The District Chronicles

Issue date: 7/26/09 Section: Divine Intervention

Media Credit: whitehouse.gov

WASHINGTON -- From a sparsely adorned office building a stone's throw from the White House, Joshua DuBois carefully navigates the delicate line between church and state.

Each morning, he sends a devotional message to President Obama's BlackBerry. He appears before religious and community groups to explain his role as director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships and, in turn, relays their concerns to administration officials. In the course of any given day, he'll receive as many as 750 e-mails from religious leaders, reporters and government officials.

But in the midst of all the political juggling, the 26-year-old preacher's kid remains a person of faith who quotes from favorite hymns - "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" is one. The Bible, too, serves as inspiration.

"I'm often inspired by the grass-roots nature of Acts and the early church," he said in a recent interview, "and what they were able to build from virtually nothing."

To some extent, DuBois is doing just that with the faith-based office, which Obama inherited from former President George W. Bush, but revamped in a bid to expand its focus, depoliticize the grant-making process and tamp down church-state concerns.

DuBois, a veteran of Obama's Senate office who oversaw religious outreach for his presidential campaign, is a distinct contrast from the Republican appointees who preceded him, including the policy wonk John DiIulio, who opened the office in 2001, or Jim Towey, a former lawyer for Mother Teresa, or the cerebral Jay Hein.

Raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church by his mother and stepfather, a minister in Nashville, Tenn., DuBois became an associate pastor of the Calvary Praise and Worship Center, a small, African-American Pentecostal church in Cambridge, Mass., while still an undergraduate at Boston University.

"I am very clear about the fact that I am a committed Christian and my faith is important to me; it's a central part of my life," he said. "At the same time, I am now in a role in this office where I'm called to reach out to Americans of all different religious backgrounds and folks who don't adhere to a particular religion."

In Washington, DuBois attends a nondenominational church that worships in a rented movie theater. He still maintains ties to the Cambridge church and to Boston, where he worked with the National TenPoint Leadership Foundation, which encouraged black churches to aid at-risk, inner-city youth.

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