It takes courage to change

LOUISVILLE — Speaking on “Changes, Curiosity and Councils” on Monday, the Rev. Jihyun Oh told mid council leaders she suspects they’ve been addressing those realities as much as she has over the past year or so.

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“You are stewarding and midwifing change too, as the church seeks to be faithful to the changes we are experiencing almost daily,” the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Executive Director of the Unified Agency told those gathered online and at the Presbyterian Center for the Mid Council Leaders Gathering, which continues through Wednesday. Oh named a few of those changes: society undergoing deep polarization, the rise of white Christian nationalism, the worsening climate crisis, and increasing marginalization.

“We need to shift because … things can no longer be assumed,” she said, and the PC(USA), through its unification process, must “get to a place where we are structured for the 1-million member denomination we are and not the 3.5-million member denomination we once were.”

In a world that’s rapidly changing, one characteristic that’s been lifted up is curiosity, and that was the focus of most of Oh’s talk on Monday. “There is a need for innovation and for people with a growth mindset,” she said. “We sometimes don’t recognize new models are needed, and we need to develop them while dealing with reality now. We have to develop the models while we’re doing the changes.”

But what folks need is more certainty, she said. “They want to know where we’re headed and what the topography is like, and that’s not something we have the luxury to do right now,” Oh said. “I trust you are inviting your faith leaders to do the same.”

She said she’s been drawn to the work of Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist. Piaget has written extensively on curiosity being an innate characteristic in babies and children. “Children develop a hypothesis, conduct experiments without knowing it, test it out, and then shift their hypothesis depending on what they experienced,” Oh said. “Curiosity helps in the developmental function of human beings.”

It's not just about “innovation and openness to change and having a growth mindset and achieving your goals,” she said. “Curiosity is critical to human well-being. It helps us make sense of reality, helps us find meaning in our lives, develop our minds and cultivate care for what’s beyond ourselves.” It’s “an innate characteristic of all people that needs to be nurtured.”

As colleagues, “we might ask, ‘what am I seeing and what are the assumptions I have that keep me from seeing new possibilities?’” she said. “What happens if we shift those assumptions?” Asking questions about our foundational assumptions “might help us find new ways if we don’t take it as disrupting or threatening, but an exercise in curiosity, like children do.”

We need answers to important questions, including “whose lens is missing?” she said. “Asking who is not at the table isn’t just about diversity. It is the difference between seeing the whole picture versus not seeing it.”

That discussion elicited one of Oh’s favorite jokes: some muffins are cooking in an oven. One muffin says it its neighbor, “it’s really getting hot in here.” The other muffin replies, “Wow! A talking muffin.”

“Are there ways we miss the rising heat?” Oh asked. “How might we open ourselves to see what God is doing in the world? What happens when we take seriously God saying, ‘behold, I am doing a new thing.’”

She asked: how will joining God require us to change the way we’ve always done things? Or given us joy in the past, but is not the way to go forward anymore?

Oh finds herself turning again and again to one of her favorite verses in the Bible, Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

“Curiosity is one of the ways our minds get renewed,” she said. “It helps us deepen learning, it rewires our minds for caring and compassion, it helps develop our brains and it’s a way to participate with the Holy Spirit’s invitation to renew our minds.”

Oh asked those gathered to break into small groups to brainstorm what thriving mid councils look like. She also asked: what do you need to be thriving? With markers and paper, leaders wrote down their answers, then shared some of them with the larger group.

“Rebuilding trust, which will take time, and the openness to not be bound by the way things were,” said one, “and to speak into the curiosity you were talking about.”

“Working together and sharing resources,” said another leader. “We highlighted our synod, which was once administrative and now connects us together with intentionality. It is helping presbyteries to thrive.”

Read previous Presbyterian News Service reporting on the Mid Council Leaders Gathering here and here.