President-elect Barack Obama has been without a worship community for about a year now and throughout that time, he says, it’s been difficult according to Christian Post.
“Now, I’ve got a wonderful community of people who are praying for me every day, and they call me up and – you know, but it’s not the same as going to church and the choir’s going and you get a good sermon,” he said in an interview aired Sunday by ABC’s This Week.
Over the past year, Obama has been attending church sparingly and though it’s been nearly two weeks since he and his family arrived in Washington, the president-elect said they still don’t have a church to attend yet.
But Obama said one of the items on his list of things to do is to visit churches in the area and “seeing what’s comfortable,” preferably before his fast-approaching inauguration date.
“It is tougher as president,” said the incoming commander-in-chief.
And it’s not just an issue of going to church, Obama added. “It’s an issue of going anywhere.”
“You don’t want to subject your fellow church members, the rest of the congregation, to being magged every time you go to church,” Obama said. “And so, we’re going to try to be balancing, not being disruptive to the city, but also saying we want to be part of Washington D.C.”
Since Obama’s victory in November, churches in the nation’s capital have been extending invitations to him and his family, touting their African-American roots, their ties to past presidents and to Obama himself. According to reports, United Church of Christ, Methodist, nondenominational, and historic black congregations have all extended invitations to the Obamas to attend their services.
“The eclectic nature of Obama’s spiritual pilgrimage, coupled with his coming to Washington unaffiliated with a denomination, has increased the competition among congregations for the involvement of the president-elect and his family,” observed Dr. Gary Scott Smith, author of Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush.
Watch the interview here.