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Chicago: When the Reverend Otis Moss III takes to the pulpit before a congregation that includes US presidential hopeful Barack Obama, he's as likely to preach about Tupac Shakur or one of his favourite authors as he is the Apostle Paul.
The 37-year-old "hip-hop pastor", as he's called by congregants, will become the head of Trinity United Church of Christ in June, taking over at a time of turmoil for the 8,000-member church, the nation's largest United Church of Christ congregation.
Moss's ascent follows the retirement of the Rev Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama angrily denounced for his "divisive and destructive" remarks.
It's a shift from more than three decades under Wright, a preacher born of the civil-rights era whose fiery comments about September 11, HIV/Aids and other issues have placed the church under a media microscope.
"Pastor Moss has inherited the repercussions of an attack he had nothing to do with," said Brenda Salter McNeil, president of an Oak Park, Illinois-based company that works on diversity issues in Christian organisations. "He has to pastor a people through it."
Moss, an assistant pastor at Trinity for two years, is a Yale Divinity School graduate whose father also is a prominent preacher and former adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.
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