Word: mosses
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Sunday June 1 lacked the fanfare that often marks the official start of a pastor's tenure. In fact, Wright didn't even show up, for reasons church officials have so far declined to explain. From the pulpit on Sunday, Moss didn't address the unseen drama, and later that evening he left for a vacation. "He has inherited this mess," one Moss supporter observes, "and his priority is to help a congregation heal and move forward. Hopefully Wright will let him do that." "The church is splitting," says one Trinity member. "It's sad, because this is a case...
Church officials have been evasive if not obstreperous in clarifying the precise timelines for the transition from Wright to Moss. Trinity's spokeswoman, Donna Hammond-Miller, responded to questions on the matter by e-mailing a reporter the church's already widely circulated response to the Obama family's departure. Pressed further on Sunday morning in between church services, Hammond-Miller said: "Those questions won't be answered at this time." When asked to help clarify points for the sake of accuracy, Hammond-Miller responded, "That's your problem, not mine." When queried by TIME again on Wednesday...
...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...
...several points in recent years, Wright has openly contemplated his retirement. But the rift between Wright and Moss was unexpected. In early 2006, Wright announced that Moss would be his successor. It was an interesting choice, considering Moss's pedigree: His parents were civil rights movement activists married by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his father is a prominent Cleveland minister. Educated at Morehouse and Yale, Moss had since 1997 led an Augusta, Ga., congregation, boosting its membership from 125 to some 2,100. In a January 2007 interview with Trumpet, a Trinity-affiliated magazine, Wright recalled introducing Moss...
...accepting the Trinity job, Moss apparently bypassed an opportunity to assume leadership at his father's church. Moss moved his wife and two children to Chicago, where he was to serve as an associate pastor at Trinity during the two-year transition. By most accounts, Moss quickly energized Trinity, particularly with his easy, unself-conscious references from the pulpit to both hip-hop culture and deep biblical scholarship. However, in an August 2007 Cleveland Plain Dealer article, Moss seemed to foreshadow his troubles in Trinity. The generation gap plaguing such institutions, Moss said, is "a gap of language, values...