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Preaching through a Poet's Eye: So Kang-seok and the Biblical Character Narrative

Series · Preaching Styles of Korean Pastors
Ⅲ Topical Preaching and Application 47/52 See this track →

Preaching through a Poet’s Eye: So Kang-seok and the Biblical Character Narrative

Founding pastor of Saeeden Church (Yongin); registered poet; one of Korea’s most visibly participatory preachers

So Kang-seok (born 1962) founded Saeeden Church in 1988 in a basement room of twenty-three pyeong (roughly 76 square meters) in Seoul’s Garakdong district. The church relocated first to Bundang, then to its current campus in Jukjeon, Yongin, where it now counts approximately 45,000 registered members. So is an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in Korea (Hapdong) and served as Moderator of its 105th General Assembly in 2020.

None of that, however, fully explains why his preaching sounds the way it does. For that, a second identity matters equally: So Kang-seok is a registered literary poet. He was formally recognized through the journal Wol-gan Munye Sajo (Monthly Literary Thought) in 1995, and has since published thirteen collections of poetry. His literary honors include the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award, the Yun Dong-ju Literary Award, the Cheon Sang-byeong Literary Grand Prize, and the Korean Christian Literary Award. For several years he contributed a regular column to Kukmin Ilbo titled “Biblical Figures Written in Poetry,” exploring scriptural characters through verse. This poet’s sensibility is not a hobby kept separate from the pulpit. It is the pulpit.

Three axes for reading So’s preaching:

  • Structure: Topical-narrative — character psychology as the engine; conflict-resolution-decision as the repeating plot
  • Emphasis: Emotional resonance leading to decision and application; high congregational participation as a formal structural feature; candid self-disclosure and humor as a way of setting aside clerical distance
  • Methodology: Narrative reconstruction and poetic language; original languages and historical background serve as scene-setting rather than foregrounded exegetical analysis

Scripture as Living Story: The Character Psychology Method

So has described his approach in terms he laid out clearly at a preaching seminar in 2006: “The Bible is an event-drama. The preacher’s task is to extract the vivid story that existed before it was recorded in text, and reconstruct it as today’s story.”

This is not a decorative framing. It defines the whole enterprise. Where a conventional expository sermon might ask, What does this passage teach about God?, So’s approach presses inward: What was happening inside this person? The feelings, the motivations, the fears, the moment of decision—these are not illustrative decoration but the primary substance of the passage, to be inhabited rather than merely extracted from.

The payoff is audience identification. Listeners do not encounter scripture as a text to be parsed but as a human situation to enter. When So reconstructs the inner life of a biblical character—the psychological weight of a moment of failure, the vertigo of a sudden call, the slow return of someone who has run out of options—the congregation is not receiving a lesson about that character. It is accompanying that character. The interpretation happens in the listener’s chest, not only in the mind.

This approach stands in deliberate contrast to the three-point expository tradition that still dominates much of Korean Reformed preaching. There is no numbered outline to follow, no propositional summary to take home. The sermon moves like a story, with dramatic tension as its propellant, and arrives at a moment of decision or application rather than a summary of principles.

The Narrative Plot: Conflict, Intensification, Resolution, Decision

So’s four-stage structural pattern is explicit and consistent: find the conflict, deepen it, locate the redemptive thread, and hold open the expectation of response.

The sermon begins with the biblical character’s crisis — what is at stake, what is in tension, what cannot be resolved by ordinary means. The middle of the sermon intensifies that tension rather than immediately resolving it; the congregation is held in the discomfort rather than reassured past it. The resolution arrives not as a theological proposition but as a turning point within the story — the moment the character, and through them the listener, arrives at something new. The sermon closes with an invitation to decision: not abstractly (“respond to the gospel”) but concretely (“what does this character’s choice mean for the choice you are facing?”).

The preacher’s task, in this framework, is less to explain the text than to make the text’s dramatic stakes feel real.

The Poet’s Ear: Language as Texture

Thirteen poetry collections, multiple national literary awards, and years of writing a regular poetry column are evidence that So’s engagement with language runs far beneath the surface of occasional elegant phrasing. A preacher with this formation does not reach for stock metaphors or standard devotional vocabulary. Specific imagery, sensory precision, and emotional density are the defaults — the way the language is constructed, not just decorated.

This is visible in the rhythm of his sentences as well as their content: a musical attention to the cadence of what is being said, not only the content. Instruction is embedded in experience rather than stated above it. The congregation familiar with this register hears something qualitatively different from purely didactic preaching.

So’s first poetry collection, I Had a Dream Last Night (어젯밤 꿈을 꾸었습니다), appeared in 2004, and his thirteenth, You, a Season That Came to Me (너라는 계절이 내게 왔다), was published in 2023. The Kukmin Ilbo column “Biblical Figures Written in Poetry” is the most direct intersection of his two identities: the same character-centered imagination applied to verse rather than sermon. The column was, in effect, the same homiletical work in a different medium.

The Congregation as Co-Participant

One of the most consistent features of So’s preaching is how actively the congregation is drawn into participation. Call-and-response sequences — the preacher delivering a phrase or question, the congregation answering or reading in unison — appear with notable frequency. The room does not listen; it responds.

This connects to a posture So has explicitly claimed for himself: setting aside conventional clerical authority and approaching the congregation from a posture of descent and vulnerability rather than authoritative proclamation. Homiletician Johan H. Cilliers has described this kind of self-lowering pulpit posture through the concept of “clown preaching” — the preacher relinquishing formal distance to meet the congregation on its own level. For So, this manifests as a deliberate refusal of the formal distance that many Korean senior pastors maintain from their congregations. Physical dynamism, vocal energy, and the use of popular song melodies with rewritten Christian lyrics — these are all expressions of the same instinct: the preacher-as-participant, not preacher-as-sovereign.

The structural coherence here is worth noting: the narrative method draws the congregation into a character’s experience; the participatory delivery draws the congregation into the preaching event itself. Both moves are anti-spectatorial.

Candid Anecdotes and Humor: Setting Aside Formality

This self-lowering posture does more than authorize physical dynamism and vocal energy. In practice, it shows up as a specific rhetorical habit: So talks about his own failures, his aging body, and the ordinary embarrassments of pastoral life without softening or hiding them, and he does it in a register that is often genuinely funny rather than merely confessional. Rather than positioning himself as an authority speaking down to the congregation, he first establishes himself as someone standing in the same vulnerable spot as everyone in the room.

This self-disclosure is not delivered as solemn testimony alone — it is paired with humor. A brief self-deprecating aside or a comic account of an everyday mishap will often precede a shift into weightier theological material, releasing tension before the sermon asks something harder of the listener. The sequence — get a laugh, lower the guard, then land the weight — is a fairly direct translation of the self-lowering posture described above into pulpit practice. Humor collapses the distance that clerical authority usually maintains; once that distance is gone, the congregation has room to admit its own weaknesses without needing to defend against the admission.

This register interlocks with the character-narrative method described above. When a sermon deals with a biblical figure’s failure or shame, a preacher who has already admitted his own failure with candor and humor gives the congregation permission to receive that character’s story as company rather than as spectacle. Candid anecdote and humor are not decorative asides in So’s preaching — they are load-bearing components of the emotional resonance the whole method is built to produce.

Cultural Entry Points and Secular Raw Material

So’s sermon introductions regularly reach for material outside the church — contemporary events, popular literature, visual art, popular music. This is not a simple concession to relevance or an evangelistic strategy for reaching non-Christians. Within a narrative-homiletical framework, the introduction functions to open imaginative space: to put the congregation in a state of felt recognition before the biblical story begins. Beginning with the culturally familiar reduces the distance the listener has to travel before inhabiting the biblical world.

The breadth of cultural reference — literature, music, current events — is also a natural extension of the reading habits and cultural sensibilities that shape a working poet. What So brings from the wider world into his sermons is not strategic illustration but the material his imagination is already working with.

Original Languages and Historical Background

So’s academic formation includes a Doctor of Ministry from Knox Theological Seminary (1999), and he has taught at the Reformed Theological Graduate School (from 1996) and Gwangsin University (from 2005). The scholarly grounding is real.

What is notable is that Greek and Hebrew word-study exposition does not feature as a foregrounded method in his preaching. Historical and cultural background tends to serve scene-setting functions — providing the atmospheric context within which a character’s inner life becomes legible — rather than functioning as the primary exegetical engine. This is a consistent stylistic choice, not a deficiency: meaning in this homiletic emerges through story and language, not despite them. The theological and textual work happens in the preparation; what the congregation experiences is the reconstructed narrative.

For Preachers Preparing in This Mode

For those preparing narrative-character sermons with Didymus Lab study reports: the report’s passage overview, historical background, and lexical keyword sections provide the factual scaffolding that this kind of preaching requires at the preparation stage. Building a psychologically rich portrayal of a biblical character depends on knowing what that character was actually embedded in — historically, culturally, textually. The poetic reconstruction needs solid ground beneath it, and the report’s application section helps carry a character’s turning point through to a concrete decision point for the listener.

Application section from the Deuteronomy 9 sample report.
The application section bridges a passage's theological claim to a concrete decision for the listener — useful for carrying a character's narrative arc through to the moment of response.

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