I didn't move into an integrated neighborhood expecting to love all my neighbors. I can do "like" pretty well, though, and expected at least to become enriched by its racial composition. In 18 years, I have been, but these years have given me insight into how much potential we as one society have squandered.

City neighborhoods have many social ills, we can all agree, and we demand solutions that call for money. But no public funds can absolve us of our greatest continuing failure -- to know each other.

The late, brave ones who sacrificed to get us all on equal footing would be forlorn to know that blacks and whites are still out of step. Our nods and hellos should be easy enough, but not when they're ignored. When we do have a chance to connect, posturing and the over-talk of anxiety often hijack it. And when we form affiliations, we rarely carry them into each other's homes.

We are all implicated, but whites bear the heavier burden as the race with the heaviest anchor. Yet too few whites seem inclined to immerse enough to learn. We say we value living in a diverse neighborhood, but if we don't know who we are talking about, what is the satisfaction, the way the declaration sounds coming out of our mouths?

This interpersonal barrier, which comes down to fear, is an untenable situation in a country I still hope we can achieve -- a gracious and grown-up America.

I've always had enough faith in the secular world to look for the solution, but the best models I've found are church congregations. Among them: the Community of Reconciliation in Oakland, East Liberty Presbyterian Church, the Covenant Church in Wilkinsburg, Allegheny Center Alliance on the North Side and Friendship Community Presbyterian Church in West Oakland.

These communities are made of many ZIP codes. People who share a ZIP code and a love of neighborhood might take some lessons from them.

The Art Of Making Choices

The first lesson is a toughie: Step away from your personal comfort zone.

Barbara Brewton, who is white, and Johnnie Comer, who is black, each sacrificed theirs.

She was raised a suburban Catholic and got a professional education, along with her husband Dave. They could have, and she says now probably would have, lived elsewhere but for their commitment to Friendship Community Presbyterian and its neighborhood.

Mr. Comer's mother switched the family to Friendship from an all-black North Side church when he was a child, and he left and came back throughout his life until eight years ago, when the congregation's support helped him get clean from addiction. He lives in Wilkinsburg but is devoted to Friendship.

Both are so fulfilled by their Friendship "family" that they speak to classes and clubs and community groups about it.

Churches have to change completely when they commit to this ideal -- from the music and its delivery to the children's curriculum, from preaching styles to the composition of committees and boards. Outreach gets more intense, too, as food pantries, after-school tutoring, adult classes, summer day camps and adult-child mentorships.

With each step, everybody has to rethink and revise his attitudes, bend a little, give a little and draw on humor to appreciate differences -- whites wanting the thermostat turned down, blacks wanting it turned up; a white person talking a mile a minute, not noticing the black person isn't talking; conversely, the demonstrative conversation among blacks being exclusionary of whites.

"Everybody has to give up something," said Rev. Rock Dillaman, the white pastor at Allegheny Center Alliance Church. "It is not a rejection of anyone's culture, but God calls you to a new culture that transcends it."

At its best, the mesh can be fragile, says Rev. Gary Willingham-McLain, the white pastor at Friendship Community Presbyterian. The best intentions can fall flat, and an innocent mis-speak can feel like a land mine.

Pastors agree the sacrifice is greater for blacks.

"Black members give up some of the markers of their experience as black citizens," said Rev. Dillaman. "If you're white, the prevailing culture is yours, and your markers pervade."

"Blacks don't get kudos from other blacks for making the effort," said Rev. Willingham-McLain. "For our black congregants, it's a deeper sacrifice choosing a mixed church than the sacrifice white families make living in a mixed-race neighborhood."

The Alliance Church has built a wealthy mission from a 3,000-member regional congregation.

Friendship is little and it has been buffeted by a series of storms, from financial to the dismissal of two black pastors over which some members left mad and others had to soul-search to accept.

A Neighborhood, A Family

In its 50th year, with a frayed and tenuous history, Friendship owes its life to the congregation's intractable commitment to interracial community -- in the church and the neighborhood.

Across Robinson Street, Pat Paey and Debbie Atkins, sisters, live in the house the Atkins family bought when the girls were young, in 1956. They were the first black family on Robinson Street, said Ms. Paey, "and we weren't received well by everyone, but Friendship Church gave me people to play with and made me feel like I belonged in the neighborhood."

She remembers being surprised that the church would court blacks. "Then, you never thought about worshipping in a multicultural setting. But one pastor, Rev. Little, was such a warm person that, even if you didn't join the church, you wanted to know him. It was then I thought, 'Wow, blacks and whites can worship together.' "

She goes to Ebeneezer Baptist in the Hill.

"It's my home church," she says. "But Friendship has always been in my heart a community church, and I never felt like I was not a member. I really have two churches."

When she returned to Pittsburgh in 2000 after 30 years away, she noticed that black and white kids were playing in a side yard across the street. "I came home to this new world and would look out my window and say, 'Wow, that guy is really open to the community, even to kids some might consider a bad element.' He was offering them something they might not ever have had."

It was Gary and Laurel Willingham-McLain's side yard, and a few years later, he was named the church's pastor.

"When I went to help them celebrate their 50 years" this summer, she said, "I had to run from my church. because I felt like something good was happening here." With her sister back in the house, organizing a block club, and planning a community garden project to lure bored youth, she said, "I feel like we're on the threshold of something good."

Mr. Comer was used to an all-black church on the North Side when his mother, who was studying at Pitt, switched her family to Friendship in the 1960s. She put Johnnie in a button down shirt and red-soled bucks because that was what the college students were wearing.

"It was a bit of a shock," Mr. Comer says. "It was a real melting pot. There were all sorts of people there," including African-born Pitt students. "My mother wanted us to know people of different cultures.

"When I sort of missed the music and friends from my old church, I talked to my mother about it, and she said, 'Johnnie, be a part of building something.' "

Mr. Comer is a thinking, intuitive man, a rough-hewn construction worker called "a spiritual giant" by his pastor. He battled his way through substance abuse before all eyes at Friendship, which is about 65 percent white.

Most intentional congregations are somewhere shy of 50-50, but at some point, among those who decide to stay put, the sense of belonging becomes over-arching.

"You have to really know why you're there," said Mr. Comer. "You have to ask yourself, 'Is it about me and what I want?' There are white people who could live anywhere and choose to stay, and I want to honor that."

"Guys on the job ask me what's the big deal about Friendship, and I say, 'I love them and they love me back,' " said Mr. Comer.

"There wasn't a bigger project than me when I was trying to recover. My life was saved there. The love and acceptance is like a miracle."

Race Matters ... And It Doesn't

Mr. Comer and Ms. Brewton spoke together one day recently to a class at Duquesne University about their dedication.

Dave and Barbara Brewton were among five white families who moved to West Oakland for the church 23 years ago. He is the church's music director.

"I had a general discomfort," she said, citing a rash of break-ins and "lots of issues I wasn't familiar with. I was raised in the suburbs, and my feelings about prejudice hadn't been tested.

"The church forced me to look at myself. I always knew prejudice was bad, but whenever anything unpleasant happened with a black person, he was a black person" instead of an unpleasant person, she said. "I can't imagine I would have taken this journey without the faith aspect. I believe that I would've lived a similar life to the one I was raised in."

Mr. Comer said he believes a time will come when his church's model of interracial community catches on. "You could only keep something like that a secret for so long," he said.

"Sometimes I just sit there and look around." He wags his head and smiles. "I see black babies held in white arms, white babies in black arms, everybody up talking, nothing pretentious. It just flows.

"In the time of greeting, it's hard to make people sit back down. When the music starts to play, you're supposed to sit back down but nobody ever does.

"I couldn't have been as intentional" as the church has been, he said. "I wouldn't know how to describe that. My addiction had nothing to do with being black, but my recovery and Friendship Church go hand in hand, so I'll be there for the person who comes in [to worship] and looks like me.

"And he might not be black."