This dissertation's main concern is the stance of the Korean Protestant church toward individualism and consumerism and how the church is seeking to recover its participation in the public sphere. Korean Protestantism bore latent traits of individualism and consumerism from the start. In order to suggest alternative ways, this project pays attention to the important role preaching holds in Korean Protestantism. The crisis of Korean Protestantism and its homiletics can be described as a problem of theology. Contemporary Korean Protestant theology has been affected by individualism and consumerism, as well as preaching of prosperity gospels, influences represented as liberal theology.

Chapter one shows the first generation of North American Protestant missionaries as key to the modernization of the nation, but with modernization, they brought individualism, Western capitalist values, and commodities, which were used as a model of the comfortable life.

In chapter two we saw how Korean Protestant pastors healed the oppressed Korean minjung and how the attitudes and practices of these pastors showed their participation in the public sphere of Korean society.

Chapter three demonstrates how Korean Protestant pastors maintained the connection between church and society, especially through their preaching, the major characteristics of which were similar to postliberal theological perspectives.

A theoretical examination of individualism and consumerism from their Western origins is explored in chapter four. The postliberal perspective emphasizes the interpretation of community within the cultural-linguistic model of Christianity and the formation and reformation of church as community through a literal reading of the stories of Jesus. The ascriptive logic of Jesus and the gospel is necessary for preaching and its ethical dimensions.

Chapter five proposes an alternative way for homiletics. Narratives should form disciples of Jesus. Platonic idealistic views of ethos, in which the speech reflects the orator's virtue, was reflected significantly in the Sonbi model. Community building is based on memory shared in the community, and this community of memory is essential to the formation of an individual's identity.