We all know that our stories and personal health impact a leader’s ministry, but how do we work with our stories while balancing our commitment to mission and outward work? Drew Hyun is working hard to figure it out. He is a pastor, a church planter, a key part of Pete Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Discipleship team (EmotionallyHealthy.org), a foundational part of The New City Network (NewCityNetwork.org), and the author of a forthcoming book, Beautiful, Disappointing, Hopeful: How Gratitude, Grief and Grace Reflect The Christian Story (Zondervan Reflective, Jan. 2025). [Editor’s note: The interviewer is senior acquisitions editor at Zondervan.]
Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor sat down with Hyun to learn more about his story, his philosophy of ministry, and what he is learning about effective ministry and inner personal health in his context of urban New York City.
Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about your early life and faith.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles to first-generation Korean immigrant parents. As was customary for a lot of immigrant communities back then, especially from Korea, I grew up attending church. I have three brothers. Every Sunday our family would drive to Koreatown in Los Angeles and the four of us boys would be part of the church service there. Church was often a full day affair. That community was where we also had Korean language school, Taekwondo and Awana. It was our hub.
When I was in middle school, that large church had a pretty acrimonious split. And then we became part of another large Korean church, which was probably half of that original church. We started meeting at a different site. It was during that tough time that I really began to connect with our youth leaders who were starting to invest in us. Then that church ended up having a massive church split. It was so bad that for one Friday night gathering, I remember the LAPD had to be called in to break up the conflict. Tensions were high, and people were ready to fight.
All this to say, there’s a lot of dissonance in my relationship with the church. Sometimes, when people speculate that I’m a Christian because I grew up going to church, I respond by saying, “I’m actually a Christian despite growing up in church.” A lot of the friends I grew up with had such painful church experiences that they ended up leaving the church and have rarely given faith a chance again.
But even through those difficult experiences, church was a safe space for me as a young man. I needed this, because at home, life was really difficult. My father was [pauses] … a very harsh man. All my brothers and I had a troubled relationship with him. We found safety in the church, even though it would end up splitting. During that time, my dad was studying in seminary. He would eventually decide that he was going to start a church. We were surprised because early on, we had no idea that he had any interest in vocational ministry. But he did.
This created all sorts of cognitive dissonance for us. We just didn’t see the evidence of a really close faith with Jesus. Later, he would build a significant teaching and speaking ministry in Korea on the theme of how to build a family, which was so dissonant to me. By the time I went to college, I was really wrestling with whether I wanted to make the Christian faith my own. Much of that was the lack of integrity I experienced at church and at home.
When it was time for college, my twin brother and I went to UC Berkeley. It was there during my freshman year that I came to a place of spiritual surrender. I was taking classes on religious studies and reading various sacred texts from different faiths. I remember reading John 6, when Jesus gives the hard teaching after the fish and the loaves. He talks about “eating my flesh” and “drinking my blood.” Many people stopped following him. Then Jesus asks his disciples if they want to go as well. And Peter says, “To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”
Reading that, I experienced a moment of true surrender. Despite everything that I’d experienced in church and my whole life, I felt those words. I wanted to follow Jesus. And from that point on, I started to direct my life toward vocational ministry.
What was it about that verse that so spoke to you?
Well, Berkeley was not exactly a haven for Bible-believing people. There I was taking classes in all sorts of classical and postmodern philosophy and literature and being exposed to all of these different religious texts. In the middle of it all, I came to the realization that compared to all of it, there was something so profoundly compelling about the news and the story of Jesus. And it was really that I found Jesus to be both truthful and compelling. And in many ways, I felt like Peter was echoing what was resonating in my own heart. I can look for the truth everywhere. But where else am I gonna go?
You know, despite whatever hurt I experienced in my church setting or my family life growing up, I really believe that Jesus had the words of eternal life. I believe he is who he says he is. There was an utter realization that out of all the different places that I could look and search for, at the end of the day, Jesus offered me the most truthful and compelling way of living in the world.
I majored in rhetoric and classics. While I was in college, I also helped start a church, and was on fire for Jesus in many different ways. I entertained the thought of possibly becoming an overseas missionary, but I ended up falling in love with New York City.
I came to New York one summer to take part in an urban mission. Back then, urban missions were mostly about serving the poor rather than cultural renewal projects. So that summer of 2000, I spent most of my time working in under-resourced areas, serving kids camps, soup kitchens and all sorts of things. Following my graduation from college, I had a few options. One was to stay on at the church that we helped start. One was to go to the Middle East and become a missionary. And the last one was to move to New York. And I felt called to New York City. In the fall of 2001, I moved to NYC and began an internship at a church called New Life Fellowship where Pete Scazzero was the founding pastor.
Given that your early experiences of conflict and hypocrisy likely deflated most of your idealism about the church, what made that pull so strong for you? It’s one thing to attend church; it’s another to dedicate your life to it.
Part of it was that church had been where I experienced safety as a young man, especially with particular mentors. I remembered their influence over my life, which was significant. Then, after my experience in college, there was just this burning passion. There was nothing else I’d rather do than to create hospitable spaces for people to experience Jesus and encounter his truth. I had become convinced that the truth of God and the story of Jesus was worth living and dying for.
It is interesting that you landed at New Life, of course. Many of our readers will be immediately familiar with Pete Scazzero and his book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. What was it about the ministry of the church that connected with you?
New Life profoundly shaped me. And Pete has too, as a thinker, a mentor and a spiritual father. When I first went, I had no exposure to the language of emotional health or integrating that with spiritual maturity. I was going to New York in order to serve the poor, and the person who had recommended New Life to me had told me about their reputation with community development, serving the needs of this incredibly diverse area in Central Queens.
At the time I was an intern, Pete was just beginning to put pen to paper about his percolating thoughts about the intersection of emotional health and spiritual maturity. During our intern meetings, he would come with these ways of approaching spirituality that were so outside of what I had experienced. Theology in college was great, but we now were investigating areas of emotional awareness and family of origin issues. I remember being so perplexed at first, even a little put off. But ultimately, my life was deeply transformed by that experience.
But suddenly, the world changed. I had moved there on Sept. 5, 2001. Yeah, just six days before 9-11. Previously, to be honest, I had become a bit of a pharisee after my college years. I loved the Scriptures, reading theology and apologetics. But now here I was being exposed to a new paradigm of ministry and spirituality. I still valued the intellectual portion of it, but now I was face-to-face with people who were going through real suffering and real questions about the truthfulness of God, the goodness of God. I was learning that intellectual answers and apologetic methods ultimately are not the things that transform people. Here I was being invited into a deeper spirituality, a deeper investigation of how truth can begin to impact recesses of our own hearts that we’ve left ignored.
Learning how to grieve with people had not been part of my paradigm of how people come to faith or what people might find compelling about Jesus. I had plenty of arguments to win an intellectual exercise. But this was something different. I was among people who had experienced devastating loss in 9-11. I was rubbing shoulders with addicts in relapse and people formerly of the drug cartel who had now given their lives to Jesus. Those experiences of discipleship gave me a lens that forever changed me. I began to investigate even the wounds of my past, and the father wound that had been lodged in my own heart. I needed to be confronted about the ways that I had been driven to work for unhealthy achievement.
Over the next 10 years, even while attending Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I would still make my way back down to New Life Fellowship in New York City on the weekends. Those 10 years changed me. They gave me such a healthier paradigm than the one I came from, which had a lot of gaps when it came to conflict and truth telling. What I had witnessed about faith was that it was easy to be someone on the platform who was very different from what someone was in private. But now, I was being exposed to a spirituality that tried to integrate one’s private life and public life; that tried to get at some of the deepest insecurities, fears and woundedness; tried to allow God into those spaces. That ended up deeply changing my approach to spirituality.
Connect the dots between New Life and beginning Hope Church.
The last year that I was at New Life, I went through a pretty significant season of depression. At that point, I was a senior associate pastor. We were having serious talks about the future of the church, but there was a lot of dissonance in my own soul. As I met with different spiritual directors and counselors, it became clear that my motivations were really unhealthy. The two primary reasons I wanted to stay were financial security and prestige. Honestly, the prospect of becoming part of a senior leadership team was intoxicating for me. I realized those are bad reasons to be a pastor. So much to the surprise of Pete and the elders and leaders, I ended up resigning. It was a painful parting.
After that, I went through my own desert season. I really had nothing to go to. New Life was generous enough to give me a severance so that I could figure out what would be next for me, and for that, I’m forever grateful. I wrestled deeply with my identity. I had preached a gospel of grace—that you aren’t defined by what you do or how many degrees you’ve earned or whatever else. But I’ve never really lived that reality. I’ve always lived according to a works-based achievement gospel. Tim Keller has this phrase where he says, you don’t know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. I spent a season unemployed. We burned through our savings. We wrestled with what was next. It really did purge away many of the trappings for me. It became an awfully meaningful time. During that time, I was also wrestling with what I believed about the church.
By this time, our family had sublet our apartment in New York and were in Seoul, the megachurch capital of the world. I was wrestling with consumer and celebrity culture, loving these large churches and their scale, but also realizing that if we were ever to start a church, we would try to buck the trends of church consumerism. So we began to dream, like many others have done, about a church that believed in mission and discipleship and that when it got to a certain size, would spin off new churches in different neighborhoods until it was a movement of friends in the city.
During this time, I remember writing in my journal, God help me give my life to something so that when the story of my life is told, it may be a story of hope and your unfailing love. Divine confirmation came in some unique external ways. Soon we were meeting with Pete again to tell him of our plans, went through a planting assessment, were approved and began Hope Church.
Tell us about that name.
It comes from Psalm 33:18: “But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love.”
That’s our prayer—that in a city of “kings and kingdoms” we will be marked by being a people of that hope in God and unfailing love. January 2012 was when we started gathering a small group of people to start a church that became the seed of Hope Church. We’re currently about 12 years into the process. We are one church with three locations here in Manhattan. We’re not large—last Easter Sunday we had about 800 people across those three locations. We own a building here in Midtown Manhattan that we call The Hub, which is used by 70 different nonprofits and churches. Last year, we purchased the building so that it could be a communal collaborative space for discipleship, mission and prayer. We want to be a resource church for the city. Everything we do is not to build a great church, but to build a great city. And emblematic of that is how we own a property in Midtown that is primarily used by other ministries and churches.
We also started the New City Network (NewCityNetwork.org), which comes alongside pastors and church planters to resource and encourage them, and we’ve been involved with helping plant—through resources, coaching, etc.—35 other churches. We have a worship initiative where musicians and worship songwriters come together to (hopefully) bless the wider body of Christ. I’m still involved on the executive team of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. Pete and I work closely together. We want to see healthy churches full of healthy people, especially in urban areas.
Talk for a moment about that—healthy organisms thrive in their environment. You’ve seen church from multiple perspectives and in multiple models. What are the principles of thriving that might be true regardless of how a church is run?
Well, I think, as others have observed, it’s about marrying the Great Commission with the Great Commandment. Both of those things are needed in equal measure. Part of the gift of the Protestant movement is our missionary verve, which is largely shaped, obviously, by an energy for the Great Commission. But I think that needs to be balanced with the Great Commandment to love—which is where the health part comes in. It’s about doing both. Every thriving church then needs to have both, but keep them in careful balance. Every church will gravitate toward one distinctive, which is fine. A church pushing for mission and growth is likely to care most about metrics for outreach. That’s wonderful. It’s part of our gift to the history of the church.
But on the other hand, you’ve got other kinds of churches and even offshoots like monastic communities, which are so deeply rooted in contemplation and prayer. A marriage of all of that is what’s needed. And again, the best way that I could describe it is the Great Commandment to love married with the Great Commission to go. Both of those things are needed for a thriving church, with a particular emphasis on discipleship and on people.
For many churches, regardless of their model, this likely means not necessarily being so program driven. Now hear me when I say, though, that people will grow from an Alpha or an Emotionally Healthy Discipleship program. Yes, they’re helpful, but that’s because the programs are helpful pathways for people to engage with people. That’s the goal, always. As a lead pastor, it’s important that I’m directly involved in disciple making. Each of us needs to see ourselves in the role of disciple makers. That’s how we ought to see ourselves. We’re (hopefully) forming disciples of Jesus who will multiply in mission. We want the kinds of disciples we’re forming to be ones of a deep resilient faith, who can communicate and live out the gospel, especially in a secular context like New York City.
Share a story from Hope Church that illustrates the marrying of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.
There are tons of stories. Most are very simple, of course, like most of ministry. I’ll pick one from last month. A guy moved here to start a new life in New York City. He wasn’t looking for faith. He was vaguely spiritual, often seeing tarot card readers and psychics. He happened to wander into our church because he went to a café where someone had mentioned a “Hope Church” for some reason and he Googled the name. Then he just visited. He had never been to a church before ever in his background. He found our gathering accessible and intelligible. It spoke to something he was looking for.
He noticed that one of the things that we were hosting was a gathering related to an organization that we work with that does anti-trafficking work here in the city. He happens to be particularly interested in anti-trafficking work and justice. So he went. He found it super compelling. We ended up hosting a series of other gatherings, men’s events, cookouts, meetups and then emotionally healthy dating and relationships stuff. He came to all of it, and eventually realized that he found the message of Jesus true and compelling.
Then I met up with him for coffee. He shared some of his story with me. It was so encouraging to hear about how he had experienced our church in this way—we were doing mission work through all of that. But what clinched it for him was the invitation when we were talking about emotionally healthy dating and relationships. He saw a vision for his life in following Jesus through that understanding of love. He was baptized a few weeks ago and will be in Alpha in the fall. Again, he was not searching for God in any way, but had a chance encounter with someone kind at a coffee shop that mentioned Hope Church to him. As a result, he became a Christian.
That’s so simple, but that’s how we hope this works. We want our church to be accessible in how we model Jesus in the community, starting with the local neighborhood. And at the same time, hopefully forming people in a deeper manner of discipleship that goes beneath just the intellectual teaching of doctrine.
What’s next for Hope Church?
Our vision is always the same. Like every church, our mission is to glorify God and make disciples. That’s what we hope to be doing year after year after year. But also, like I said, our goal is to help build a great city, not just build a great church. We do that by being present. By being a resource. By seeing people come to faith and then welcoming them as part of a community whereby they might experience deep transformation, and which impacts the recesses of their lives, beyond simply reading and learning a few things, but instead transforms their whole selves. We want to create faithful, hospitable spaces for those who are far from God to learn and experience the wonder of who God is.
As you reflect on your journey, what are you praying for in your pastoral life as you work to lead Hope Church toward that future?
I’ve doubled down on my own health as part of my faith and ministry story. The emotional health of a leader is so significant for the long-standing mission of their church. One thing we saw during the pandemic was cracks in the ways leaders have done discipleship and have managed their own well-being in the midst of ministry leadership. But a leader’s health is a vital pathway toward effective mission. You don’t have to choose one or the other. It’s not like you’re either all healthy but not that effective or all mission, but you lack boundaries and rhythms.
I would contend again that the way to fulfill the Great Commission is the Great Commandment. And I think that’s what the secular world today sees as most compelling. That starts with us. I would love for pastors and leaders to fight to have a deep and loving relationship with Jesus marked by a slow spirituality as well as healthy relationships marked by profound self-awareness. I would love for us to have relationship skills that allow us to be a healing presence and not toxic or abusive leaders toward those we meet.
I think three words mark the Christian story: beautiful, disappointing and hopeful. I think the Christian story is truthful and compelling because it includes beauty, but it also expects disappointment. And ultimately it’s hopeful. Leaders and churches can overemphasize one of these qualities at the expense of the others. But I think it’s about being able to hold together the reality of beauty and disappointment in order to ultimately find hope in the midst of all of it. In doing this, practices of gratitude, grief and grace are how we regularly mirror the story of beauty, disappointment and hopefulness.
This is what ministry is about, isn’t it? It’s beautiful, disappointing and hopeful. And in response to that, I want to be someone who’s centered in profound gratitude, grief and grace; someone who leads from them.