DURHAM - When I was a 16-year-old Southern Baptist with my sights set on the White House (I grew up in the heyday of the Moral Majority), I met a black pastor named William J. Barber II at a statewide event for young political hopefuls.

Rev. Barber was there to give a motivational speech, but I heard the gospel in his talk and saw it in his character. A friend and I invited Barber to come preach in our home town, and he accepted. A few months later, Barber drove to King, N.C., in his family minivan. He was not alone. "My people told me not to come up here," he said. "This is Klan country, you know."

As a post-civil rights white boy, I didn't know. I was raised to be color-blind by believers in equal opportunity. No one told me that King was a Sundown Town -- one of hundreds of cities and towns that had advertised danger for blacks found within its limits after dusk. (The last sign in King was removed, I'm told, in 1983.) I didn't learn the history of racism in church or public schools. I heard it from a preacher who knew that judgment can be a gift.

This week, as I listened to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's speech at the National Press Club (a speech that kicked off a two-day symposium on the black church), I was reminded of Rev. Barber's words to me on that first visit to King. I remember the feeling of surprise and confusion -- awkwardness, even -- as I heard the truth about my past spoken so frankly. And it occurred to me: That must be how most white folks feel listening to clips of this on the evening news.

Given the fierce political competition that has afforded Wright his national platform, I'm not surprised that most commentators have ignored his message about the prophetic tradition of the black church. Looking back on my education from Barber, though, I hope followers of Jesus will take this opportunity to listen to our black brothers and sisters. Though judgment is not easy to hear, my experience has been that there is grace and new life on the other side if we are willing to listen.

I talk a lot to white Christians who are concerned about the future of the church. They worry that our faith has become irrelevant in a postmodern and increasingly post-Christian era. The next generation simply isn't hearing good news from our pulpits. "If today's Church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early Church," wrote Martin Luther King from Birmingham Jail in 1963, "it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning."

The prayer of the prophetic tradition, as Wright describes it, is always that all people would be set free from our bondage, transformed into the image of Christ and reconciled to one another and God. This is not an angry diatribe. It is, I'm convinced, our only hope.

It may be that this combination of truth-telling and radical grace can come only from the black church tradition. In an age when we do not easily believe in miracles, the black church in America is a miracle that can hardly be refuted. Not only do we have a black church, but its members have consistently loved their enemies and prayed for those who persecute them.

By miracle, even reconciliation is possible. More than a decade after I met Barber -- who now heads the state NAACP -- and learned that I was a racist by birthright, my home church in King invited me to preach its homecoming service. Now an associate minister at a historically black Baptist church, I asked if I might bring our choir along to help me preach. As it happened, our pastor canceled service at our church, chartered a bus and the whole congregation went to worship in Klan country.

When we arrived, there were some awkward exchanges. Everyone, of course, was trying to be nice. But when the gospel choir started singing, it wasn't long before the whole church -- black and white -- was on its feet, clapping and singing together. It was, of course, just a moment -- a few minutes in hundreds of years of history. But it was, without a doubt, an interruption of that history. It was the sort of miracle I'm praying to see more of.

(Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove of St. John's Baptist Church in Durham is author of "Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line.")