MILWAUKEE — Several hundred people, including colleagues, family, current and former General Assembly moderators, staff of the PC(USA) and friends, gathered in Milwaukee for a dinner on June 29 to honor Diane Givens Moffett and her three decades of ministry. Moffett, the former Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) executive director, said she is not retiring and is discerning her next call.
Moffett led the PMA for six years before it was unified with the Office of the General Assembly to form Presbyterian Life & Witness (PL&W) in 2025. She addressed the change in her remarks to those gathered for dinner: “I know that we are challenged, and I know that restructuring is hard,” she said. “I want to recognize all those who have been impacted by that restructuring.” She added, “God is working in it all.”
The dinner was emceed by Moffett’s daughter, Eustacia Moffett Marshall, founding pastor of New River Presbyterian Church in West Philadelphia. Speakers included Stated Clerk and Executive Director Jihyun Oh, GA226 and GA227 co-Moderators Tony Larson and CeCe Armstrong, Unification Commission co-Moderators Cristi Scott Ligon and Felipe Martínez, and PL&W senior director Corey Schlosser-Hall.
Moffett was ordained in 1987, 13 years after Katie Cannon became the first Black woman ordained as a teaching elder in the denomination and 31 years after the denomination ordained the first woman pastor, Margaret Towner. Marshall told the room her mother belongs to “the first generation of Black women who answered a call to word and sacrament,” at a time when the church had not yet made room for her.
GA226 and GA227 co-Moderator CeCe Armstrong called Moffett “always uplifting, never tiring” and said she considers her an honorary auntie — a designation, she said, that carries particular weight in Black families. “Auntie got it all,” Armstrong said.
Michelle Hwang and Shannan Vance-Ocampo, who both served as co-chairs of the PMA board during Moffett’s tenure, credited her with implementing the Matthew 25 initiative — adopted by the 2016 General Assembly to focus the denomination on dismantling structural racism, eradicating systemic poverty and building congregational vitality — and building it into a sustained movement. Hwang said Moffett “led not from a place of certainty, but from a place of conviction.” Vance-Ocampo called her leadership “a master class.”
SanDawna Ashley, synod leader for the Synod of the Northeast and a friend of Moffett’s for more than 30 years, closed her remarks with a line she said summed up Moffett’s ministry: “People may forget what you said, and people may forget what you do, but people will never forget the way you make them feel.”
In her response to those gathered, Moffett said she has launched a consulting practice, Blazing Leadership, and works as a trained executive coach focused on executive and church leaders while she discerns what comes next.
“I’m not retired,” she said. “I am prayerfully saying where my next move will be.”
As she stirred the crowd to stand and clap, she shouted, “We’re called … to share the light, to speak truth to power, to be courageous, to have conviction, to know how to call those things that are not as though they were, to speak in a way that people can see a new reality is possible with all of God’s people coming together with love and justice.”
Moffett spoke of her hope that PL&W will carry forward the work she and others continued amid the restructuring that eliminated the agency she led.
