Obama Welcomes Christian leaders to White House for Easter Prayer Breakfast
Pastor Joel C. Hunter offered the opening prayer at the fifth annual Easter Prayer Breakfast at the White House.
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Orlando Sentinel: Interfaith prayer service honors Joel Hunter
Interfaith prayer service honors Joel Hunter
One by one, members of different faiths and beliefs stepped forward Tuesday night to light candles in remembrance of loved ones they had lost.
In the procession of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, Northland Church Pastor Joel Hunter and his wife Becky lit a candle for their son, Isaac Hunter.
In the end, some 70 candles flickered in a small sanctuary of the St. James Catholic Cathedral in downtown Orlando during the hour-long Interfaith Prayer Service for Peace.
"Many of us faced losses this past year or unresolved losses," said Rev. Bryan Fulwider, a Congregational minister. "We are strengthened, we are healed, by standing together, walking together, being together."
Leaders of the major religions as well as representatives of the Sikh, Unitarian and Baha'i faiths, also said prayers.
The service was both an act of empathy for all who lost friends and relatives and a public show of support for Hunter, whose son died by suicide in December.
"This is a service designed to bring comfort to all that have had losses, but it's also a collective embrace of him and his family for their loss of Isaac," said Pastor James Coffin, executive director of the Interfaith Council of Central Florida.
Coffin said the idea of focusing on personal peace following a private tragedy came from Orlando Catholic Diocese Bishop John Noonan, who started the annual interfaith prayer service about three years ago.
Hunter is widely respected within the faith community for his commitment to building relationships with leaders of different religions.
One of his longest friendships is with Imam Muhammad Musri, president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida.
"He is an evangelical leader who got a lot of flak for going out and meeting with Muslims and other communities," said Musri, who sat beside Hunter.
"The least we can do is be with him and lift up his spirit."
That willingness to join in with other religions might have cost Hunter friends among evangelicals, but his commitment to interfaith cooperation is the natural extension of his Christian faith, said Fulwider, president of Building US, a nonprofit diversity consulting and training organization.
"He has become a friend to those in other faith communities because this is who Jesus calls him to be," Fulwider said.
"He is not a person who cuts off relations because you have a difference of understanding or belief or thoughts. To me that is the heart of the Christian gospel."
jkunerth@tribune.com or 407-420-5392.
Barack Obama’s Church Attendance: An Interview with Dr. Gary Smith
Editor’s note: The “V&V Q&A” is an e-publication from The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. In this latest edition, Dr. Paul Kengor, the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values, interviews Dr. Gary Scott Smith, Grove City College professor and author of the acclaimed, Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush, published by Oxford University Press.
Kengor: Dr. Smith, you are one of the country’s leading experts on faith and the presidency. Reporters frequently come to you for comment. In that spirit, the New York Times interviewed you last week on the notable fact that President Obama didn’t attend religious services this past Christmas. That’s quite unusual for a president, isn’t it?
Smith: Yes, it is.
Kengor: Do you know of any other president skipping religious services at Christmas?
Smith: Some probably did not attend religious services at Christmas, but I do not know of any specifically. The media was not omnipresent before the 1960s, so it was easier for presidents’ non-attendance to go unnoticed. However, most presidents have attended church faithfully while in office, including George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. Others who claimed to have a strong Christian faith but attended infrequently while president include Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Ronald Reagan. Obama did issue a Christmas message, as he has done every year as president, in which he encouraged Americans to serve others. “For families like ours,” he declared, “that service is a chance to celebrate the birth of Christ and live out what He taught us—to love our neighbors as we would ourselves; to feed the hungry and look after the sick; to be our brother’s keeper.” Obama has used this latter phrase more than 60 times in his presidential addresses and proclamations.
Kengor: Yes, he uses that phrase constantly. Did President Obama give a rationale for not attending church this Christmas? What’s the explanation?
Smith: He apparently has not offered an explanation for not attending Christmas services. He did vacation in Hawaii for five days where he spent time with his family, played golf three times, attended a basketball game, and visited a military base. On Christmas Eve, the president called U.S. armed forces members who are stationed around the globe to wish them a Merry Christmas.
Kengor: Moving away from this Christmas example, what about Obama’s attendance at church generally? The New York Times quotes an “unofficial White House historian” who calculates that Obama has attended church 18 times during his nearly five years in the White House, while his predecessor, George W. Bush, attended 120 times during his eight years in office. Is Obama a member of a church?
Smith: Obama does not currently belong to any congregation. After attending St. John’s Episcopal Church and 19th Street Baptist Church in Washington a few times, he decided instead to worship primarily at the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David. However, he rarely spends weekends at Camp David.
Kengor: Does Obama have a formal religious affiliation? He’s no longer with the denomination that housed Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church, is he?
Smith: Since ending his relationship with Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ Church in Chicago during the 2008 campaign, Obama has not joined a church.
Kengor: Has Obama explained his lack of church attendance? You and I both have written on President Ronald Reagan’s faith. Reagan stopped attending church regularly after the assassination attempt, though (to my knowledge) he always attended Christmas and Easter services. Reagan gave a host of reasons for his infrequent attendance as president. (He returned to church regularly again after the presidency.) Has Obama addressed this? Reagan was constantly asked to address it, and did.
Smith: Obama has seldom commented on why he rarely attends church. His basic explanation is that he dislikes being on display when he worships (many people have snapped pictures of him with their cell phones and some pastors have spoken directly to him).
Kengor: In the Times article, you’re quoted as saying, “I would argue that Obama’s faith has been one of the most misunderstood of any president.” What do you mean by that?
Smith: From 2008 until now, many Americans (as high as 20 percent in some polls) have identified Obama as a Muslim despite the controversy over his membership in Wright’s church and his many professions of Christian faith. Because of his connection with Wright, others have labeled him an advocate of black liberation theology. Many political and religious conservatives complain that Obama’s claim to be a Christian is disingenuous and entirely politically motivated. Obama has been labeled “the most explicitly Christian president in American history” by historian John Fea and America’s “Most Biblically Hostile” president by evangelical author and activist David Barton. Many conservative Christian books and websites argue that Obama is trying to destroy the nation’s Christian heritage and cannot possibly be a Christian because of his stances on abortion, gay marriage, and government redistribution of wealth. On the other hand, liberal Protestants and Catholics and some evangelicals praise Obama’s concern for aiding the marginalized, oppressed, and poor. Some younger evangelicals support Obama because of his commitment to social-justice issues like overcoming racism, combating poverty, and tackling global issues like AIDS.
Kengor: As you note, conservatives who don’t like Obama argue that his faith is not genuine, while liberals who do like Obama argue otherwise. Others take a position somewhere in between. What’s your take?
Smith: I believe that Obama’s faith is genuine. He has testified to it many times on both the campaign trail, at National Prayer Breakfasts, and in other settings. Obama has repeatedly declared that Jesus is his savior and Lord and that he bases his life on Christ’s teachings. He has frequently affirmed his belief in Christ’s divinity, bodily resurrection, and atoning death on the cross. Obama insists that he prays and reads the Bible regularly. He meets and prays regularly with ministers of various denominations and theological traditions. Evangelical pastor Joel Hunter, Obama’s closest spiritual mentor, asserts that the president is “born again” and “has trusted in Jesus Christ with his whole heart.”
Obama’s faith is difficult to decipher, however, because various streams—the African-American church, the Social Gospel movement, mainline Protestantism, and evangelicalism—have all shaped it. On the other hand, as Stephen Mansfield contends, Obama’s “big-tent approach” to religion and spirituality “is perfectly in step with the country he now leads.” Like the vast majority of Americans, he believes that many paths lead to God and that all religions contain fundamentals truths. Similarly, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asserts that Obama embodies America’s “uncentered spiritual landscape” because like 44 percent of Americans, the president switched his religion as an adult, and because he is part of one of America’s fastest-growing religious constituencies—the “unchurched Christian” bloc.
Kengor: Dr. Smith, thanks for your time. I strongly encourage readers to pick up a copy of your outstanding book on faith and the presidency.
Smith: My pleasure.
Dr. Gary Scott Smith chairs the history department at Grove City College and is a fellow for faith and the presidency with The Center for Vision & Values. He is the author of “Faith and the Presidency From George Washington to George W. Bush” (Oxford University Press, 2009) and “Heaven in the American Imagination” (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Son of “Orlando’s Favorite Pastor” Named “Orlando's Best Eye Surgeon”
Father and son honored by readers of Orlando Business Journal and Orlando magazine.
ORLANDO, Fla. (OCT. 18, 2013) — Like father like son … readers of Orlando Business Journal have named the son and namesake of nationally known pastor Rev. Joel C. Hunter as “.” Rev. Hunter was recently honored as “Orlando’s Favorite Pastor” by Orlando magazine.
Joel Hunter, M.D. opened the area’s most-advanced LASIK facility back in 2010 at the RDV Sportsplex—offering state-of-the art, bladeless laser vision correction and laser cataract surgery. This year, Hunter Vision expanded its services to include general eye care.
As a distinguished fellow at the most prestigious refractive surgery center in the world, Dr. Hunter had his choice of jobs, but chose instead to create a new and better kind of medical practice in his hometown of Orlando.
Using a new generation of diagnostic and surgical equipment, Dr. Hunter is able to perform some of the finest and most-precise vision correction procedures in the field, including 3D LASIK and laser cataract surgery—a procedure he is helping to pioneer at Hunter Vision.
Dr. Hunter concludes, “My family has been grateful to serve the central Florida community for nearly 30 years. Hunter Vision is committed to continuing that tradition.”
MegaChange: 10 Trends Reshaping the American Megachurch
Today, megachurches (with attendance of 2,000 or more) are not only growing, they are growing in certain notable ways. To start, they are getting younger and more ethnically diverse, and they’re attracting more singles.
Not only are they growing numerically, but the combined number of them in America is growing as well; from 150 in 1980, 350 in 1990, 600 in 2000 and about 1,600 today. Fifty percent of churchgoers attend one, though megachurches account for only 10 percent of American congregations. The latest research by The Hartford Institute and Leadership Network reports that “the stated average attendance for these churches grew from 2,604 in 2005 to 3,597 in 2010.” Big churches are getting even bigger.
Fifteen years ago, business expert Peter Drucker referred in Forbes magazine to the rise in the megachurch movement as “the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last 30 years.” Of course, the movement has grown significantly since he wrote those words.
In their book Beyond Megachurch Myths, Scott Thumma and Dave Travis write that “megachurches, their practices and their leaders are the most influential contemporary dynamic in American religion.” This influence has now superseded that of denominations, seminaries and religious publishing, they say. These older and established institutions are, no doubt, wrestling with these new realities.
Whether or not these claims are overstated, the influence of megachurches undoubtedly continues to grow. Among the evangelical church world today, these megachurches are the prime influencers of leadership development, worship styles and ministry innovation. The pastors who lead them are writing the books most pastors are reading and keynoting the conferences most of them are attending.
While megachurches continue to experience mega-growth, the question emerges: How are they adapting as the culture changes and the megachurch movement matures? What are the megatrends?
1. Timothys on the Rise
In the 1970s and ‘80s in America, with the number of large churches much smaller than today, big church pulpits were even more coveted and selectively filled. Denominations tended to reserve those opportunities for their most “seasoned” pastors—those who were older and had “paid their dues” in ministry.
That trend has changed. The average age of lead pastors in megachurches is getting younger. Today, 25 megachurch pastors range in age from 30 to 37. As of last year, the average age of the lead pastor at the largest 100 churches in America was 47.
Along with this growing number of Timothys has come aging Pauls who are recognizing that the thing their congregation may need the most is for them to make room for younger leaders.
At last year’s general council of the Assemblies of God in Orlando, Fla., J. Don George (long-time megachurch pastor of Irving, Texas’, Calvary Church) talked about making a place for Timothys. When he faced an 18-year-long “plateau” of 3,000 attendees, George said, “God showed me that my church was too old. When I looked in the mirror, I knew it was true. So I told God I would spend the rest of my life making a place for young leaders to emerge.” Today the church is replete with numerous NextGen leaders. Calvary Church is much younger on average and running more than 9,000 in attendance.
2. A Spiritual Formation Reformation
Megachurches are often accused by outsiders of being shallow. Some say: “It’s true they are big, but they are 1,000 miles wide and about one inch deep!” The implication is that while sizeable, megachurches are just not that spiritual.
But, there are clear signs of megachurches digging deeper. Joel Hunter, pastor of Orlando, Fla., megachurch Northland, A Church Distributed, says, “It is slowly sinking in to many megachurches that we live in a culture similar to first century Christianity, where the gospel was advanced in a non-Christian, often hostile environment by making disciples within relational networks.” Spiritual growth is happening in “new” ways, and many megachurches are finding ways to nurture it.
The approaches are moving away from podiums and classrooms to cafés and living rooms. According to Hunter, “The modern institutional paradigm in the West is waning in favor of simpler generic gospel evangelism and discipleship groups.” Programs are out; mentoring is in.
3. The Growing Ethnic Church
Time magazine recently featured a cover story that cited such a significant growth in the influence of Latino evangelicals that it titled the story, “The Latino Reformation: Inside the New Hispanic Church Transforming Religion in America.” The article featured a story on a Latino megachurch in Chicago, New Life Covenant Church, which in 2000 had just 100 members and today has more than 17,000, making it the largest Assemblies of God church in the country.
Wilfredo “Choco” De Jesús, the pastor of New Life Covenant Church, succeeded his Spanish-speaking father-in-law 14 years ago.
De Jesús sees one of his decisions as strategic to the church’s growth: "We started doing English services to reach third-generation Hispanics who love their culture, but prefer to hear a sermon in English. I started doing that, and the church started growing."
Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren also saw an opportunity in the Latino emergence several years ago. In the last 10 years he has helped start 35 Spanish-speaking congregations throughout Orange County, Calif., where Saddleback is based.
Black megachurches similarly are on the rise in the United States. In her book The Black Megachurch: Theology, Gender and the Politics of Public Engagement, Tamelyn Tucker-Worgs describes her early encounters with black churches in the D.C. area: “I was simply amazed by the numbers of extremely large black churches that dotted D.C. and its surrounding suburbs. These churches were different from those I had attended back home. … They seemed to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they seemed to have ‘ministries’ that fulfilled every need one could possibly imagine. … The ministers [preach on] relevant topics from one’s love life to one’s pocketbook. … I was surprised to find that the congregations consisted of young people—young families and single people.”
Twenty years ago the majority of black churches were in urban settings. Today, they are just as frequently found in suburban ones.
4. A Team Culture
Collaboration has become the skill of the age. Many megachurches are no longer simply trying to get people within the church to work together in teams. Now they’re developing what I call teaming cultures.
Craig Groeschel of LifeChurch.tv sees teaming culture as “essential to everything we do to fulfill our mission.”
But do the ingredients of a great ministry team change as churches grow? Are smaller church teams different than megachurch ones? Although LifeChurch.tv has grown from a handful to some 30,000 attendees today, Groeschel says, “The principles of team don’t change based on the size. The only difference now is we are one big team [made up of] many smaller teams.”
Paid megachurch teams today are leaner than they were 10 years ago. And since the recession of 2008, they have learned to accomplish more with less by assigning multiple roles and more efficiently utilizing volunteer teams.
5. Celebrity Pastor or Celebrating the Faithful?
Like many megachurch critics, Wilmer MacNair says in his book, Unraveling the Megachurch: True Faith or False Promises? “The megachurch features a regal pastor who is the church’s head minister and is totally in charge and in control.” However, research shows that the average megachurch pastor, although strong in his leadership gifts, has surrounded himself with a strong team of elders and staff members.
While leading so many people might make celebrity status inevitable, many megachurch pastors are moving the spotlight away from themselves and onto their church’s individual members—often through stories of faith and service, creatively and beautifully told with video and other media. These stories are proving powerfully effective as focal points for nurturing faithfulness and engagement in the entire congregation.
6. Leveraging Church Resources for Social Transformation
Today, many megachurch pastors are discovering the power of helping hundreds as their churches put systems in place to help create social transformation. One example is the Los Angeles Dream Center, affiliated with Angelus Temple and led by Matthew Barnett.
The L.A. Dream Center is housed in the abandoned 15-story, 400,000-square-foot Queen of Angels Hospital building. There are currently over 850 residents living in the facility, people with various life needs and of those who minister to them.
“God is raising up a younger generation of churches that recognize that Sunday is not the destination point,” Barnett says. “It is the launching point to get the church mobilized Monday through Friday.
“Pastors used to believe that what they really needed to succeed was a bigger building than other churches. Now they are rediscovering what a shallow view this was and that the real ministry is among the needs of the people of their communities.”
The Dream Center strategy of holistic ministry has been replicated across the country many times over. Some 7,000 leaders each year come to the Dream Center in L.A. to observe, volunteer and learn. As a result, there are now 200 Dream Centers across the country.
“We are finding out just how simple it can be to live out the gospel,” Barnett says. “We are moving from social justice to social transformation. Social justice is awareness; social transformation is doing something about it.”
7. The Quest for Better Metrics
“We are so over counting ‘nickels and noses,’” says Northland’s Joel Hunter. “Church attendance and finances tell little of how many in the congregation are actually living as disciples and making other disciples on a weekly basis. We are coming up with better surveys like: How many of us belong to a spiritual small group? How many of us have a ministry or area of service for Christ? How many of us have brought someone else to Jesus?"
New technologies are making it easier to examine spiritual fruit in the lives of believers. They are revising how churches lead and serve their members and how they evaluate their level of effectiveness—no longer just from year to year, but from day to day.
“The win is being redefined,” says Ben Cachiaras, pastor of Mountain Christian Church in Joppa, Md. “Attendance, buildings and cash are still worth counting, but now you hear churches getting excited about the changes they feel called to make in their community, as neighborhoods and cities are transformed by the gospel. …These are new metrics.”
8. The Big Church Search for Small Church Intimacy
One of the myths about megachurches is that they are generally distant, aloof, political and impersonal. This is usually true only for those who loosely affiliate with the church, slipping in and out of worship services.
Still, for a big church to become truly strong, it needs to develop lots of smaller “churches” within it, which is why 82 percent say small groups are now essential to their spiritual formation strategies. And many are restructuring to create smaller church experiences within the context of large. This is the case at National Community Church in Washington, D.C. This megachurch, pastored by best-selling author Mark Batterson, consists of six multisite congregations that average about 350 attendees per worship service.
Stewardship of facilities is becoming more desirous, while large buildings occupied for only a few hours a week are becoming old school. This means more churches are becoming multisite. In fact, half of all megachurches today are multisite, and another 20 percent are considering it. Multisite megachurches have also grown faster than single-site megachurches over the past five years.
9. The New Collaborations
Megachurches have begun to form mega-collaborations. While churches have traditionally affiliated along denominational and geographical lines, today more megachurches are affiliating via other networks, and along lines of affinity. Connection points include various summits held across the nation and globally among pastors of larger congregations for interaction, support, fellowship and strategic thinking.
Northland, for instance, has joined an association with other church-based and parachurch organizations, like Campus Crusade for Christ, to plant 5 million churches in the next 10 years. Other groups are partnering around causes like human trafficking, poverty and the need for water wells in developing countries.
Another collaborative trend of the past 10 years is churches affiliating with megachurches. In some cases this is a loose affiliation, like Willow Creek Association, Saddleback’s Purpose Driven Network or LifeChurch.tv. In others, it is a full-fledged incorporation and merger with the megachurch. 10. The Shifting Shape of the Virtual Church
LifeChurch.tv has long been noted for its innovative use of technology. The YouVersion Bible app it created has surpassed 100 million downloads. And you can join the LifeChurch.tv worship experience anywhere via laptop or desktop computer, tablet or mobile phone. Instead of the church you go to, it’s the church that comes to you.
Today LifeChurch.tv literally has thousands of churches in many different languages doing church online, and some 4,000 churches have signed up to use its free Church Online Platform (ChurchOnlinePlatform.com) to host their services. Pastor and Innovation Leader Bobby Gruenewald of LifeChurch.tv notes the growth in the connected church: “Things have definitely changed from when we started. We continue to be passionate about doing ministry in this context and have hundreds of volunteers who invest themselves each week in making it possible. It is a vibrant ministry that is reaching many people who may not have otherwise heard the gospel or been able to connect with a physical church. We see online church as very much a part of our future and believe it is a continuing trend in the global church.”
Also passionate about online ministry, Northland was the first local church to do international concurrent worship in the 1990s via video, at that time connecting Orlando and the Republic of Namibia, in Africa. The church continues to engage worship internationally and concurrently every weekend. However, according to Hunter, “We are seeing now that unless we can plant actual churches in all these sites, the worship we do together will be merely a common experience and not a missional advancement.” Hunter goes on to explain that such “building” is not about physical structures but small groups of people who care for each other spiritually and serve their communities together.
One momentous event in Northland’s concurrent worship model occurred the weekend after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At that time, one of the churches worshipping with Northland via video was located in Cairo, Egypt. Hunter recalls, “I will never forget the bond created by their [real time] prayers and from our hearing directly from their pastor that our Middle Eastern family was with us in spirit and heart.”
SOURCE: Robert Crosby, Outreach Magazine
Orlando Sentinel: Dr. Joel C. Hunter Is a "Different Breed of Evangelical"
The paper reports: "Hunter has established himself as a different breed of evangelical. He works with leaders from other faiths. He advocates for environmental stewardship, help for the poor and assistance during natural disasters rather than focusing on abortion and gay marriage. His church, Northland, a Church Distributed, plays a prominent role in most every issue confronting Central Florida from the shooting of Trayvon Martin to homeless schoolchildren. Hunter gained national prominence by becoming the spiritual adviser to President Barack Obama but asserts his leadership locally by providing a reasoned, compassionate voice that resonates across religious, economic and racial lines." View the Sentinel's complete list of "Orlando's Power Brokers."
White House Names New Faith-Based Office Director
The White House announced today President Obama's appointment of Melissa Rogers to serve as the new director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and special assistant to the president.
In this capacity, Rogers will provide President Obama with spiritual support and guidance, and assist the Administration in its efforts to collaborate with faith-based and nonprofit organizations throughout the country.
Rogers previously chaired the president's Inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. In this capacity, Rogers collaborated with members of the Council to adopt consensus recommendations regarding ways in which the federal government could strengthen its partnerships with religious and secular nonprofit organizations that serve people in need.
Joel Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed in Florida and who was a member of President Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, said of Rogers, "She worked diligently [as Council chair] to find common ground. Melissa has a gift for crafting the kind of language that maintains clear boundaries but promotes cooperation."
He continued, "I may differ with Rogers on certain policy and legal issues but I have faith that she will always listen to a variety of views and make sure they are accurately conveyed.
"Melissa is an honest broker, a consensus-builder, and a problem-solver, and someone who believes that government should be actively engaged with civil society, including religious institutions and individuals, to promote the common good. I look forward to her service in the White House."
In 2010, Obama issued an executive order that embraced the council's recommendations, and one of Rogers' tasks will be to implement that order across a range of federally funded programs.
Rogers, who is known for reaching across ideological, political and religious lines to gain consensus on collaborative projects to promote the common good, recently led a common ground project that resulted in the publication of Religious Expression in American Public Life: A Joint Statement of Current Law.
This consensus statement was drafted by a diverse group of religious and civil liberties leaders on the state of current law: signatories included staff from Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice to former staff of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Rogers also collaborated with religious and political leaders in a project called Come Let Us Reason, in which a group of Christian evangelicals and political progressives sought and found important common ground on issues, such as nondiscrimination, ending torture, reducing the number of abortions, and reforming our immigration system.
In February, Obama announced Joshua DuBois' departure as head of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, a position he held since 2009.
During his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., Obama thanked DuBois for his stewardship and service to him during the past four years. "This morning, I want to publicly thank Joshua for all that he's done, and I know that everybody joins me in wishing him all the best in his future endeavors – including getting married," Obama said.
The president also thanked the 30-year-old aide for sending him a daily devotional every morning via email, "a snippet of Scripture for me to reflect on." Obama added that, "it has meant the world to me."
DuBois, who's credited with helping the Democrats establish a progressive faith movement, was 26 when he started working for the Obama presidential campaign. He now teaches at New York University and plans to author a book of devotionals for leaders, based on the ones he sent the president each day.
The Pentecostal minister sparked controversy last year when he defended the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that would require all insurance companies to supply contraceptives and abortifacients, even to employees who work for religious institutions and organizations that are opposed to both.
However, he was also a staunch defender of Pastor Louie Giglio, who was scheduled to deliver the benediction at Obama's inauguration, but whose appearance was canceled by the Inauguration Committee after a decade old sermon delivered by the pastor surfaced, in which he stated the biblical view of homosexuality.
Prior to working for Obama as a senate aide and then the religious affairs director for the Obama campaign, DuBois worked for Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), was a fellow for former Congressman Charles Holt (D-N.J.), and served as an associate pastor for a small Pentecostal church in Massachusetts.
DuBois said in a statement regarding his successor, "I have known Melissa Rogers for years, as chair of President Obama's faith-based advisory council, as one of the nation's leading experts on religion and public life, and as a close and dear friend. There is no better person to lead the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and bring the federal government into deeper, effective and constitutional partnership with faith-based and other nonprofit groups around the country."
The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (formerly the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) was established in 2001 by former President George W. Bush, who used his first executive order to create the initiative, which was established with the aim of increasing government-funded social service grants to faith-based organizations that are improving the lives of those who live in their communities.
By Melissa Barnhart, Christian Post. Find this article at: http://www.christianpost.com/news/white-house-names-new-faith-based-office-director-91781/
White House Director of Faith-Based Office Is Leaving His Post
President Obama announced on Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington that Joshua DuBois, the young pastor he appointed four years ago to lead the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, would step down on Friday.
Mr. DuBois played a central role when Mr. Obama was making his first run for the presidency, cultivating relationships on his behalf with religious leaders of many faiths. Mr. DuBois, 30, has also served as an unofficial in-house pastor to Mr. Obama, sending the president an e-mail each morning with Bible passages intended to prompt reflection or prayer.
At the prayer breakfast, the president called Mr. DuBois a “close friend of mine and yours” who “has been at my side — in work and in prayer — for years now.”
He continued, “Every morning he sends me via e-mail a daily meditation — a snippet of Scripture for me to reflect on. And it has meant the world to me. And despite my pleas, tomorrow will be his last day in the White House.”
The faith-based office was started by President George W. Bush at the beginning of his first term, which proved contentious because many critics said the office and its actions often violated the constitutional separation of church and state. But Mr. Obama preserved the office and appointed advisory councils that represented a broad range of religious leaders, including conservative evangelicals and openly gay ministers.
Mr. DuBois, a black Pentecostal minister, steered the office toward engaging religious leaders to address broad social goals like reducing unwanted pregnancies, helping people cope with the economic downturn, encouraging fathers to take responsibility for their children and improving child and maternal health.
Some of the most prickly First Amendment issues facing the faith-based office were never resolved under Mr. DuBois’s tenure, most notably the question of whether religious organizations can receive government funding and still discriminate in hiring. The office last year released a report that did not propose definitive policies.
A White House official said that Mr. DuBois planned to teach at New York University, and would create an organization to help government, nonprofit and private institutions develop partnerships with religious groups to solve social problems. He will work with Michael Wear, his former assistant and the director of faith outreach for Mr. Obama’s second presidential campaign.
With Mr. Obama’s blessing, Mr. DuBois will also write a book of devotionals for leaders, based on those he sent to the president.
The Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the senior pastor of Northland, a network of churches based in Longwood, Fla., said that he observed significant changes in the faith-based office after Mr. Obama inherited it from Mr. Bush.
“Before it was basically about which organizations got funded,” said Mr. Hunter, who served on the first faith-based advisory council appointed by Mr. Obama. He said that Mr. DuBois focused on connecting religious leaders with policy makers, adding, “What has resulted is this accessibility to policy conversations by faith communities that really wasn’t there before.”
But the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who served on a task force at the faith-based office, said that Mr. DuBois’s tenure was “a lost opportunity to fix real constitutional problems,” such as government financing of religious organizations that discriminate in hiring or that serve the public in overtly religious settings.
FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/us/politics/white-house-director-of-faith-based-initiatives-will-step-down.html?_r=1&
Rev. Joel Hunter: Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast Message Marks a Shift
President Obama struck a humble tone at the National Prayer Breakfast, the Rev. Joel Hunter said on Thursday [Feb. 7, 2013]. The senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed said the President spoke less of his own faith as he has in the past and more about the role of humility in leadership. “We must keep that same humility that Dr. King and Lincoln and Washington and all our great leaders understood is at the core of true leadership,” Obama said in his speech. The president began his address by announcing that his head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Joshua DuBois, will leave his position on Friday. Ben Carson, a pediatric surgeon at Johns Hopkins University and a Seventh Day Adventist, was the keynote speaker at the breakfast.
Video from Odyssey Networks.
WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s use of Scripture has elements of Lincoln, King
President Obama will publicly take the oath of office with Bibles once owned by his political heroes, Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One Bible was well read, but cited cautiously. The other granted scriptural sanction to the civil rights movement.
When Obama lifts his hands from the Bibles and turns to deliver his second inaugural address on Monday (Jan. 21), his own approach to Scripture will come into view. Characteristically, it sits somewhere between the former president and famous preacher.
His faith forged in the black church, Obama draws deeply on its blending of biblical narratives with contemporary issues such as racism and poverty. But like Lincoln, Obama also acknowledges that Americans sometimes invoke the same Bible to argue past each other, and that Scripture itself counsels against sanctimony.
Obama articulated this view most clearly in a 2006 speech, saying that secularists shouldn’t bar believers from the public square, but neither should people of faith expect America to be one vast amen corner.
“He understands that you can appeal to people on religious grounds,” said Jeffrey Siker, a theology professor at Loyola Marymount University in California who has studied Obama’s speeches. “But you also have to be able to translate your case into arguments that people of different faiths, or no faith, can grasp.”
Florida megachurch pastor Joel Hunter, a close spiritual adviser to the president, said Obama often starts the day by reading Scripture.
One “great source of encouragement in my life,” Obama has said, is Isaiah 40:31: “Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
Obama seldom attends church since moving into the White House but occasionally alludes to his private faith in public speeches. More often, he cites Scripture to connect with traditions and arguments familiar to most Americans, if only faintly.
“He is a leader who wants to approach challenges from many different aspects of our lives,” Hunter said. “Not just intellectual, but also moral, and he finds Scripture to be a way of communicating values that many of us share.”
Like many liberal Protestants, Obama often emphasizes Bible passages that urge compassion for the poor and downtrodden.
“He uses those Scriptures more than any other type,” said Hunter. “It has to do with assisting those in need, rather than moral commands about sin,” Hunter said.
As Hunter notes, occupying the bully pulpit gives presidents license to cite Scripture, and Obama is far from the first to use it.
Bill Clinton alluded to the Psalms while asking for forgiveness during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and George W. Bush cited Scripture to forge a personal connection with evangelical Christians.
Obama uses the Bible a bit more broadly.
He has quoted the Sermon on the Mount to explain his economic views, read Psalms to bereaved families in Newtown, Conn., and Tucson, Ariz., and cited the Bible’s Golden Rule to explain his evolving support for same-sex marriage.
During his 2009 inaugural address, Obama cited the Apostle Paul’s admonition to “set aside childish things,” challenging the country to tackle its complex problems.
“Any time anybody quotes Scripture, they are implicitly saying: If you are a person of faith, this is what God is telling us to do,” said Siker.
But like Lincoln, Obama has also used the Bible for the opposite purpose — to argue that no one fully knows the divine design.
“The full breadth of human knowledge is like a grain of sand in God’s hands,” Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2011. “And there are some mysteries in this world we cannot fully comprehend. As it’s written in Job,’God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways. He does great things beyond our understandings.’”
Of course, not everyone agrees with Obama’s interpretation of Scripture.
Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has accused Obama of “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.” Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum said Obama has a “phony theology ... not a theology based on the Bible.”
But nothing upset conservatives quite like Obama’s citation of the Bible to back same-sex marriage. Even Hunter criticized the president. “You can’t cite one Scripture to interpret or negate other Scriptures,” he said. “But I know for him that was a moral decision.”
That’s precisely why Obama drew on the Bible, said Mary Frances Berry, co-author of “Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches, from the State House to the White House.”
“What he wants is to have moral authority. Not just to be president, but to have moral authority,” Berry said. “That’s in the black tradition. We talk about the preacher as having moral authority: the ability to convince your audience of the rightness of what you are saying.”
In that tradition, Obama sometimes bookends big speeches with Scripture, Berry said, wedging a challenging message in between.
Despite Obama’s later estrangement from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he learned at the feet of a rhetorical master, said Martha Simmons, co-editor of “Preaching with Sacred Fire,” an anthology of African-American sermons.
Among the skills Obama gleaned at Trinity UCC is the ability to draw modern messages from ancient texts, and to condense that message into a memorable phrase. It’s called “shorthanding” Scripture, Simmons said.
For example, Obama frequently used the expression “we are our brother’s keeper” during his 2008 presidential campaign. Some evangelicals were perplexed at the citation, noting that it comes from the mouth of Cain, history’s most famous fratricide.
But the message, which Obama used to argue against excessive individualism, made perfect sense to African-Americans, said Simmons. “He was doing what the black community does: understanding the relevancy of the text for our modern context.”
One more rhetorical tact Obama learned from the black church, especially from King: Orators can challenge their audience, but should always end on an uplifting note.
“When all is said and done,” Simmons said, “you leave people with a hopeful word.”
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