Cynthia Moore-Koikoi
United Methodist bishop
Even though she was closely involved in church life since she was a child, Bishop Cynthia MooreKoikoi didn’t embrace a calling to ministry until she was in mid-career.
Bishop Moore-Koikoi, 53 — who now leads the Western Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church — was born in West Virginia and grew up in Maryland.
Her father was a United Methodist minister, and she would listen in on church business meetings with fascination. “I liked hearing the give-and-take of people,” she recalled. “I liked hearing the way my dad handled that, letting everyone have a voice.”
She earned a master’s in school psychology from the University of Maryland in 1992, and she worked as a public school psychologist for 17 years. She was also getting increasingly involved in church leadership, music and preaching.
One day, a stalwart church member “told me that God has called me to be a pastor,” she later said. “I said, ‘It’s nice that God has told you, but God hasn’t told me yet.’” But she soon came to the same conclusion, earning a master’s of divinity from Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and being ordained.
She said she takes lessons from her educational work into her current work. Both involve making sure systems work for the people they’re intended to work for, particularly the vulnerable.
When she was a student pastor at a small urban congregation in Baltimore, she realized it lacked a connection to its neighbors. She held a Bible study for the neighborhood youth — not in the sanctuary but on a nearby front stoop. “That’s what the kids in the neighborhood did — sit on the stoop,” she said.
In 2015, Baltimore erupted in unrest after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. As a United Methodist district superintendent in the city, she worked with churches that distributed needed supplies and offered safe havens for children when school was canceled.
Bishop Moore-Koikoi recalled going on a peace march with other pastors from various denominations soon afterward. Smoke and tear gas were still in the air.
The ministers found themselves being escorted by gang members, who made sure they were safe and that onlookers quieted down while they prayed.
“While I was marching I was terrified,” she later recalled, but concluded, “this is what God wants me to do.”
She was elected a bishop in 2016 by the Methodists’ regional conference and assigned to lead the Western Pennsylvania Conference. Like the churches she grew up in and later led, the hundreds of churches in the conference range from urban to suburban to rural settings.
She and her husband, the Rev. Raphael Koikoi, live in Mars. He is also a United Methodist minister. He’s been conducting spiritual and social outreaches in the Upper Allegheny Valley and most recently has been appointed pastor of Warren United Methodist Church in the Hill District.
Bishop Moore-Koikoi’s tenure began just as tensions have risen to a near breaking point in the global United Methodist Church over its prohibitions regarding ordaining or marrying LGBT persons. A pending proposal, expected to go before a United Methodist conference next year, would split the denomination amicably. That still leaves each conference and church having to decide which side to join.
Even now, Bishop MooreKoikoi envisions the church to be as big a tent as possible, recalling how her grandparents stayed in the denomination even through decades when it was segregated by race. Now African Americans such as herself are in leadership positions.
“They had hope in the dream that one day this denomination would look like the kingdom of God,” she said.
Similarly, she said: “I support the United Methodist Church. And I want folks to be a part of this denomination, who have made a choice to accept our theology, and our polity. And part of our polity, and part of our theology says that we stay in the messiness of diversity.”
The pandemic brought on a whole new set of challenges. After in-person worship was canceled beginning in March, churches found ways to provide food and other supplies to the needy, to check in on isolated members and to provide worship and fellowship online.
“Folks now more than ever need to feel the presence of Jesus Christ through the church,” she said. “I’m godly proud of the ways in which the pastors and lay leaders in Western Pennsylvania have risen to the occasion in the midst of their own anxiety and fear.”