From Burnout to Breakthrough: How Healthy Church Leadership Begins
Our lives are filled with sliding door moments, choices that shape or alter our trajectory. For the apostle Paul it was the momentous decision to take the road to Damascus. For Will Chung, it was the choice to attend a youth revival at a Korean American immigrant church rather than watching the 2006 NBA Slam Dunk Contest.
Prior to that, Chung was on a trajectory that likely would have landed him in prison. But because of that one decision to go to church, he instead became a youth pastor in Southern California at age 18, just three years removed from leaving Korea to avoid drug charges.
After spending 10 years on volunteer staff with 4 Christ Mission—his father-in-law’s missions organization—he and his wife, Andrea, founded The Meeting Place and later planted Beloved Church in Fullerton, California, in 2021. Now he will be a mainstage speaker at the upcoming Exponential Global Conference in Orlando, Florida, March 17–19.
Outreach caught up with Chung to discuss his radical conversion, the significant breakdown he experienced in 2020 under the weight of his own ministry expectations, and what he’s learned about leading in healthy ways through the overflow of God’s love.
An Interview With Will Chung
Tell me about your early spiritual journey.
I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, on the U.S. military base, because my dad works for the U.S. Army. My dad was a nominal Christian and my mom grew up Buddhist. Even though I grew up in Korea, I didn’t speak Korean because all my friends were kids of U.S. soldiers. When I did go to church with my parents, it was all in Korean, and I couldn’t understand a thing. So by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, I had just stopped going to church entirely.
I was a very troubled youth. By the time I graduated high school, I probably had been arrested 15 to 20 times. When I was 15, word got to my parents that I was the one providing the drugs to the kids who got caught—which was true.
So my mom and I and my dad had a family meeting. I wanted to change. I was tired of being a troublemaker. I was tired of breaking my mom’s heart. I was just tired of being a “bad kid.” Ultimately, we decided that I would move to Illinois—Champaign-Urbana—where my older brother was going to college. So my mom and I left Korea and moved in with my brother. My dad stayed in Korea to continue to work.
My mom missed Korean culture and community, so we started going to a small Korean-speaking immigrant church in Champaign-Urbana, but right when I came to the States, I was causing trouble pretty quickly again.
It was during my junior year of high school, Feb. 18, 2006—I only remember that because it was the [night of the] NBA Slam Dunk Contest—the elders at the church, from what I understand, were praying and fasting for me because there was a youth group revival. They had called my mom repeatedly to bring me to church. It was a Saturday, so I told her I wasn’t going, but they called a few more times, and I eventually ended up going. There I had what I would consider a supernatural encounter with God. That was the day that I gave my life over to Jesus.
Was it the fact that you had an encounter or was there something deeper about the message of the gospel that spoke to your heart in that season?
It was a supernatural encounter. It felt like a Damascus Road type of thing. I was sitting in the way back. I came an hour late into the service, and I don’t remember anything about the message. But at the end of the message the preacher led what we would call “ministry time.” I don’t want to call it a trance, but as I had my eyes closed, I started having flashbacks of everything I’d ever done wrong. All these scenes of me sinning. Then toward the end I started to feel deep remorse [about] how deeply [it] affected my mom. The last image that I had was Jesus being crucified on the cross. Simultaneously, I felt God’s love and God’s forgiveness, and it overwhelmed me. I cried for like two hours uncontrollably, at first overcome by guilt and shame, and then afterward overwhelmed by love and grace.
Months later I realized—I think D.L. Moody talked about this—how the trees got greener, the birds were singing … that’s what it felt like. It was what that born again experience was like, like everything was new, everything just declared God’s glory.
