March 20, 2008--Last June, on assignment covering religion for the Washington Post, I found myself at the National Press Club, where a group of religious leaders were meeting to craft a social justice agenda for the 2008 elections.

Among those at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Legislative Conference was a minister named Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a man with a legendary reputation as a homilectical genius, known for ministering to the poor, stirring crowds into a spiritual frenzy, and tossing a few curse words into his homilies every now and then.

Sporting a tropical open-collared shirt, Wright looked like a grandfather on vacation as he and a who's who of black ministers took part in a press conference titled "Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in the Major News Media." The chief complaint of the conference was that the major news outlets were ignoring progressive theologians in favor of those from the Religious Right. Perhaps underscoring the ministers' beef was the fact that I was the only reporter from mainstream media there. Wright was so appreciative that he later wrote me a gracious letter of thanks for coming.

Now, thanks to YouTube, the minister has more media attention that he ever dreamed of, the vacation is over and his sermons are stirring up a different kind of a frenzy—one that surely would not exist had John Edwards or Hillary Clinton been the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But fate and timing are ironic bedfellows with destiny.

Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech on Rev. Wright—his former pastor—was designed to mend fences and dispel doubts, and its success remains an open question.

But the entire media saga raises a more important question about the theological relevance of ministers like Wright in Obama's multicultural age.  

It is a question I have asked myself repeatedly, as I have pushed hard for more coverage of what goes on in black churches. Until the flap over Wright, I have never seen so much attention paid to what goes on in black communities at 11 a.m. on Sundays, the time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called "the most segregated hour of Christian America."

 After the media storm fades, I wonder, what will have changed: Will the needs and aspirations of the black church, and those who cling to it as a haven, change or fade away, too?

This Easter Sunday, whites and blacks will flock to church to worship, listen to the words from the same Bible and then go back home to eat food and pluck Easter eggs. In today's America many more congregations are integrated than when Dr. King made his observation; in some communities black pastors will preach to whites and white pastors will preach to blacks.

Rev. Otis Moss Sr., co-chair of Clergy for Obama, is a 72-year-old veteran Cleveland pastor whose son has taken over Wright's former post at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, said parishioners must be able to sift out the good and the bad, regardless of the religion.

"Are we going to ask a very devout Catholic to leave the Catholic Church?" Moss said. "You can't hold the listener or a member of a church to be responsible for every word uttered by his prophet or pastor, if you did, you would have to join a new church every week, you would end up being churchless and homeless in terms of spirituality."

But as Obama pointed out, race remains a central and uncomfortable reality in American life. So how should clergy address this reality?

Are we living in a time when ministers should just lob spiritual daisy's from the pulpit? My wife, Taunya described the Obama speech as eloquent and timely: "He addressed the proverbial 900-pound pink gorilla in the room."

"It is so obvious that race is an issue in this election. Why can't we talk about it," she asked. "In order for this nation to heal we must talk about race."