Pittsburgh Area Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi may have made history Saturday, June 1 at the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference when, perhaps the first time, a bishop commissioned her husband as a Provisional Elder. The bishop was a district superintendent in Baltimore-Washington when she elected to the episcopacy in 2016 and she returned home to commission her husband, Raphael Koikoi Jr.
“I knew that she was going to be a part of the service,” said Koikoi. “But I’m kneeling there, and I feel hands on my shoulder, and there’s something familiar about the hands. And then I hear her voice and all I can think is, ‘What a God moment.’ At a time when the church says we’re splitting up, here you find a husband being blessed by his wife.”
Bishop Moore-Koikoi said it was a wonderful experience to commission her husband, and that she felt the presence of God in a powerful way. As she was commissioning him, she raised her right hand high in the air and her voice crackled with emotion.
“I was receiving from heaven and imparting to my husband,” she said. “That level of intimacy was witnessed by thousands of people was just phenomenal to me.”
Bishop Moore-Koikoi said she asked her husband what he wanted her to be in the moment of commissioning: her wife or a bishop. His response: “Both.”