Photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University

The Rev. Brad Braxton, a Salem native, has been nominated to lead New York's Riverside Church, famous for its social activism.

Photo courtesy of Timothy Jacobsen

The Rev. Brad Braxton once served as senior pastor at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore.

Photo courtesy of Timothy Jacobsen

The Rev. Brad Braxton greets worshippers at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore. New York's Riverside Church will vote in September on his candidacy as pastor.

Preachers who stir things up are popular at Riverside Church in New York City, and the Rev. Brad Braxton, a native of Salem, is the choice of the congregation's hiring committee as their new leader.

If the church's 2,500 members favor Braxton, 39, in a September vote, he will take the pulpit in a Manhattan landmark that has been visited by Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.

"The pastor of this church is expected to be a national leader on social issues. This will be something different for Brad," said Carter Turner, an assistant professor of religious studies at Radford University and a high school friend of Braxton, who was salutatorian of the 1987 graduating class at Salem High School and a co-captain of the football team in his senior year. Turner added, "He had a star quality about him. Everyone who knew Brad or encountered him knew he was destined to do something special."

Gerald McDermott, professor of religion at Roanoke College, called Riverside Church "the flagship congregation of liberal Protestantism in the world."

Braxton didn't return phone calls Wednesday, but earlier this week he told The New York Times that he hopes to "continue in that marvelous legacy of congregational care internally, and bold, courageous, prophetic action externally, for which the Riverside Church has been known now for so many years."

He would become the sixth pastor in the church's 75-year history.

Although Braxton was announced on Sunday as the unanimous choice by the Riverside Church search committee, which interviewed 65 candidates, he still needs a two-thirds vote by congregants who attend the service on Sept. 14. The vote is scheduled to be taken after he delivers what church officials describe as his "candidate sermon."

Braxton was ordained in 1991 at Salem's First Baptist Church, where his father, the late Rev. James Braxton, ministered for more than 30 years before his death in 2004 at 75.

Braxton's Salem roots were evident on Friday, when Cheryle Wills, chairwoman of Riverside's search committee, said she phoned him from Manhattan to discuss his candidacy. "He was in Salem visiting his mother, because she had assembled deacons and elders of his dad's church to come and pray for him," she said. "I think that says a lot about him."

Yet Braxton's career has taken him far from home at times. Currently an associate professor of religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., he has studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, earned a Ph.D. in New Testament studies from Emory University in Atlanta and was senior pastor for five years at Douglas Memorial Community Church, an interdenominational congregation in Baltimore, with a reputation for social activism.

Riverside Church, affiliated with two denominations -- the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ -- is a racially diverse congregation. Controversy is nothing new there. The previous minister, the Rev. James Forbes, who retired in 2007 at 71 after 18 years in the pulpit, welcomed gays and Buddhists through the doors of the tall Gothic church at 120th Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan.

The senior pastor before Forbes, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., called for an end to the production of nuclear weapons and encouraged attendance by political refugees from Central America.

"Social justice is the anchor at Riverside Church," said Wills, a television and radio entrepreneur who has attended there regularly since moving to New York from Cleveland in 2000. Noting that Braxton is black, Wills said, "If you look at the leadership of black pastors in the U.S., you find that they have represented all of us who have needed a proponent for our individual rights: gays, women and children. All have been propelled by black leaders like Dr. King. A rising tide has lifted all boats."

Braxton's father had something of an activist bent. In the 1960s he successfully lobbied the Salem council to change some street names so they didn't become different when they crossed into historically black neighborhoods.

In Manhattan, Riverside's congregation will require that Braxton live on the Upper West Side, a upscale neighborhood between Central Park and the Hudson River above 59th Street, according to Leah Watkins, a spokeswoman for the church. "Some people who work in Manhattan live in Connecticut, but he's supposed to live close by," she said.

The contract agreement about his salary is still in negotiation, Wills said. She predicted that Braxton's experiences in England and Baltimore, along with his personal skills and intelligence, will help him adapt quickly to life and work in Manhattan: "I think the question will be if New York can keep up with him."