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When Sen. Barack Obama severed ties with his Chicago church, most political observers saw the move as a way for the candidate to insulate himself from the controversies stirred by its retiring pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. But Trinity United Church of Christ does not have that kind of insulation. According to sources within Trinity, Wright, 66, who began the process of retirement two years ago, is resisting fully relinquishing his duties as senior pastor, hanging on to power in the church he helped build...
...board merely declare Moss "senior pastor-elect" because the younger cleric needed "supervision" - effectively ensuring Wright remains Trinity's preacher-in-chief. Wright's essential argument hinges on a technicality: Moss is an ordained Baptist minister who has yet to be fully ordained in the United Church of Christ, the predominantly white protestant denomination of which the roughly 8,500-member Trinity is the largest congregation...
Officials at the United Church of Christ's national headquarters in Cleveland are aware of the leadership tension at Trinity. However, they say, individual U.C.C. churches are autonomous and the national body can do little to intervene. Barbara Powell, a U.C.C. headquarters spokeswoman, noted that "Trinity didn't follow the normal U.C.C. guidelines for the [pastoral] search" (Wright handpicked Moss, apparently without a formal search committee), but said it was hard to imagine that Moss wouldn't successfully complete the ordination process...
...distorted by the campaign echo chamber - that Obama's aides had exploited Clinton's gaffe when she inappropriately raised the specter of Robert Kennedy's assassination, that Obama hadn't defended Clinton sufficiently after the disgraceful attack by Father Michael Pfleger from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, that the Obama campaign had played too rough in the Democratic Rules Committee battle, which granted the disputed Michigan and Florida delegations half representation. There was, more significantly, the lingering conviction that Obama didn't, and couldn't possibly, represent the women like Margaret Dinock who had been empowered...
...aspirations. After all, Obama's stunning rise to the brink of being the Democratic presidential nominee has cast an unusually harsh light on his place of worship. Trinity's roughly 8,500 members makes it among the largest congregations in Chicago - and the largest in the United Church of Christ, a predominately white protestant denomination. When Wright assumed leadership of Trinity in 1972, it barely had 90 members. He steered it toward Black Liberation Theology, which had emerged in the late-1960s largely in response to the Black Power Movement and the Nation of Islam - both of which questioned whether...