Dolores White is not shy. Although on the phone she sounds quiet, a bit hesitant, she describes herself as "overbearing, maybe ... aggressive ... when it's something I believe in."

She believes strongly in St. George's Church and Community Center on 26th and Oak streets in Louisville, Ky.

Ms. White, in addition to being a "retired" special education teacher, has been the center's director for the last two years. Initially she only volunteered to answer the telephone for the center, but "that gets pretty boring." So she started thinking about programs and recruiting volunteers. She began an informal survey of the neighborhood.

"I'd knock on doors, visit with people on their porches or working in their yards," she recalled. "We started the block watch, inviting people to come to the church and talk." She's good at ferreting out others' talents. "If someone comes in who knows how to make baskets, we'll start a basket-weaving group," she said.

The 1997-98 program schedule doesn't mention basket weaving, but does list tutoring, judo, basketball, 4-H, literary club, violin, cello and piano lessons, ballet, tap and African dance. In summer there are field trips to museums, the IMAX theater, strawberry picking, and a circus farm where kids can try out Ringling Brothers equipment - stilts, the high wire, the big top.

She wrote and directed a play about her own ancestors. The 30-member cast, including St. George's African dance troupe, performed at Locust Grove, a former plantation now a city museum, where her great-great-grandmother lived as a slave. "It was outdoors, and I wanted to beat the rainy season, so we did it on May 18, which is my birthday. And it turned out that my great-great-grandmother was married at Locust Grove on May 18, 1796."

St. George's Church is connected to the community center physically and emotionally. The vicar, the Rev. Joy Browne, described it as "a little white church with a gym stuck on." Attached to the gym is the annex dedicated in 1993, the two-story Tachau House, the former rectory named for a former rector. Legally, for funding purposes, the entities are separate. Among the many church members who volunteer at the center is junior warden David Tobin, who is retired from the military and from driving a bus. "Now I'm down here every day, working harder than I ever did," he said. Mr. Tobin coaches and tutors, and is bringing in Boy and Girl Scouting.

It was senior warden Ed Hamilton, a sculptor who designed the Amistad Memorial in New Haven, Conn., who mentioned the new acolyte group directed by Mr. Tobin. From little boat girls to an adult crucifer, the group participated in the acolyte festival at Washington National Cathedral. Ms. Browne said, "We had a banner made by a South African woman, with African symbols. We received compliments in Washington - others said, 'We want to look like you; you have everything!'" Mr. Hamilton exulted, "This little low church is swinging the incense!"

The church is perhaps a hundred years old; the center opened in the late 1940s. Then, said Mr. Hamilton, "St. George's neighborhood was white." The ethnic makeup changed gradually, "from working-class German to working-class black," and the center was closed. "Kids were breaking into the gym to play basketball. People realized the kids needed a place to go. Ken Thompson became vicar and opened the gym."

Lee Trowell, a life-long member and now a tutor, said, "The neighborhood has seen so many bad things ... but I guess crime, drugs come into every place no matter where you go." He sympathizes with the many single-parent families. "I was brought up in a similar situation so I know." His mission, he said, is to "bring kids into the church. And some are coming, from the center."

"It's my impression that the center began as a church activity and later became separate, with a board from outside," Ms. Browne said. "Now we're in a revisioning process, and we've all learned to talk about 'we' again."

With the changing neighborhood, she said, the diocese had thought about closing the church. "Two women kept keys. They put flowers on the altar every Saturday and prayed for a priest. Their spirits are keeping the church alive."

Ms. Browne is a part-time vicar and a part-time professor of pan-African religious studies at the University of Louisville. Dolores White said of her, "She's young, dynamic, petite, talkative, alive. She wears African garb and long braids."

A "cradle Episcopalian and Pan-Africanist" from California, Ms. Browne's background is in community empowerment. "My ministry is not at the altar, the pulpit, or in academe," she said, "but as the umbilicus that joins all three." The syllabus for her course in "Service Learning in African-American Traditions" states:

"The history of community service in African-American culture is inextricably tied to the centrality of the black church as a core institution of the community. Community service, in the form of ministries that provide food, clothing ... tutoring ... has been a primary vehicle for the introduction of programs in voter registration ... nonviolent civil disobedience, neighborhood block watch ... and a variety of other sociopolitical issues. All these activities are informed by a worldview that recognizes no distinction between 'sacred' and 'secular' realms and that considers community service a religious responsibility."

The course requires students to "assist in providing various urban social services" working through St. George's and "other church-based sites."

St. George's is "greening," Ms. Browne said, with older people and younger, "artsy-craftsy activists, some who were never religious or had rejected religion have found a place." The church has a Rite II service with music from The Hymnal 1982 and LEVAS II played by Bill Ballard, who came to St. George's as a volunteer tutor. "He played one Sunday and never left," said the senior warden.

Louisville has two predominantly black Episcopal churches about four miles apart. "We have a sense of ownership," Mr. Hamilton said. "We didn't want to merge with Merciful Savior. They're uptown, St. George's is downtown."

The former rector, the Rev. Bob Coon, said the congregation had decided to reduce its diocesan support by 30 percent. "We took a leap of faith," the senior warden said. We want to be a parish - we're working toward that. We keep up our [diocesan] apportionment.

"This church has been a blessing for a lot of people. Even without a priest, [either we] had a supply, or we stepped up and did Morning Prayer. I dream of filling the pews, but maybe that's not the most important part of the church. Maybe spirituality is, and what you take from the sermon.

"We've been a rock on 26th and Oak!"