Would Jesus wear Birkenstocks, flip-flops, or Crocs if he were here today?
It’s a cool spring night in early April, and close to 120 of us are seated elbow to elbow in the basement of an Anglican church on a quiet residential corner in Vancouver, Canada. In the center of the space, standing on piles of Persian carpets, is a performer with salt-and-pepper hair, a band of musicians behind him.
The man continues singing a jazzy ditty: Would Jesus ban plastic bags? Would he be a fan of Jesus Christ Superstar? Would he look at the church and say, “What the?”
We laugh loudly and often as the performer asks his amusing questions: how Jesus would act and what he would say about us, the world, and the church. But the performer, Ins Choi, never laughs along—as if to underscore that these silly thought experiments are actually worthy of contemplation.
Most people are better acquainted with Choi’s art than with the artist himself. He’s the creator behind Kim’s Convenience, the hit play turned TV series on the life of a Korean immigrant family in Toronto, which won rave reviews as a “charming, understated family dramedy” with a “quietly revolutionary” approach to portraying Korean food culture on screen. Cast members have garnered best actor and actress accolades from the Canadian Screen Awards, with one actor (Simu Liu) going on to score the role of Shang-Chi in the Marvel universe.
But here, in the darkened confines of Pacific Theater, hosted by Holy Trinity, Vancouver, there is no caricature of the stereotypical Korean immigrant—speaking in broken English, working hard to save up money, insular in thinking—to serve as comedic relief. Instead, the 51-year-old actor-playwright lays bare his life experiences with aching vulnerability, albeit replete with self-deprecating and sometimes incongruous humor.
Few people are able to hold an audience’s attention span for 80 whole minutes. But Choi can, and with apparent ease. Most of Son of a Preacherman—a world premiere, running until April 13—is a monologue, backed up by a trio of talented musician-actors (Ben Elliot, Rachel Angco, and Haneul Yi). Alternating between song and spoken word, Choi weaves together the threads of his life story, including his family’s sojourn out of North Korea into the south and his supposed destiny—to be a preacher just like his father, grandfather, and cousins.
Throughout Son of a Preacherman, Choi breaks the fourth wall over and over again. We are intimately present as he wrestles with his artistic vocation, which he embarks on after a dream in which Jesus flicks him on the forehead (twice). We hear his plaintive cry of trust in God despite friends encouraging him to give up on his craft. When he tells the audience, “Thank you for coming,” before closing the show with a stirring, hopeful poem, we are collectively (and disappointingly!) jolted from our immersion in his world.
That God, Jesus, and church are mentioned repeatedly in the play without cringe or kitsch is a testament to Choi’s finesse. In life and art, he navigates the tensions between creative calling and cultural expectations, between devotion and self-expression.
Choi was born in South Korea in 1974. His family resettled in Scarborough, Ontario, and lived above their uncle’s grocery shop, where Choi would while away his time writing poetry and songs.
He grew up in Toronto Korean Bethel Church, an immigrant community, where his father’s effusive preaching style piqued his interest in the art of storytelling. Sticking pictures on the walls of the tiny storage-locker room that was his office, the pastor would pore over books, then write his sermons, rehearsing them out loud. At the pulpit, he mimicked different animal noises: a rooster, a cow, a sheep, a dog. “He would play the fool, a clown,” Choi said in an interview with CT.
God found the 15-year-old preacher’s son not in the pews of his father’s church but at a Korean youth group gathering in downtown Toronto, where Choi was sitting in the back with the cool skateboarders and hoping to meet girls. Choi had been to other events like this. But this time, when the speaker invited students to come to the front if they wanted to meet Jesus, something prompted him to go forward. He grabbed his skateboard, pretending he was going to go to the restroom. Instead, he walked down the center aisle, weeping and falling to his knees as a counselor prayed over him.
“It was quite an emotional, euphoric moment of experiencing the God I heard about,” the one whom his father and grandfather had dedicated their lives to, Choi said. “It was like a reunion.”
When Choi didn’t get into university, he attended Bible college, dropped out, then studied theater at Toronto’s York University. He struggled to land roles, frustrated by the one-dimensional bit parts regularly offered to actors of Asian descent. He began working as a part-time children’s pastor at his father’s church while spending long hours penning poetry and plays at the coffeehouse Tim Hortons.
He also began pursuing a master of theological studies from the evangelical Anglican Wycliffe College in Toronto. Marion Taylor, who taught Choi Old Testament, said that his time there helped the fledgling artist to integrate his gifts in drama and production with his faith.
Choi would seize the opportunity to “dramatize Scripture and make it his own in class,” she said. In one instance, Choi memorized parts of the opening chapters of the Book of Lamentations. As he was practicing his oration in a big hall at the college, a passerby who overheard his recitation thought someone was having a nervous breakdown. “He was just lamenting over the destruction and the blood [in the book],” Taylor said.
After seminary, Choi began writing a play about a Korean immigrant family running a convenience store in Toronto, based on the parable of the Prodigal Son. No one wanted it when he first shopped the script around theaters in Toronto, Choi tells us in Preacherman.
His breakthrough came in 2011 with a performance at the Toronto Fringe Festival. When the play ended, there was complete silence. Choi felt stricken by self-doubt; perhaps the audience had hated it. Then cheers and applause filled the space. Choi’s career took off; he went on to be the writer, cocreator, and executive producer for the TV adaptation.
Watching Kim’s Convenience, you might be able to tell its creator is a Christian. There are characters like Umma (Jean Yoon), a devout believer who always exhorts others to “praise the Jesus,” and pastor Nina Gomez (Amanda Brugel), the earnest, awkward leader of her rambunctious Korean flock. The characters are sweetly sincere and relatable in expressing their faith, which heightens the comedy when they reveal their flawed humanity. It’s like Appa (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) says: “Every time you gossip, you make the baby Jesus cry.”
The show, which debuted in 2016, faced criticism in its later years, with the majority-Asian cast lamenting the production team’s lack of diversity and accusing them of creating racist storylines. After its fifth and final season, Choi walked away from the project, saying that he had “nothing more to give this.” Kim’s Convenience was eventually canceled in 2021.
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Outside the TV series, Choi’s body of work mainly revolves around playwriting. He staged Songs, Stories, and Spoken Words in 2018 and Bad Parent in 2022, which details the ups and downs of new parenthood. (Much of the latter’s material was drawn from his experiences as a first-time dad.)
Now with Son of a Preacherman, Choi has returned to the stage—possibly the place where he feels most comfortable showcasing the intricacies of a baptized imagination, as C. S. Lewis puts it. Preacherman isn’t Choi’s first explicitly Christian work. There’s Subway Stations of the Cross, an hour-long solo show in which a homeless man brings an urgent message from God, and The KJV: The Bible Show, in which Choi shares his experiences with the translation.
It’s lonely being a writer, Choi told CT. The social aspects of theater—lunching together, working with designers and the director, and having a common goal—attracted him back to acting. “It’s such a public, communal experience. … I missed it a lot,” he said. “It was good for me to be in community—like church.”
Haneul Yi, a young Korean Canadian actor and musician, is part of Preacherman’s ensemble. One of his favorite songs in the show is “I Rejoice,” which speaks about the struggles Choi faced as a Korean Canadian artist: feeling overlooked and forgotten, perennially an outsider in the spaces he hoped to inhabit. It’s one of the few songs in the play directly addressed to God.
Yi said Choi told the cast that two identities define who he is: a follower of Jesus and an artist. “I can really see both in his life; it just shines in the words he says and the actions he takes,” Yi said.
In Preacherman, Choi explains how he contemplated following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and becoming a preacher. It was a well-trodden path, one that felt safe and familiar. But he wrestled with, and eventually surrendered to, a stronger desire to act and write.
“When I’m on stage, when I’m acting, I feel like God is smiling on me,” Choi said in a 2021 interview. “I feel like he’s shining his light on me, because it’s what he created me to do.”
Choi’s creative work still reflects much of what a serious expounder of the Word does: probing and interrogating theology and praxis in a gritty, rubber-meets-the-road kind of way. In Preacherman, he incorporates a hilarious spiel on what the biblical prophets would say and do if they all got together: Who would be ostracized, and how would they react to the only one (Samuel) who got a sequel?
In Subway Stations of the Cross, he conveys the surprising grace of God in the guise of a social outcast through a poem: “God is calling for you / God is falling for you / It’s appalling how much God is falling for you.”
“I’m not a preacher,” he declares in Preacherman. “I never became a preacher.” But as a friend texted him after the preview in Toronto, “The irony is that you are preaching the gospel through your storytelling.”
“Serving your audience is also a ministry,” Choi told CT. “I feel like people go to a theater [and] all of a sudden they feel like they’re part of a group experiencing a show together. They laugh together, they gasp together, and so they feel less alone.”
Son of a Preacherman examines the tension between art and faith with unflinching honesty. Ultimately, Choi shows us that this tension is good, even necessary, shaping us into the people God made us to be. Artist and Christian can be one and the same.
Isabel Ong is the East Asia editor for Christianity Today.
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