Sun Ho co-founded City Harvest Church with Pastor Kong Hee in 1989. She was ordained into the ministry by Dr David Yonggi Cho. Since 2010, she has been the chief executive officer of CHC, overseeing a congregation of 24,228 members and a collective membership of more than 70,000, including all branch and affiliate churches.
Together with Kong, they co-founded the “Church Without Walls” initiatives (1996) and City Harvest Community Services Association (1997), both of which assisted 11,941 individuals in need (2024). In recognition of Sun’s humanitarian work among the poor and needy, particularly children, Sun received the “Outstanding Young Person of the World” Award from Junior Chamber International in 2003.
In addition to her humanitarian work, Sun was a pop singer, using music as a tool for evangelism in Asia. In 2004, she was named “Ambassador of Love” by the Children and Youth Foundation of China for establishing schools among underprivileged kids. She was also appointed “Charity Ambassador of Love” for the Special Olympic World Summer Games in Shanghai in 2007 and served as the “Music Ambassador” for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Songfest.
Leadership is a complex phenomenon that cannot be easily defined as a single concept. Still, it is often understood as a set of social processes that influence people towards common goals—an approach that I will follow in this study. Drawing from general leadership theory and research on Pentecostal leadership, I will emphasise the interaction between leaders, followers, and the spiritual dimension, leading to a constructivist perspective on leader-follower relationships. The article will first address leadership in various settings, emphasising the need to contextualise leadership in different cultures, but also keeping an analytical distance to avoid dominating discourses that break with Christian perspectives. Second, I will discuss the complexity in Pentecostal leadership, especially the collaboration between divine and human interventions, the dialectic connection between agency and structure, and the ambivalence and tension between leaders and followers in ecclesial settings. Finally, I will highlight the constructive relations between leaders and followers. While leaders hold a formal position, leadership is also a social phenomenon effective only if it makes sense to church members, implying that the leader’s task is not to create everything from scratch but to build relationships and draw from the resources and spirituality present within the congregation.
