine of Faith,” analyzes Park’s understanding of faith as “relational interpretation”—faith not as propositional assent but as relational response to a prior divine initiative. This reading of faith shapes the kind of question Park’s sermons put to their hearers: not “have you decided?” but “have you recognized what God is already doing?”

Homiletician Ryu Cheol-gyu, writing in the 2002 issue of Hermeneia Today, noted that Park sustains a double movement throughout his preaching: rootedness in the classical theological tradition and descent into the concrete specificity of pastoral life. Neither pole collapses into the other.

A Productive Critical Tension

The scholarly conversation around Park’s preaching identifies a central tension that runs through both appreciative and critical assessments.

On the appreciative side, Jeong Yong-sub credits Park with drawing congregations “directly into the scriptural world to perceive and experience spiritual reality,” and with the theological courage to relativize the programmatic certainties of Korean church culture. Wang Dae-il sees the sanctification-centered pastoral vision as a genuine contribution to Korean homiletics.

On the critical side, the same emphasis generates concern. Jeong Yong-sub, in the same assessment, points to a statement Park made—“You don’t obtain sanctification through prayer. You must work, practice, and train”—and argues that it risks producing a dangerous dualism: justification belongs to God, sanctification belongs to human effort. Jeong’s critique is that sanctification, no less than justification, is a work of grace received through faith, not a discipline acquired through willpower. A review of Park’s sermon collection God’s Zeal in Newsnjoy similarly observed that while Park’s preaching excels at the imperative of sanctification, it is less attentive to the reality—the how and the through-what of sanctification actually happening.

These two assessments agree on the diagnosis even as they differ in emphasis: Park’s preaching consistently redirects attention from human religious performance to divine theological fact. Where his critics push back is on whether that redirection is finally consistent all the way through—whether “God’s zeal” governs the sanctification process as fully as it governs the initial act of salvation.

This is not a tension unique to Park’s preaching; it maps onto a live debate in Reformed soteriology worldwide. What is distinctive about Park is that he surfaced the debate explicitly in Korean pastoral preaching across four decades, making it a congregational conversation rather than a purely academic one.

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Sources

• Ryu Cheol-gyu, “Listening to Sermons and Preachers from Pastor Park Young-sun,” Hermeneia Today 19 (Korea Institute of Theology, June 2002), pp. 59–63. https://www.dbpia.co.kr/journal/articleDetail?nodeId=NODE02408009
• Kim Jeong-hun, “Pastor Park Young-sun’s Preaching and Biblical Interpretation,” Hermeneia Today 24 (Korea Institute of Theology, September 2003), pp. 111–118. https://www.dbpia.co.kr/journal/articleDetail?nodeId=NODE02406252
• Kim Jeong-woo, ed., Sown in Weakness, Raised in Strength: A Dialogue between Park Young-sun’s Preaching and Biblical Scholarship (Cannon & Culture, 2015). — Contains essays by Wang Dae-il, Lee Dal, and Kim Jeong-woo.
• Park Young-sun, God’s Zeal (Bok Itneun Saram).
• Park Young-sun, The Mystery of Sanctification (Bok Itneun Saram, 2006).
• Park Young-sun and Kim Gwan-seong, Plain Talk [직설] (Duranno).

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