Today we’d like to introduce you to “Pastor DL” – David Larry Kim.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up in Virginia and while pursuing my undergrad degree at the University of Virginia, I found myself saying, “There’s got to be more to life than this.” I thought I had reached the pinnacle of success in everything that I had heard would make my life complete: friendships, relationships, academics, athletics. And yet I still felt a hole in my soul. One by one, the things that I thought would satisfy my deepest longings, the things that promised to give my life meaning and significance began to be taken from me. At the end of my first year in college, when my life hit rock bottom, I remembered the words to a song that I had sung to Jesus in church growing up: “You’re all I want, You’re all I’ve ever needed, help me know you are near.” When I arose from that tear-filled time of turning to Jesus, I knew that something was different. As I began to turn away from temporary pleasures and put my hope for joy and meaning in Jesus, my life began to change. I found peace, love, and a reason to live. I began telling everyone of the hope that I had found.
During this time, mentors and older Christians began to tell me to invest my life into things that were eternal, to live for a purpose that would outlast my days on earth. Most of the things in life are temporary but people, the Bible, and the church are eternal. So I began to consider and pray about how I could invest my life into those things. During my remaining years in college,pastors and others whom I respected told me to consider becoming a pastor. Heeding their advice. I spent almost every day for the next three years praying to God to guide me as I shifted my academic focus from accounting to psychology. One night during my third or fourth year in college, as I was praying to God, I felt Him taking me to the cross where Jesus died and telling me that He loved me. After telling Him that I knew that he did, I felt Him say that He loved the whole world and asked who would tell them of this love. In my heart, I said, “I will!” You could say this was where my calling to be a pastor came.
For the next three years, I served in campus ministry and college ministry while also working in commercial real estate for two of those years. In 2001, my pastor and I came down to Orlando to take a preaching class taught by a pastor named Tim Keller. After that class, I felt compelled to come study at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Oviedo. I was connected with a church who was looking for a youth pastor, through a friend who had come to preach there. I began serving as a youth pastor and I’d spend my four years of seminary in that capacity.
As my seminary graduation drew near, I was considering ministry opportunities in LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Virginia, and New Jersey. I also had a desire to stay at my church in Orlando but it didn’t seem like that was the right call. People were advising me to either (1) do something I couldn’t do when I was older/married or (2) go to a big city and advance my career. Almost nobody thought it would be a good idea to stay in a small, Korean-American church in Orlando…except for God. The day before I was going to tell our church leadership that I would be leaving the church upon graduation, I felt a strong sense that I was supposed to stay in Orlando. During a time of prayer, I saw faces of our church people and faces of people in Orlando flying by me like the Microsoft Windows screensaver from the 90’s. Then I remembered a Bible verse from Matthew 9.35-38: When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them for they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to them, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” I felt God was saying that the people of Orlando will be without a shepherd and that the harvest of people who need Jesus in Orlando is huge–but there are not many workers. On that day in April 2005, I committed to stay here in Orlando and serve His church, as long as God would have me stay.
Since then, our church has moved from Pine Hills to the Horizon West area and God has blessed our congregation in many ways. We have seen so many lives changed, so many marriages saved, so many families healed, and are seeing the church strengthened in many countries as well. And we have experienced so much joy along the way.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Donald Miller said a story is nothing more than a hero pursuing a goal. Good stories contain obstacles along the way and the best stories have moments where it seems like all hope is lost. Our story is the same–though none of us would consider ourselves heroes. We have experienced many hardships for a congregation of our size. In 2006, one of our men collapsed in his home and passed away. In 2009, we lost a teenager to pancreatic cancer. In 2010, another graduated into glory in a bus accident while on a mission trip to train pastors in Sri Lanka. In 2011, a college student passed away on the mission field in Ecuador. In 2020, one of our most faithful leaders entered His forever home after an aneurysm. We have suffered much hardship and loss, yet each of these men were like kernels of wheat that fell to the ground and died in order to produce many more seeds. These seeming tragedies saw our church come together like never before and out of the ashes, we have seen so much fruit. In addition to the spiritual revival and spiritual oneness that came as a result of these losses, we have seen a new church building established, a missions hub created in Ecuador, seven churches started within the Amazon region, and over hundreds of baptisms as a result of these losses. We have traded temporary farewells for eternal hellos. None of this is surprising when we see that this is how God has always worked. In fact, the Greatest Story Ever involved a man rising from the dead. Indeed, God is a God who brings beauty from ashes, hope out of despair. He has done that time and time again in our church and His story is the story to which all of our stories point.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
As a pastor, I have a passion to communicate God’s truth, be it through conversations at a coffee shop, in a classroom studying the Bible with others, or from the pulpit preaching the Word of God. What I do on Sundays informs and is informed by what I do during the rest of the week. I hear people’s stories during the week, then go up on Sunday and share how the Good News of Jesus answers the questions that they’re asking. Then I go back down from the pulpit and see how the messages are landing and being played out in the lives of my people. Our house churches are smaller groups that meet during the week. They seek to embody the spirit of the church that we see in the New Testament. In house churches, the Word moves from theory to practice as faith gets lived out. Christian life was never meant to be relegated to a thought experiment, staying in the head and heart; it must be lived out. My role as a pastor is to be committed to the Word of God and prayer so that I can help our church members allow the Word of God to become flesh. Our church understands that faith without works is dead and we seek to live out our faith — with each other first and then to take the Good News outside the walls of the church in both word and deed.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
You are welcome to come and see what God is doing in our church on Sunday mornings, at our Wednesday prayer meetings, or in our house churches that meet throughout the week.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.harvestchurchorlando.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harvest.kpco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/harvestkpco
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@HarvestChurchOrlando
