The Rev. Jihyun Oh is among the featured speakers at the Moderators’ Conference
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
The Rev. Jihyun Oh addresses the 2024 Moderators’ Conference at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Rich Copley)
LOUISVILLE — If there’s one thing that convinces the Rev. Jihyun Oh that she ought to say yes to a call, it’s “when a call scares me a little, a call I cannot do without God’s help.”
“I’ve been thinking about leadership a lot lately,” Oh, the Executive Director and Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, told moderators from around the country last week during the Moderators’ Conference held online and in-person at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville, Kentucky. “Some of you are coming from presbyteries where you have had conversations about merging, partnering or working with other presbyteries in new ways, or synods figuring out new ways of supporting your presbyteries. All of us are in that transitional moment. We’re still figuring out what church looks like as polarization has taken root.”
“I believe God calls us for such a time as we are in right now,” she told the 80 or so mid-council moderators gathered in person and roughly 50 participating online. “Each of us brings our own giftedness, and I’m grateful you have said yes to answering that call.” Her prayer was the conference would “be a time where God is working to transform each of us more closely to the crucified and cruciform shape of Christ.”
“We don’t have to do the work perfectly,” she told the moderators. “But we are called to do it faithfully.”
The tools at a moderator’s disposal are in place “so we can be more faithful in discernment together, so we can be the community of loving disciples together, and so we can figure out what God is doing in our midst and in the world,” she said. A classic Presbyterian way of doing things — decently and in order — “allows us to hear voices that have been ignored and excluded.”
As she travels the nation and the globe in her new role, “I continue to be reminded how human resources rich we are in the denomination, and that gives me joy,” Oh said. “I love hearing what the message of the Gospel is for a particular community. That’s what gives me a lot of hope.”
The Rev. Jihyun Oh speaks in the Chapel at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Rich Copley)
Later Friday, Oh delivered a talk on emotional and conversational intelligence and bias awareness. She delivered a scenario many mid-council moderators face: During a meeting, a hot topic is introduced to, say, consider presenting an overture to the General Assembly. “People start murmuring. Maybe the chat starts to heat up online,” Oh said. “You notice the expressions on people’s faces. What are the relationships that need to be attended to for the whole body?”
“It’s most often not about you,” Oh said about the murmuring. Sometimes conflict is about the history of the mid council or what’s happening in a particular congregation. Or it could be an unhealed 40-year wound, Oh suggested. “It may feel really personal, but it’s not,” she said. “Some of you may be leading in environments where there’s a lack of trust.”
Conversational intelligence, according to the author Judith E. Glaser, is “the ability to connect, to navigate and to grow with others” through conversation. Oh labeled it “a way to grow in relationship management.”
“We imagine ourselves as rational human beings, but we often have conclusions based on biological reactions that take just a second to form,” Oh said. “We feel good or bad, and we make judgments on whether someone is a friend or foe in the moment.” In the process of making meaning, “sometimes we make stuff up,” she said. “We pull in beliefs about a situation or the person. By the time we conclude, we are not sharing the person’s point of view, and no more dialogue can happen.”
Glaser teaches there are three levels of conversation, with the highest being Share-Discover, where conversation partners “trust you to share, experiment and innovate with them.”
“Some of the best Assembly and committee moments are at this level of conversation,” Oh said. While I may not agree with my fellow commissioner or committee member, “I want you to be part of the body, and your voice is important. That’s the best of how we are together as a covenant community.”
Oh touched on two other topics that have received increasing attention in recent General Assemblies, implicit bias and equity primes. “As moderators,” Oh said, “you have the authority not to be a bystander when folks are making statements that deny the integrity of a person in the room.”
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