What K-Pop Reminded Me About the Global Church
The church is local. The church is global. K-pop reminded me of both.
I have a confession.
I’ve recently started listening to K-pop. Like, a lot of it.
It started with a recommendation from our dear friend Katie to give it a shot while I work — just background noise, she said. I knew BTS. I knew BLACKPINK. But then I started pulling on a thread through an Apple Music playlist, and suddenly I was three hours deep into artists I’d never heard of, bopping my head to songs I don’t know the words to, and genuinely, embarrassingly into it.
This isn’t new for me, actually. Last year I started watching a lot of lucha libre and listening to Latin music. There’s something that keeps happening to me where a friend opens a door I didn’t know I wanted to walk through, and then I can’t stop walking.
But here’s the thing: I’m not the target demo. I like bluegrass. I like classic country. I like folk and Americana — the kind of music that smells like woodsmoke and sounds like it was recorded in a barn in 1973. Yet here I find myself bopping my head to Stray Kids and NewJeans and a half-dozen groups whose names I can’t pronounce yet, and something unexpected is happening underneath all of it.
I’m feeling something I can only describe as gratitude.
Let me be clear about something: this music isn’t Christian. Nobody is slipping theology into the bridge. Nobody is trying to point me toward God. And yet.
There is a long tradition of recognizing that truth, beauty, and goodness don’t exclusively live inside explicitly Christian containers. Augustine talked about taking what is genuinely good from the wider world and receiving it as a gift that ultimately traces back to the Giver of all good things. Listen, I’m not trying to over-spiritualize a pop playlist. But I do think that when something genuinely beautiful breaks through and catches you off guard, it’s worth asking what it’s doing to you, what it’s pointing you toward, even accidentally.
What K-pop did to me — accidentally, while I was just trying to get some work done — was remind me that the world is enormous, that human creativity is astonishing in its variety, and that joy travels across languages and oceans and completely foreign cultural contexts and still lands. I can not understand a single lyric and still feel what a song is doing. That does something to you, if you let it.
For me, it did something to my ecclesiology.
I’m a church planter. I spend a lot of my days thinking about one very specific community — a neighborhood on the south side of Newark, Ohio. I think about the people there, what they need, how the gospel might take root in that particular soil. It’s granular, local, and sometimes claustrophobic work. It’s easy to start thinking small. To confuse your corner of the kingdom with the whole kingdom.
But I have been given, without asking for it, a life that keeps bumping me up against the size of the church.
I've been on the ground in Cambodia and Brazil — places where the gospel is alive and moving in ways that look completely different from anything I grew up with, and are no less real for it. I have missionaries I'm regularly in contact with in France, in Phnom Penh, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Canada, in Mexico — people who left comfort and familiarity to carry the same message I believe into places that needed to hear it in a different accent. I get regular email updates from a friend I've known since high school who has given his life to Bible translation in Africa — working alongside local communities to put the full Word of God into languages that have never had it, so that people can hear Scripture for the first time in the language their mother sang to them. I have been shaped — genuinely, durably shaped — by theologians who never once set foot in Ohio. Men and women who wrote in other centuries, other languages, other contexts entirely, whose understanding of Scripture formed mine in ways I'm still discovering.
And here’s the one that gets me most: right now, in my own church building, there is a congregation that meets and worships and preaches the gospel in Nepali — the heart languages of Bhutanese and Nepali families who have found a home in central Ohio. Their pastor is my friend. We share a building and a Lord and almost no common language. I will never fully understand what happens in that room on Sunday mornings. But I know it is real. I know the Spirit is there. And I know that what they are doing and what I am doing are not two different things — they are two expressions of the same impossible, ancient, global project.
The church is local. It has to be. The gospel is always good news for these people in this place, spoken in a language they can understand, embodied in a community they can belong to. You can’t love an abstraction. You have to love your neighbors, and your neighbors have names and addresses.
But the church is also global in a way that should regularly undo us. There are believers in South Korea who have been praying longer than I’ve been alive. There are house churches in places I’ll never visit, led by people who’ve risked things I’ll never be asked to risk, worshipping in languages I’ll never speak. The communion of saints stretches across every continent and every century, and most of them I will never meet this side of eternity, but they are my people. I am bound to them by something deeper than shared taste or shared geography.
Paul knew this. He wrote to churches he’d never seen. He carried in his chest a burden for communities in Colossae and Ephesus and Philippi, and he loved them with a love that clearly exceeded what any normal network of acquaintance could produce. That love had a source. The Spirit makes the body one, and that oneness is not a metaphor: it’s a reality that sometimes catches you off guard in the most ordinary moments.
K-pop caught me off guard.
The gospel has never been the property of any one culture. It doesn’t belong to America. It doesn’t belong to the West, or to English, or to the particular worship style I grew up with and genuinely love. It arrives in every culture and starts asking questions — What here reflects the image of God? What here needs to be redeemed? — and it does that work in Korean and Nepali and Portuguese and French and every other tongue that will one day confess that Jesus is Lord.
I think there’s something healthy about being regularly reminded that you are not the center of the world. That your taste is not universal. That there are whole dimensions of human experience and creativity and joy that you haven’t encountered yet, and that encountering them doesn’t threaten you — it enlarges you.
I want to plant a church in Newark, Ohio, and I want that church to feel the weight of belonging to something that dwarfs it. I want us to pray for believers in places we can’t find on a map. I want us to hold our local, particular expression of the faith with both deep commitment and genuine humility, knowing that we are one small note in a very large song.
A song, it turns out, that sounds good even when you don’t know all the words.