After learning that his wife is sleeping with another man of the cloth, Euliss "Sonny" Dewey, a popular Pentecostal preacher of deep spiritual convition, commits a crime of passion and thusly, is forced to abandon his home, family, and church. Destroying all traces of his true identity, he takes to the road, dubs himself "The Apostle," and attempts to start life over. Following a long-standing tradition in Southern storytelling, and evoking such forebears as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, Euliss reinvents himself as the archetypal mysterious stranger who resurfaces in a poor black town where he tries to redeem himself by helping the congregation build a church. And during his tenancy in the small town, he manages to transform both its inhabitants and himself.