Who needs a heart?

We need one to join a God who’s brokenhearted and yet still loves us, the Rev. Cindy Kohlmann tells the 2024 Presbyterian Women Churchwide Gathering

October 10, 2024

The Rev. Cindy Kohlmann, co-moderator of the 223rd General Assembly and the connectional presbyter and stated clerk of New Castle Presbytery. (Contributed photo)

Answering the question “Who needs a heart?” was the Rev. Cindy Kohlmann’s task during the opening plenary of the 2024 Presbyterian Women Churchwide Gathering, which was recently held in St. Louis.

Kohlmann, co-moderator of the 223rd General Assembly (2018) and the connectional presbyter and stated clerk of New Castle Presbytery, came on to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It.”

Kohlmann centered her talk, which she acknowledged would be more like a sermon, on Isaiah 54:7–8, a reminder that God briefly abandoned God’s people when God’s heart was sufficiently broken by their actions. What would happen, Kohlmann asked, if God decided to let go of God’s heart? She traced episodes of God’s heart breaking back to the story of sin entering the world in the Garden of Eden. “To me,” Kohlmann said, “it feels like an absolute miracle that God continues to choose to love us. … The God whose indelible image is interwoven with our very selves reaches out to us, again and again.”

“Make no mistake. God’s love is fierce. It is powerful. It is certainly not ‘a secondhand emotion,’” Kohlmann said with a nod toward Turner’s hit song. “God’s love isn’t fickle or temporary. This is a love that imagined the endless possibility of Creation, then breathed them with God’s own breath into being. How fearfully and wonderfully we are made in God’s love!”

Another truth about God’s love is that it’s “focused on the tangible, everyday aspects of life,” according to Kohlmann.

“All that God desires with fierce longing and passionate dedication is entrusted to us to bring to fruition, here on Earth as it is in heaven,” she said. “We are meant to be the expression of God’s powerful, fierce, life-changing love in this world. So, we need to acknowledge that a good portion of what breaks God’s heart is the very fact that we claim this amazing love for ourselves, and then deny it to others.”

Photo by Aziz Acharki via Unsplash

“We know the stories. We know the words of the prophets and the psalms. We know God’s love is tangible, and our expression of God’s love is meant to go beyond thoughts and prayers,” she said. “We know that we are meant to have hearts, hearts that can indeed be broken, hearts that go beyond charity to long-term solutions. But my God, it’s hard. … It’s hard to hold tight to compassion when confronted every day with cynicism and apathy, and that’s in our churches as well as in our communities.”

Choosing to have a heart “is life-changing and habit-forming, and, my friends, it is world-altering,” Kohlmann said. “It is who and how and what we are called to be — fiercely, passionately, whole-heartedly advocates for the love of God.”

“When we open our hearts to this world, our hearts will be broken, and we will join God in that brokenness,” she said. “We need hearts that can be broken so they can overflow even more. In the power through whom all things are made possible, tonight we open our hearts to all the holy triune God can and will and intends to do through us. We open our hearts. Hallelujah! Amen.”

A number of speakers welcomed attendees to the gathering, which is normally held in person every three years, but saw a pandemic-caused interruption in 2021.

“I wish you could see what I see,” said the Rev. Dr. Diane Givens Moffett, president and executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency, gazing into the faces of those gathered. “It is good to see everyone in person.”

Moffett thanked Dr. Susan Jackson Dowd, the executive director of Presbyterian Women, as well as PW’s officers and members for the opportunity to bring them greetings.

While “churches are learning to thrive in a post-pandemic world,” times of crisis “can leave us weary,” Moffett said. She recalled raising three daughters who were carted to their after-school and weekend activities by their father and by extended family members. “I experienced days when nothing seemed to be working but my nerves,” Moffett said. “I did what I did because of love, and I believe there are a few women here for which that is true.”

“For mission and ministry projects, for your support and embodiment of the Matthew 25 focus, for your per capita donations … for your willingness to keep pressing and leaning into new ways, for the audacity to believe that God is doing a new thing, for being disciples who are love with skin on it — for Presbyterian Women past, present, and future, I say thanks be to God for your witness and your ministry. Blessings on this, your 2024 Gathering.”

Read a report on the second plenary here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Today’s Focus: Rev. Cindy Kohlmann speaks to the 2024 Presbyterian Women Churchwide Gathering

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Marsha Stearley, Desktop Support Analyst, Information Technology, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 
Elaine Stepp, Operations Reconciliation Specialist, Presbyterian Foundation 

Let us pray

Great God of Hope, may the river flow through us this day in sharing help and gladness to God’s city as the morning dawns. Touch our hearts with love for all, especially by encouraging the weak and giving tenderness to the strong. Amen.