J.Y. Park's unlikely journey from K-pop to pulpit

J.Y. Park was hardly a name associated with religion.

For decades, he was better known as the boundary-pushing singer in transparent plastic pants who became one of the architects of modern K-pop, founding JYP Entertainment and producing generations of stars from Wonder Girls and GOT7 to Twice and Stray Kids.

Today, however, Park can also be found standing at a lectern, teaching the Bible.

On Saturday, First Fruits, the Christian community Park leads, uploaded a 72-minute YouTube video in which he directly addressed claims that the group is heretical or a cult. Park rejected such descriptions, saying the community has members from different religious backgrounds and arguing that it should be judged by what it teaches.

How one of K-pop's most powerful producers came to lead such a religious community is a story that stretches back more than a decade. Part of Park's own account begins during one of the most difficult periods of his career.

Park spent years trying to break into the US market, first as a songwriter and later by preparing JYP artists including G.Soul and Lim Jeong-hee for American debuts. Those plans were derailed by the 2008 global financial crisis.

Speaking to local media outlets in 2014, Park said he had lost the money invested in his US push over the four years from 2004, adding that the setback also hurt JYP back home.

He nevertheless continued his US ambitions, taking Wonder Girls to America in 2009. "Nobody" made them the first Korean act to enter the Billboard Hot 100, but the group's US venture ultimately failed to produce the broader breakthrough Park had hoped for.

It was around this period that Park also began thinking more deeply about luck and the existence of God. He later said he began seriously investigating whether God existed, a search that eventually led him to study major religions and spend about two months in the Middle East in 2012, including time studying the Bible in Jerusalem.

He still described himself as nonreligious in 2014.

That same year, however, Park’s religious journey became entangled with a separate controversy. It emerged that his wife was a niece of Yoo Byung-eun, a businessperson closely associated with the Evangelical Baptist Church, commonly referred to in South Korea as “Guwonpa,” or the Salvation Sect. Major Korean Protestant denominations regard Guwonpa as heretical.

Yoo and his family came under intense scrutiny following the Sewol ferry disaster, which killed 304 people, because of their alleged financial and organizational ties to Cheonghaejin Marine, the company that operated the ferry.

A national broadcaster subsequently reported allegations that several hundred million won had passed from a company controlled by Yoo's eldest son through Yoo's younger brother — Park's father-in-law — to JYP Entertainment. The company denied receiving illicit funds, and a follow-up report cited financial authorities as saying that neither Park's nor JYP's alleged involvement, nor the reported account tracing, had been confirmed.

Questions about Park's links to Guwonpa resurfaced in 2018, when a local entertainment media outlet reported that he had led a seven-day Bible gathering attended by several Guwonpa members.

This time, Park was no longer simply someone studying religion. He was teaching it.

"I paid for it. I rented the place, and I taught the Bible study," Park responded on social media. He said only several of roughly 100 attendees were Guwonpa members and denied belonging to the denomination. Guwonpa itself also said Park was not a member.

Park said the Bible study had begun around 2014 with a friend and gradually expanded.

What was once a private gathering has since grown considerably more visible. Park now publicly delivers Bible lectures through First Fruits, while rejecting claims that the community is heretical or a cult. In Saturday's video, he described First Fruits as a church with a clear theological lineage, marking a shift from his earlier descriptions of his activities as an independent Bible study.

Park himself now carries a different public weight.

He remains a central figure at JYP Entertainment and has served as co-chair of the Presidential Committee on Popular Culture Exchange since September 2025, tasked with helping formulate strategies to expand Korean popular culture overseas.

No established evidence ties Park to Guwonpa or shows that the financial allegations surrounding JYP influenced his faith.

Still, the sequence of events provides important context for the questions that have followed him: a K-pop mogul questioning luck and God after one of the biggest gambles of his career; a marriage that connected him to a family at the center of a national controversy; financial allegations that were never substantiated against him; and a private Bible study that eventually grew into a public religious community.

More than a decade later, Park is no longer merely explaining his faith. He is preaching it.