Georgia Presbyterians are challenged to build a bigger table
The Rev. Jihyun Oh says true inclusion means congregations must change — not just newcomers
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Georgia — More than just welcoming new faces through the door, true inclusion requires a congregation to fundamentally shift who it is — not simply expect newcomers to conform to the culture already in place. That was the central message delivered Saturday morning by the Rev. Jihyun Oh, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and executive director of the Interim Unified Agency, as she addressed the 2026 Georgia Presbyteries’ Gathering at Epworth by the Sea.
The two-day conference, with the theme “Building a Bigger Table: Gathering, Sharing and Learning Together,” brought together Presbyterians from five Georgia presbyteries — Cherokee, Flint River, Greater Atlanta, Northeast Georgia and Savannah — for worship, workshops and conversation Feb. 20-21. Although Savannah Presbytery has had an annual tradition of gathering in February for a presbytery-wide leader development and faith formation, the last time the five presbyteries had gathered together was in 1998.
Oh served as keynote speaker for this year’s gathering, delivering a wide-ranging address that wove together Scripture, theology, organizational psychology and intercultural competence theory to propose how the church can approach a calling towards inclusivity.
Oh opened by signaling that her remarks were meant to be collaborative, not declarative. “In undergraduate, I was trained as a scientist, and what that means is that I’m usually bringing ideas for peer review,” she told the audience. “I’m actually bringing things and wondering about them aloud, and then I’m hoping that you all will engage in some thinking with me.”
She began by challenging what she described as a common conflation in PC(USA) circles between diversity and inclusion. Having people present in a room, she argued, is not the same as having their full personhood incorporated into the life of the body. She illustrated the distinction with a personal anecdote about a tight-knit friend group adding a new member. “The expectation was that the new person would then come and adjust to the group that was already there — not that the group as a whole would shift because of the addition of a person.” That expectation, she said, is precisely what most churches quietly maintain, often without realizing it.
Oh grounded her theology of inclusion firmly in both Scripture and the PC(USA)’s constitutional foundations. Referencing the Book of Order’s F-1.0404, she walked the gathering through the denomination's foundational call to a new openness — in membership, in discernment, in institutional forms and in God’s continuing reformation of the church. “We are to be open to new membership. We are to be open to what God is doing in the world,” she said. “That might mean different people, different sorts of things, different ways of being church in the world.”
She paired that constitutional grounding with three New Testament passages. From 2 Corinthians 5:15-17, she highlighted the call to no longer regard anyone from a merely human point of view. "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away.” From Galatians 3:27-29, she cited the baptismal formula that erases the categories of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female — “be encouraged,” she said, “to take those things that are dividing, excluding, othering, bringing people apart into us-versus-them categories, to actually say we need to be working towards something bigger, a bigger we.” Oh read aloud the advice from Romans 12:2-5 to “not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind.” calling it another invitation in the Bible “to be grounded in God's grace, to think more expansively, maybe more organically, about what it means to be church, but also to have our minds renewed about the way we think about what it means to be the body of Christ, to be church, to be participating in God's mission and ministry in the world.”
On the practical side, Oh drew on tools from applied social science — spanning behavioral economics, intercultural communication and critical social theory — to help congregations move from good intentions to measurable changes.
She described equity primes, a concept rooted in behavioral economics and implicit bias research, as structured reminders built into decision-making processes that prompt leaders to slow down and ask whose voices are missing. She noted that the PC(USA)’s own General Assembly uses such cards for committee work, and suggested sessions and presbyteries could create their own versions to ask who is being centered in this decision? Who is most impacted? Do we need more listening before we act?
She also introduced the Intercultural Development Inventory, a tool from the field of intercultural communication developed from Milton Bennett’s research on how individuals and organizations move along a continuum toward genuine cross-cultural competence. Oh described it as the capacity “to shift perspective and adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonality in ways that are appropriate and authentic to oneself and to the culture we’re engaging.”
She drew on the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, describing a spectrum of behaviors — breaking, bridging and bonding. Most congregations, she suggested, are skilled at bonding with people like themselves but struggle with the bridging behaviors that connect across real differences. “I wonder if we're really just more comfortable bonding all the time,” she said, adding that bonding within a group is frequently paired with breaking behavior toward those outside it.
Oh closed with a charge that matched the gathering’s theme. “Complex issues and problems can't be solved by single solutions,” she acknowledged, “but it is the next faithful step that we can take. I think it’s most important that we take that next faithful step if we want to practice inclusion, to grow the table wider.”
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