If the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s weekly sermons seem overly zealous, Barak Obama's outspoken minister has earned his outrage over decades of social injustice, a longtime friend said yesterday.

"I look at Rev. White as controversial but prophetic," the Rev. G. Daniel Jones said. "He is informed and he informs. He is a religious analyst coming out of the biblical tradition who denounces social ills and warns people on how to become more just and more humane."

Jones is pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Germantown, Wright's spiritual home when he was growing up in Philadelphia.

Wright's father served as pastor there from 1938 to 1980. His portrait hangs in the entryway, above a plaque commemorating the church's centennial in 1992. The family was beloved by many in the congregation, and Wright Jr. returns annually to give a guest sermon.

With Obama scheduled to give a speech on race at the National Constitution Center today - in part as a salve to the nettle of Wright's controversial remarks on race, religion and injustice in America - few may be in a better position than Jones to offer insight into the candidate's mentor and minister.

Jones and Wright have known each other since 1959, when they were Omega Psi Phi brothers at Virginia Union University. Wright was an honor student, Jones said.

But the kind of provocative black spiritual leader who would years later fuel his Chicago congregation's indignation over white oppression with cries of "God damn America"? Or characterize the nation as the "U.S. of K.K.K.A"?

Twenty years ago, Jones didn't see that coming.

In hindsight, it's hardly unexpected at this stage in Wright's life. For a thoughtful African American preacher with a keen social conscience, Jones said, it's not surprising to hear anger and outrage.

Grace Baptist sits in a residential section of Germantown, a modest brick structure with plain, wooden pews, burgundy carpeting, and long, rectangular windows covered in colorful plastic sheets to give the appearance of stained glass.

Though Grace Baptist is "nonpartisan," Jones said, he does not shy away from speaking about politics when the issues involve social ills. He may not use Wright's inflammatory language, he said, but he understands the fire beneath.

"We have been a very oppressive society since the writing of the Constitution," said Jones, now in his 26th year as pastor. Rather than take Wright's words literally, he believes the public should explore their deeper meaning.

"I think he's saying we're not the ideal society," Jones said. "There are some social ills that can be connected with white America. The facts are the facts."

Not all members of Philadelphia's black clergy are as understanding.

The Rev. Anthony Floyd, now retired, said he had known Wright "through the years to be a very honorable person."

Personally, Floyd said, he found some of Wright's remarks "polarizing."

"I'm very much surprised at him," he said, adding that, knowing Wright's good character, he was concerned.

"Something has gone wrong in his head. I'm going to pray for him. That the Lord might heal whatever is wrong with him," Floyd said.

The city's black ministers do not speak as one. Floyd serves as president of the 440-member Philadelphia Council of Clergy, a group that has endorsed Obama's opponent Hillary Clinton.

Other pastors, such as Jones, see Wright's words as truth to power. Jones belongs to another group representing black clergy, United Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, which endorsed Obama last week.

A stout man with silvering temples, wearing a monogrammed shirt and gray suit with a handkerchief in the breast pocket, Jones said too much had been made of excerpts from Wright's preaching that have circulated widely over the last few days since YouTube videos of his sermons hit the Internet.

"The media is picking at straws" by dredging up old statements and deliberately timing their release to create controversy, Jones said, sitting on a bench in a corridor near the church's main entrance, where he agreed to an impromptu interview.

"The clergy are individuals and have individual opinions," he said. "No parishioner accepts everything that the spiritual leader says or directs."

To wit, Sen. Obama.

Wright officiated at the senator's wedding, baptized his two daughters, and spoke of "the audacity of hope" in a sermon that inspired Obama to embrace Christianity. Later, the senator adopted the phrase as the title of his memoir.

But since last year, when Obama disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation at the official announcement of his candidacy for president, he has been steadily - and lately, more emphatically - disassociating himself from the pastor.

Jones, too, has established his own boundaries. Though he believes he understands the minister's thinking, "I am not Rev. Wright," he said.

And what of Obama's recent denouncement of the minister's views?

"The senator is being politically astute," Jones said. "He is committed to being the president of a nation which consists of a pluralistic society. . . . It is Sen. Obama who is running for president, not Rev. Wright."