God’s Alderman : UPON THIS ROCK: The Miracles of a Black Church, By Samuel G. Freedman (HarperCollins: $22.50; 363 pp.)

“Good isn’t weak. Good isn’t milquetoast. Good isn’t namby-pamby,” roars the handsome, tormented, confounded preacher who is the centerpiece of this exciting new work by Samuel Freedman. “Good is stronger than evil. And I can bust an ass as good as anybody on the street.” Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, pastor of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, is the subject of this vivid biography and the medium through which Freedman, an award-winning journalist and author, explores a broken-down, working-poor, African-American, urban neighborhood and its sparkling variety of inhabitants.

Pastor Youngblood, a native of New Orleans, son of a day-laborer in a sugar factory, was seen by his church community as called to God in early childhood. Now a man in his early 40s, Youngblood single-handedly attempts to revitalize an old New York church and the decaying, crime-ridden streets adjoining it.

He begins his days on his knees, before dawn, in his cold, Spartan home office, praying to Jesus for help with a number of very specific items: how to attract men back into the female-dominated world of the black church; how to inspire teen-agers to lead ethical lives, despite the easy money and cool swagger of young gang members in the streets; how to help the pregnant teen-agers and the babies of teen-agers in the congregation; how to comfort the family of a decent man shot to death in a sudden dispute over a parking space; how to sort through accusations against a kindly old retired dry-cleaner, a church usher, named by a 10-year-old girl as the man who tried to molest her.

He prays, on his knees, in the dark, for help contending with his personal demons, as well: his illegitimate son, now a teen-ager, growing up without a father in New Orleans; his own distant, indifferent, aging father. Then Youngblood drives to work at St. Paul and finds, throughout the day, in the words of the Bible and in conversations with his congregants and staff, answers--answers, he believes, that are God-sent.

This biography, falling somewhere between journalism and poetry, is full of sweat and struggle, the author whole-heartedly trailing this roisterous, turbulent minister up and down through many moods. Through his quiet observation, Freedman becomes “privy,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald has written, “to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”

We observe Rev. Youngblood closeted with congregants in many stages of mourning and trouble and rehabilitation, and hear the stammered confessions, the shamefaced autobiographies, the whispered scandals. Freedman, the author of the National Book Award-nominated “Small Victories,” makes us feel the heat outdoors: “It was a dark, clammy night, uncomfortable for idling”; or the cold: “Children trudge behind mothers toward school, their faces lost inside the periscope hoods of down parkas”; and quiet moments in the lives of church congregants: an old woman caring for neglected neighborhood children “worked her love into them like lotion into a callous.” And chiefly he makes us feel the passionate striving of a flawed and goodly man, Johnny Ray Youngblood: “Now that I know what God saved you from,” he tells one congregant (but could be talking to himself), “what did he save you for?”

It is a tricky business in literature--fiction or nonfiction--to attempt to portray full-scale decency. Literature teems with rapscallions and tragic heroes--Odysseus, Lear, Faust, the Mayor of Casterbridge, the Great Gatsby, Humboldt, the Great Santini. But how many books focus on a good man? Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” does, but is widely appraised as being one of his slower-moving, stiffer works. Samuel Richardson’s 18th-Century novel “Clarissa” offered good Clarissa, but her virtue was monotonously static and unbelievable; the action in the novel came from the rogue who pursued her.

Much great literature interests itself, rather, in the rough striving toward goodness, the failure to achieve it, or the evanescent moment of grace before all is lost. In “Crime and Punishment,” it takes Raskolnikov 500 pages to achieve the last five pages of understanding. In biography, we look for the mistress, the financial indiscretion, the hidden alcoholism. Good piled upon good is unbelievable; a work containing it feels like a whitewash, and readers wish the writer would get the hell on with the story.

So why does “Upon This Rock” work as a piece of literature? Because Johnny Ray Youngblood is a character full of spirit and vinegar; a man without a holier-than-thou bone in his body; a preacher who takes to heart his own fiery sermons, is shaken by them, and looks to repair his own life. And his story is embellished by the capsulized life stories of congregants, which Freedman weaves in and around the preacher’s.

In this forgotten neighborhood of rusty fences and abandoned warehouses and liquor stores, in the shadow of the church, a bit of community flares up. Reverend Youngblood protects it as much as possible from the chaos of inner-city America, tries to give it time to grow. Law-abiding, God-fearing men and women emerge from behind locked windows and doors to come worship, and they fill up the sanctuary with song and hope. Under Youngblood’s leadership, church membership grows from a congregation of 84, a staff of three, and a budget of $18,000 to a membership of 5,000, a staff of 55 and a budget of $4 million.

The pastor conceives of the church community as a village, saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” He throws church money, time, staff and energy into securing the little neighborhood against crime and unemployment; he boosts local businesses and helps others to start; he founds preschools, day-care centers, literacy programs, drug- and alcohol-abuse programs, men’s support groups; he announces SAT scores from the pulpit.

“Upon This Rock” works as literature--despite its being a portrait of a good and decent man--because the odds are so great against Reverend Youngblood. It is so much more likely he will fail-- he is an Ahab battling the disaster of late-20th-Century urban life--and for chapter after chapter we wait to learn he has given up, been defeated. For chapter after chapter he gets up, gets dressed, gets down on his knees, and walks out the door, a hands-on saver of lost souls.

“Cities were not saved in grand sweeps,” Freedman writes. “Cities were saved block by block.” Johnny Ray Youngblood will save his city block, or die trying.