Its plot is borrowed from the book of Genesis, but the musical might be controversial even by secular standards. A wealthy white woman, feeling undesirable after a breast-cancer operation, pays her black maid $15,000 to sleep with her husband. Only after much trouble and prayer does a righteous resolution ensue. Yet the co-author, composer and producer of Behind Closed Doors, which just opened in Chicago, is a man of the cloth: Bishop T.D. Jakes. Doesn't he fear failure? "My definition of success," says Jakes, 43, "is to be able to birth out every creative thought God has breathed into me before I die."

Jakes' emotive preaching flows out of the Pentecostal school, a minority tradition even in the world of the African-American church. His frankness — on stage or in the pulpit — about sex and sexual abuse (topics most pastors prefer to limit to private counseling) is also a breakthrough. "It wasn't just 'Read the Bible verse and talk about it,'" says J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine. "It was a married black man speaking from a shepherd's heart to wounded