Mother Tongue
Rev. Mihee Kim-Kort

A storyteller and minister, Mihee Kim-Kort reflects on how learning her mother tongue (Korean) opened up new ways of understanding God, culture, and her own vocation.

Mihee Kim-Kort is an ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister and serves as co-pastor with her spouse of First Presbyterian Church in Annapolis, MD. She is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Indiana University with degrees in divinity and theology from Princeton Theological Seminary and English Literature and Religious Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder. She juggles various other jobs including raising three children, itinerant preaching and speaking, writing, hanging out with young people, struggling with being an Enneagram 7, and trying to maintain some semblance of sanity. 


Born in Seoul, Korea, she and her parents immigrated here shortly after her birth. Settling in Colorado, she was baptized in a Methodist church before her family joined the local Korean Presbyterian (PCUSA) church. It was here that she learned the faith from an African American man, who was a respected Elder and teacher in the church, and from a little old lady that was the wife of the former pastor of the white Presbyterian congregation that shared the building with the church.


She says:  "In all times, the Church, whether the local church or the seminary, gives me hope. I don't understand it most days, this hope, how it comes from something that seems so fallible and imperfect, but I do know in my bones and cells that it is because God is present there in the places that I least expect, and always, in those places that are the most human. It’s these places and people that teach me to keep hoping, keep looking, and keep showing up, and that always stays with me."   

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