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The Rev. Marta Pumroy-Cordero and the Rev. Dr. Kristopher D. Schondelmeyer are the first to officially announce they’ll stand as a team for Co-Moderators of the 227th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which will be held online and in person in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, June 22-July 2. The election is scheduled for the Assembly’s final day.
Pumroy-Cordero is border ministry coordinator for the Tres Rios Border Foundation in Tres Rios Presbytery. Schondelmeyer is pastor and head of staff at First Presbyterian Church of Davenport, Iowa, and moderator of the Presbytery of East Iowa. Both have been endorsed in their call to stand by their respective presbyteries.
“Our call emerges from the lived reality of our ministries: churches and communities carrying wounds of division, fear, and exhaustion, yet overflowing with creativity, compassion, and courageous hope,” the two wrote in a letter announcing their intention to stand. “Rooted in the vision of Revelation 22, we believe the church in this time is being invited to ‘Be the Leaves’ for the healing and flourishing of every congregation and community we are called to serve.”
While Pumroy-Cordero is a recently-ordained pastor, Schondelmeyer’s sense of call goes back to high school, when he became an inquirer. While at a youth conference, a pastor sexually assaulted him. “It took me a decade to come to terms with that,” he told Presbyterian News Service. “I have since used that experience to encourage the church to create safe and sacred space.”
He eventually completed doctoral degree studies related to designing a compassion-based framework for moderating civil discourse at the intersection of religion and public policy. “It’s a framework to be able to talk to each other when we vehemently disagree,” he said. “It’s a key challenge facing the church today.”
While he was working on his doctoral degree, Schondelmeyer learned about listening sessions that Pumroy-Cordero was holding as a co-moderator of the PC(USA)’s Special Committee on Racism, Truth and Reconciliation. “She said a profound thing,” he recalled. “As she is listening to people, one thing she tries to do is listen to the heart of the person. … What she was describing is empathetic listening, listening to the feelings behind what people are saying.”
Before attending seminary and her ordination as a teaching elder, Pumroy-Cordero taught middle school students for 20 years — half of those years in public schools and half in Catholic schools. “God has been sending me to all sorts of places,” she said.
She grew up in Iowa, completed college, accepted a teaching position in Houston and met and married a man. They had a daughter and then divorced. Pumroy-Cordero returned to Iowa, where First Presbyterian Church of Marion “opened itself to me,” she said. “The pastoral care I was given meant the world to me.” Church members “loved having a baby around,” and she started working with the church’s high school students. “I was nurtured by the church,” she said. “I am the type of leader who feels called to serve, especially when others are pushing me.” She remarried in August 2025.
Pumroy-Cordero explained the Tres Rios Border Foundation makes presentations about “what’s going on at the border,” hosts three-day encounters and gives “direct support to areas with the most need.” Now that the U.S. asylum process has ground to a halt, the work has shifted, she said. “People’s needs are now transitional, like school uniforms,” she said. “We also do vigils outside the courthouse weekly.”
“We are not on team red or team blue,” she said. “We are on team love your neighbor and love God and meet people’s needs wherever you can.”
“Our paths kept crossing,” Schondelmeyer said. After the 2024 presidential election, “I went to bed that night with this prophetic sense of what [the results] would mean for vulnerable people, including migrants and immigrants, people of color and LGBTQIA+ people.”
That night, he dreamed that he and Pumroy-Cordero “were standing together doing something. I don’t know what it was, but she came to my mind. We were standing to listen to the heart of God’s people.” He prayed about the dream and spoke to his wife as well as his pastoral counselor over the next two months “before I got the courage to call Marta.”
“I said, ‘please tell me if I am way off base. Are you having any sense of call?’” he asked her. She told him it was interesting, that she’d been feeling a sense of call as well.
Schondelmeyer said Rev. 22:2, particularly John’s vision that “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations,” had for him been an important Bible verse for many years. “Imagine our shock when we learned the PC(USA) had chosen that scripture” for the upcoming Assembly, he said.
“Whether we are called, that’s up to commissioners,” he said.
Asked to name significant areas where they might focus their work if they’re elected at the General Assembly, Pumroy-Cordero cited churches “operating in survival mode” when “what they’re doing can lead to flourishing rather than the idea we are dying.”
“Survival isn’t the keeping of our buildings. It’s how we connect with our communities,” she said. “I am in tiny churches where people are finding life and hope, and that’s what we need to hold onto.”
Schondelmeyer’s passion “is rooted in advocacy and justice, about what it means to show up for vulnerable people and to engage with people we find difficult to engage with,” he said. “With the rise of Christian nationalism and bigotry and hatred, it’s important for the church to speak with clarity about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ and to be a Matthew 25 church.”
“An important mission of Co-Moderators is to communicate how the work of the Assembly can serve ministry at the local level,” he said. “It’s the work of local congregations, ruling elders and deacons, the people who show up to hand out clothes at the clothes closet. If we can help mid councils and congregations see the national church has resources, that will be enough.”
“It speaks volumes when you know the messiness and you still want to participate [at the General Assembly level],” Pumroy-Cordero said. “You want people to participate and grow this denomination. There is something good about knowing what we are doing right and where we can grow. We have experienced that and continue to love and serve this church.”
