There is power in the words we speak. No one knows this better than Hosanna Wong, a renowned and sought-after spoken word artist, evangelist and preacher. A YouTube video of her performing her poem “I Have a New Name” has over 400,000 views, and she has performed that poem and others in churches, prisons, recovery meetings and conferences all over the country for the past 15 years. She is the author of How (Not) to Save the World and, most recently, You Are More Than You’ve Been Told (both Thomas Nelson).
Her journey began on the streets of San Francisco, where she grew up. There her father, a second-generation Chinese immigrant, recovered heroin addict and former gang member, held church services several times a week for other recovering addicts, gang members and unhoused people. It was also there where she learned to craft words on the underground slam poetry circuit.
Outreach co-editor Jonathan Sprowl sat down with Wong to discuss how street ministry and traveling the U.S. shaped her, how trying to reach her little brother with the gospel taught her all the ways not to share her faith, why getting honest about who we are and what we’ve overcome is the road to freedom and fruitfulness, and why she still believes in the local church.
I’ve read and heard about you reaching out to your younger brother through Marvel. So, with that comic book background, can you tell us a little bit about your origin story—your faith story—and how you became the superhero that you are today?
So, I was raised on the streets of San Francisco. My dad battled a heroin addiction for 15 years, and he fought in a gang. He had bullet holes along his calves from the last time he ran from the police [after] he robbed some place. A woman introduced him to Jesus, and Jesus changed his whole life. He ended up starting an outreach to our friends living without homes and battling with addiction, and that’s how I grew up.
We had outdoor church services two to three days a week every week, and people would bring their alcohol bottles and their drugs. That is how I learned church. I learned later in life when other people said they were also raised in church that we were not talking about exactly the same thing. But that’s where I learned that Jesus could save anyone’s soul, and redeem anyone’s story, and would use anyone who would say yes.
That’s also where I learned the art of spoken word poetry. It was the thing me and my friends had in common, something we loved to do together, a way that we all communicated. There were lots of different forms of oral storytelling, whether through rap, hip-hop, spoken word poetry or singing.
When I started having my own relationship with Jesus, it was just the natural way to talk to my friends about Jesus through the thing we had in common. Then I started competing in the underground slam poetry world with all my friends. Everyone was telling the truth about their stories, and Jesus was the truth of my story. Now I just get to share about Jesus with more friends. But it was always about trying to share about my one friend [Jesus] to my other friends in a way they understood.
And man, I could talk about [my brother] Elijah all day long, but it was the same kind of principles with him too. My brother grew up in the same environment I did, but didn’t have his own relationship with Jesus. [When] our dad died when I was 18 years old and my little brother was 12, my brother felt abandoned by God, and abandoned by our community, and had a hard heart toward God.
At first, I ministered to him so poorly. I was very bad at it. I would tell him he can’t be sad, he can’t be mad, he needs to have more faith. God’s gonna use this for his testimony one day. [But] my brother was 12 years old, and he missed his dad. At [various times], I was sending him all of these books and sermon videos—some of my own videos. Elijah, watch this. Minute 17, it’s for you. I was aggressive. I was rude. I was unkind. I wasn’t a good listener.
At one point I realized that he needed not another preacher but a big sister. Instead of trying to force my brother to step into my world, I learned that I needed to step into his. Whenever I would call him and want to talk about Jesus or church or his prayer life or his faith, all my brother wanted to talk about was superheroes. I realized that the best way to have a relationship with him at all, to communicate with him at all, was to also start getting into superheroes. I started loving what he loved, I stopped fighting to be right, and I started fighting for the relationship. Over time, I realized that my greatest witness would be my withness. How could I come alongside my brother and be with him where he really was?
It took 11 years of a constant relationship with my brother. Eleven years of apologizing when I was unkind. Eleven years of being with him where he really was, of listening to him, of admitting when I didn’t know something when he asked me for answers that I truly didn’t have. A lot of bringing him into what God was doing in my life, even when I wasn’t crushing it, even when I was doubting, even when I was struggling, even when I wasn’t living a life that I was proud of. Bringing him into that, admitting those things, and letting him see the journey of a very imperfect person still finding grace from God. Through 11 years of withness with Elijah, eventually he told me he wanted the peace I had, the joy I had, and he knew it was Jesus because I had told him a million times. But because he saw someone in real proximity who it was real for, it was real for him. And then he gave his life to Jesus.
I think a lot of Christ followers can relate. There is something in our lives that makes us fall in love with Jesus, and even have good theology about sharing about the love of Jesus, but then it becomes so personal and it’s in your home, and now it’s my little brother. It just became so much more than my theology. It became so much more than what I could preach about. It was something that I was learning how to live out with tears, and with begging, and with imperfections.
I think one of the things I learned from growing up on the streets of San Francisco, as well as in my pursuit to lead Elijah to Jesus, is that we need to know the language of the people we’re ministering to. We need to know the words and ways of God—to be in his Word, to know what he’s saying—but we also have to know the words and ways of the people around us. What are their real questions? Because God has real answers to people’s real questions.
I love that. When your dad passed away, you [also] went through a season where you were struggling with your faith, thinking through whether to take ownership of it for yourself. That led eventually to that step of faith to start translating your spoken word into a ministry. Could you connect the dots between being age 18 and that next stage of life?
The thing is that I never stopped believing that Jesus is real. I was just mad at him. I was one of those people who would say I’m down for Jesus, but I’m not down for Jesus people. I was deeply wounded by some people in certain churches who were not who I had hoped they would be. And that was enough for me to just have a hard heart toward the entire idea of church altogether.
So, over 15 years ago, I packed my life into suitcases and started traveling the country to talk about Jesus through spoken word poetry—the one way I knew how to talk to my friends about Jesus. Whether or not churches would allow me to use that art form … [was] unclear. But I had many prisons, recovery outreaches and ministries, evangelistic outreaches that had invited me all throughout the country to use this art form to talk about Jesus. So, I was hoping to kind of be church adjacent. I was one of those people who felt like I wasn’t churchy enough for my churched friends, but I was too churchy for my unchurched friends. And I didn’t really know where I fit in. But I believed in the power of Jesus and I saw him use it through spoken word poetry, so I was going to go to where I would find my kind of people all throughout the country.
I expected to [travel] in my 1996 red Toyota Corolla for about three months, and it ended up being about four and a half years of being hosted in homes—families at a bunch of churches, across denominations, across state lines, across cultures. I spent Thanksgivings, Christmases, holidays with families. They housed me as I would minister in their area, and sometimes it would be for a night or two nights. Some families hosted me for weeks while I ministered at multiple other churches that weren’t even their own church. And I would join their small groups or growth groups, depending on which church I was with throughout the week.
As I got very real and very raw and very honest with a lot of people—because, What? I’m gone the next week, so I didn’t have the fear that maybe I used to have—when I would get very real and raw with them about my real questions about God, my real hurts from other people, what I was really going through, and I wasn’t met with guilt or shame, I saw the beauty of what the church could look like, and that I could be a part of helping create the community I longed for. I started becoming aware of the need for people who actually love God and actually love people to be the church, stay in the church, and create change from withinside the church. [That’s] the only way the church is going to be the church that we are praying for, the church that Jesus prayed for.
I thought God was going to do a lot through my ministry on stage. I had not anticipated the work he was going to do in me off stage through all these families and churches. I hated the church more than anyone I knew, and now I love the church more than I ever imagined was possible. I got to be the local church’s little sister, and God was a father to me through so many pastors and through so many churches.
It all started with spoken word, and then people started asking, Oh, can you talk longer, without rhyming? I was like, I don’t know. Will someone help me? So, I started teaching soon after. I would ask so many men and women throughout the country for help, and they helped me. I would ask them for feedback, and they gave it to me.
So, I don’t just feel like the local church’s little sister [anymore]. I feel trained by, and raised by, many local church leaders from all over the country.
Your husband and you run a nonprofit called Word on the Street. Talk to me about what you’re learning about withness through that.
With Word on the Street, we help families in need. We open doors for the underdogs through resources. We provide pathways for people’s physical and spiritual needs [to be met], and that involves resources with recovery, outreaches to prisons and our friends living without homes, food pantries.
More than ever, I believe that our greatest witness will be our withness. Why would people believe us that the God we’re talking about wants to know them if we don’t even want to know them. There’s power in proximity. There’s power in somebody knowing that you walk with God, and they want to have what you have.
Through our local and global church ministries and through Word on the Street, we’ve set out to be with people and resource and empower other ministries that are with people, that can provide for their physical and spiritual needs and hopefully provide a pathway to God. It’s just one of many ways.
I’ll tell you, me and my husband, we throw a lot of things at the wall and see what sticks for the glory of God and the saving of souls. We don’t do this perfectly, but we do this prayerfully and purposefully, and try to be with people where they really are. We realized that we were uniquely gifted to help hurting people. We’re not great at anything, and we’re not professionals at anything, but we are pretty good listeners and we walk with real everyday people.
That’s also how I preach messages. Most of my messages come from a real conversation I had with a real person, and trying to answer people’s real questions with God’s real answers.
A big theme in your latest book, You Are More Than You’ve Been Told, and in your spoken word poetry is looking for identity, and the struggle with that. What is it about that willingness to be real with people that makes them open up to hear your story, and how did that play a part in discovering your identity?
I think the Enemy doesn’t want us to know who we really are. I have learned throughout these 15 years all over the country that I’m not the only person who has ever felt unworthy, unseen, unwanted, unloved, not good enough. I’ll always be defined as a failure. I’ll always be defined by what I don’t have or what I did or didn’t do. And I think the Enemy hopes that we believe all of these lies so that they act like a ceiling over our lives, stopping us from living the full lives we’ve been created to live.
The truth is the Enemy knows who we really are. He knows how loved we are, and how chosen we are, and how created with purpose and safe in the hands of God we are. He knows what we need to know, which is that we are actually set up for success. That we were created to know God, and created to enjoy and experience God in our real lives, and created to share about God with the people in our real lives.
It is actually your background. It is actually where you’re from, and it’s actually what you’ve overcome. It is actually your family’s background. It is actually your heritage. It is actually the city you’re from, the streets you’re from, the suburb you’re from. It is actually the shape of your eyes. It is actually your height. It is actually all the things you can do and can’t do, even your limitations God wants to use. So, of course, the Enemy wants us to doubt who we are, because the Enemy can’t change who we are. He doesn’t have that kind of power. So, his best plan is to try to make us doubt who we are.
When I unlocked that truth in my life, I had to let everyone else know. I thought, Does everyone know we’ve been listening to lies? Does everyone know they’re more than they’ve been told? Does everyone know you’ve actually been set up for success? Your details are your superpower … just to bring it back.
I see what you did there.
I wish people knew. So, to answer your question about being raw and real, I have seen by me telling the truth of my real story, it’s not just inviting people who have also been raised by a recovered addict, and it’s not just making people feel seen who also were raised in a broken or different kind of household, or poor, or who struggled with knowing who they were, or had things taken from them that shouldn’t have been taken from them, or struggled with hurt in the church … it wasn’t just people relating to my story. It was relating to anyone who was willing to get real and honest about what they’ve really been through.
I think the Enemy hopes that we don’t share where we’re really from and what we’ve really overcome. Because when we reveal the truth about the mess we’ve come from, and how a real Savior has been with us in our real mess, we’re revealing the true power of a Rescuer, of a Savior who loves us and is with us. Unlocking that truth for me, and realizing the freedom in that, and wanting to unlock that truth for other people—I want you to know that you are more than you’ve been told. I want you to know who you really are. We will hear lies our whole lives, so we have to make God’s voice the loudest voice in our life. We have to know the truth about who we really are.
You use that beautiful image in your book of the trellis—that wine grapes need a trellis. People are hungry for that groundedness, for that fruitfulness to come from being connected to the vine of Jesus [through the trellis of spiritual disciplines]. Was that a recent transition for you, thinking more deliberately about spiritual disciplines?
Yeah, I love that. Yes, in continuation of what we’re talking about, knowing the questions people are actually asking is a lifelong commitment to me. How do I sharpen both languages and hear what God is saying and the questions people are actually asking? In the past several years I have learned that many people are asking the question, How? It’s not only whether it’s good Bible teaching, which is important, and good theology, which is important. So many people coming into church or coming to events—they were not just cynics who were saying, “I don’t believe in God.” A lot of people were saying, “OK, I’m here, someone teach me how. How do I do it?”
We can preach sermons that are impressive and over people’s heads all day long, but we can do more than impress people. We can impact people. We can literally help them find and follow Jesus for real in their everyday lives. So I’ve spent the past six years trying to really unpack as practically and literally [as possible] what it means to abide, and unpack spiritual disciplines, or relational rhythms—I call them rhythms of Jesus—or holy habits. Whatever your favorite phrase is from whatever church you’re part of. I am trying to unpack how we do those things in 2025.
How do we do these things if someone is a single mother of three and works four different jobs? If the husband and the wife are both business owners of two different businesses and they don’t have the same schedule and there is no day that month where they can sabbath together? How with this kid who is a D1 athlete and practices and games change all the time? How in our real lives can people actually live out rhythms that help us connect with God without guilt and shame and legalism—without bringing in the very things that Jesus came to set us free from?
My local church is not the only church filled with people who have [either] been hurt by Christ-following communities, [or] it is their introduction to a Christ-following community. I have spent years researching the pathways to God, as well as the roadblocks to God.
I think one reason why so many people outside the church are far from God is because so many people inside the church are far from God, and we need to have a real one-to-one relationship with Jesus. We need to surrender our sins, and our shame, and our pride, and our ego, and know Jesus, and follow Jesus for real. Then we can show a watching world what he is actually like. Us, the church, following Jesus for real, and obeying him for real, and loving people the way he actually called us to love people. This is how we will see souls saved and disciples made without any ounce of faking it. So, that’s what I hope to continue to uncover, and that’s what the next season of my life will be dedicated to.
As we wrap up our conversation, what’s one message that you would really love to get across to church leaders?
I have so many things to say … I love you. Stay in it. I really feel it in my heart for church leaders today that God knew what he was doing when he chose you for this moment in time, and you have been set up for success. God wants to build his church more than you do. God wants souls saved and disciples made more than you do. The best thing you can do is to stop comparing yourself to other church leaders or your church to other churches, [and instead] to see what God has uniquely equipped you with, and your community with, for you to obey God and love people well.
It’s an amazing time to be a church leader.
Why do you say that?
We have so many resources and tools available that we have not yet fully scratched the surface of or fully unlocked to come together and use them to share about Jesus with our communities. It is a privilege, and it is an honor to get to love people in 2025. I’ve walked with hurting people my whole life, and I’ve never seen people more clearly desperate for hope and for peace. We have the answers that people are looking for. We have such a unique opportunity to share the love of Jesus in our real communities.
I’m the teaching pastor at Eastlake Church [in Chula Vista, California]. We have seven locations. Something that I say to our staff a lot is, “You’re set up for success. You are the people that God picked to be here in this moment, to share his love with people right where you are.” For the past few years, I’ve been training up other preachers. When I teach at other churches, I often come a day earlier or stay a day after to partner with the senior pastor and help raise other preachers: new preachers, green preachers, women preachers, preachers from different backgrounds and ethnicities, and partner with the senior pastor for his goals for communicators in his church, across denominations.
Early on, a lot of people are trying to mimic some other preacher that they’ve heard. And they’ll say, “But I want to preach like this.” First of all, yes, be inspired by all of your heroes. Watch them all. Learn from them all. You shouldn’t sound like one person; you should sound like 50 of them. Great. Wonderful. But something that I had to teach early on was that you have an authority beyond your skill. You walk with real people. You don’t have to imagine what people in the room are going through. You know what people in the room are going through. You have an authority, not because of your skill-set, but because you walk with God and you walk with people. And I think that’s a unique authority that we can have in this season in 2025. Walk with God for real and walk with people for real. It’ll be very hard not to share the love of Jesus to real people that way.
At a time when so many people are leaving the church, I’m doubling-down on the local church. I’m laser-focused on people knowing Jesus for real and following him for real, and helping other Christ followers share about the love of Jesus in their lives. It’s the most important thing in the world.
I agree with you that people are in search of hope right now. People in the church are also in search of hope right now. The gospel is right there in front of non-Christians and Christians as well, and it feels like there’s a disconnect.
I think some of us who have followed Jesus for a long time and served in his church for a long time, we have seen it done wrong so many times. We are understandably struggling with what we believe about God, and we’re struggling with what we believe about the church. Some of us have lost hope and faith in it, and some of us have reason to have questions and doubts. We’ve seen our heroes not turn out to be the heroes we wanted them to be, and we’ve seen even our own inadequacies on full display. So, if they’re letting us be leaders, who else are they letting lead? {Laughs.} I think that is good, that we have wrestled about God and about God’s church. But my hope is that we wrestle with God for his church, because I think we must remember that just because we’ve seen it done wrong, that doesn’t mean we can’t be the ones to do it right.
There are so many people who are hurting and need hope and need peace, and we get to be the people to show Jesus to them. We have the opportunity to do it well. We can be the church we’ve been praying for. We can be the church Jesus prayed for. We can be the way that some people find out about the hope of the world for the first time. That’s what I think.