The Rev. Jihyun Oh marks Stony Point Center’s 75th anniversary with a rousing and prophetic talk
The Stated Clerk/Executive Director takes a clear look back and a hopeful look ahead
LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Jihyun Oh helped Stony Point Center celebrate 75 years of ministry Saturday with a speech filled with appreciation for the work that’s gone on in decades past, especially at the General Assembly level, and confidence that God will not abandon the church, even in difficult times.
“I will be doing a bit of a deep dive of nerdiness tonight,” joked the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and the Executive Director of the Interim Unified Agency, “to talk about where the church is and what the church can do in the time such as we live in now.”
“We are in a time when working together will be more important than ever,” Oh said. “I hope that will mean that those of us in the PC(USA) will find ways to work closely with ecumenical, interreligious, and secular and civil society partners in our efforts to enflesh God’s love and justice in the world.”
Oh said she hopes that will also mean that “organizations of all sorts will reach out to those of us in the PC(USA) and find welcome partners in the work of justice in the days ahead.”
For her talk, Oh drew from a letter she and the Co-Moderators of the 226th General Assembly (2024), the Rev. Tony Larson and the Rev. CeCe Armstrong, published in December, “after the election and as we were headed into the new year knowing what was likely to come,” she said.
The PC(USA) “is a denomination shaped by our Christian biblical roots and our Reformed theological roots, both of which gave shape to our Constitution,” she said. “It’s also a denomination shaped by our General Assembly-discerned social witness policies.”
Oh took those in attendance on a brief tour of the Book of Confessions. Reformation-era confessions like the Heidelberg Catechism and the Second Helvetic Confession “speak to an era a long time ago as folks were figuring our what it means to be church when the church had in some ways stopped being church,” she said.
Modern Reformed confessions including the Theological Declaration of Barmen and the Confession of Belhar “speak to the issues of the day — modern realities like racism and Apartheid and war.” She pointed also to the confessions of the PC(USA) and its predecessors, the Confession of 1967 and A Brief Statement of Faith.
“Those confessions all taken together remind us that in every season, regardless of what’s happening, we are called to be the church, the body of Christ in and for the world,” Oh said, “worshiping God and gratefully serving and acting in response to God’s grace.”
In this time, “we are being asked to give allegiance to human leaders, to unjust ideals of dominance and nationalistic perversions of Christian faith over and against faithfulness in God,” Oh said. “In and through these confessions we join other Christians and traditions declaring that the God we know in Jesus Christ is sovereign, that God alone is Lord.”
The 200th General Assembly (1988) adopted the policy statement “God Alone is Lord of the Conscience.” That statement “likely will be important in the days ahead,” Oh said. “It has served and continues to serve as the basis for court cases involving religious liberty for which the General Assembly or the PC(USA) has been a party or a friend of the court,” most recently concerning a lawsuit on religious liberty.
“Part of what this means is when our theology and practice of faith differs from what others might believe it should look like, and on behalf of the General Assembly it is declared that we are called to welcome the stranger, to include all in the life of the church regardless of who they are or how they are embodied,” Oh said. “To lift up the voices of those long silenced, to work toward equity in all areas of life and faith, and to care for Creation — it is done out of the conviction that God alone is Lord of the conscience.”
“No person or institution can compel our faith to look different than we have discerned God is leading us through the Holy Spirit,” Oh said. “It doesn’t matter who the leader is. It doesn’t matter what the institution is. We are compelled through the Holy Spirit the way God leads us,” and not “by how those human leaders or that institution compels us. God alone is Lord of the conscience.”
“We believe the Christian call is not to seek political power for ourselves and for our own good, that we don’t seek political power to maintain dominance,” Oh said. “We act in a way that uses the policies, advocacy, power and authority we can muster in order that we are working toward God’s wholeness and peace in the world.”
As “a possession of God,” the church “must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged,” Oh said. “The church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interest and thus control and harm others.”
Presbyterians join with other Reformed Christians “in recognizing that all believers are called to the vocation of discipleship,” Oh said. The church is “not about the pastor doing all the work … or the people who have long years of experience, or the people who have always belonged to the church. It means that all who are part of the church are called to the work of discipleship.”
“It will take all of us and each of us — the whole church and all of society working together — to imagine how to enflesh God’s love and justice as good neighbors and to live this out,” she said.
Another report “that has been re-emerging as an important policy statement for the current time” is “Peacemaking: The Believer’s Calling,” approved in 1980 by the 192nd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, also known as the northern church. That report says the church is faithful to Christ when it is engaged in peacemaking, and that “our sources of military might, economic relationships, political institutions and cultural patterns fail to meet the needs of our time.”
“Y’all, this was from 1980,” Oh noted. “It is in some ways — in many ways — true today.”
Presbyterians love their committees, Oh noted with a smile. “We meet in committees to discern God’s will because we believe a single individual cannot fully” do that “because we can see only part of what God is doing. We need a community. We need each other. We need the diverse lens each person brings through their life and their experiences and the ways they have engaged the world in different relationships and with God. That’s how we can discern God’s will more fully.”
Doing all this “will involve both recovering and rediscovering the wisdom of the past, something I think we’ve been doing this weekend as we’ve been sharing the stories and the wisdom and the past of Stony Point Center,” Oh said. “I think it will also mean opening ourselves to imagine something new for the future, even when the way forward seems hopeless and that future looks so very far away.”
Doing all of this — imagining, recontextualizing, remembering the past, organizing and acting, and “being for love and justice in the world” — will involve forming “good partnerships and being good neighbors,” Oh said. “The church will entrust ourselves to God and place our hope in God even as we discern and plan for the days ahead.”
“I hope that communities and partners will continue to reach out,” Oh said, “and that we will reach out to do this work together. Thank you.”
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