It was the condition of the church accounts that gave the impetus to a change of attitude. As I pored over the accounts prior to my first Annual General Meeting of the Church Council, it dawned on me that they were a very good indicator of what we considered important. Our spending showed very bleakly that mission did not matter to us, and that areas like Sunday school and youth work were deemed unimportant. Indeed, the finances showed that the church was interested in maintaining itself only by spending money on buildings, repairs and heating.
I set the church a challenge. From now on, I said, our missionary giving must start at 10 per cent of gross income, and not what we can spare when all expenses are paid. Furthermore, I continued, we must have a realistic budget for children and youth work, for the reason that a church that does not invest in the young is doomed. Again the Parochial Church Council backed this overwhelmingly, but sadly the Treasurer himself was the first casualty of the strategy. He resigned because ‘the church would not be able to afford it’. The interesting thing is that when a congregation is set a healthy challenge, it will respond to it. This proved to be the case at St Nic’s. Giving soared as we created a missionary budget aimed not at simply maintaining ourselves, but at attracting new members.
Perhaps one of the most exciting developments was the creation of ‘Watersports’. The idea started when a new member of the congregation, David White, came to me one day and said hesitantly, ‘I know you’re appealing for people to help with youth work. At the age of sixty-two I’m hardly the sort that youth workers are made of, but I have a boat, and I’m prepared to take children sailing.’ From this small beginning developed a number of children’s and youth activities which continued for many years. Many dozens of families from inside and outside the church community, as well as a number of youngsters from areas of social deprivation, learned sailing and canoeing with the church in the Lake District. As a consequence many new children were fed into the Sunday schools, and often their parents began to attend the church.
I wanted the church to serve the wider community. For me, Christianity was too important to be left to churches and Christians. My theology was, and is, that God is at work in the world, and uses people of all faiths and none to further His purposes. Furthermore, caring practically for the body and the mind is as much a priority of the gospel as caring spiritually for the soul – indeed, the two cannot be separated. So I had no hesitation in raising the question: How may we serve our community better? As I saw it, healthy churches are relevant to the needs of those they serve.
It was difficult at first to see how St Nic’s was serving the wider community. I decided to do my own private survey, by going to people outside the church to see what they thought of it and what suggestions they might have. I approached the Mayor, the Chief Executive of the city council, market traders, shopkeepers, shoppers and others. The results were sobering as well as challenging. For the majority of them St Nic’s was ‘just there’, part of the landscape of Durham, and they had no expectations of it. But when I pressed the question: ‘What would you like to see the church providing?’ the answers were positive. Some wanted the church to be open, so they could go in and pray. Others suggested that they would like to see church people more involved in the life of the city, and St Nic’s more visible in providing help to the elderly, the young and the destitute.
This deepened my own resolve to get involved in the life of the city. I became a part-time Prison Chaplain at Low Newton Prison, which held over three hundred young men and about forty women. I spent up to twelve hours a week in the prison, and found it a healthy balance to the middle-class life of St Nic’s. I also became Chaplain to the Royal Air Force Club, where as an ex-RAF man I was made very welcome. This brought me into close contact with another side of Durham life, that of ordinary citizens very similar to the people I grew up with in Dagenham. Another area occupied a great deal of my time – I chaired the local committee of the Cyrenaian organisation, which dedicates itself to serving homeless people. From my days in Islington I felt I had a calling to help the members of this underclass, who usually drop out of mainstream community life. Today they constitute an even more serious problem than they did then. I and two other men of my age, one an agnostic, the other an atheist, made an unlikely trio as we set about helping such people get back on their feet by overseeing the management of a hostel where they could stay. Homeless men were frequent visitors to the vicarage as well, especially around dinnertime, when Eileen would make up a sandwich and a cup of tea for them.
Largely as a result of my desire to make St Nic’s more central to the life of the community, we set about a radical reordering of the building. From my first visit to the church I realised it had huge problems, but equal potential. It was ideally and excitingly positioned in a busy market square, yet it was in a very rundown state. The interior was gloomy and unattractive. The pews, many in very bad condition, made it difficult to adapt the space for anything other than worship. Heating was supplied by a temperamental coal boiler which, I was told, was the last solid-fuel boiler in the diocese, and which required stoking from Friday onwards before the Sunday services could be comfortably held. There were also serious leaks in the roof – six or so buckets were placed by the church cleaner, Mrs Simpson, at the offending places. If one adds to the list of problems the fact that the church interior was defiantly puritan in its ugliness and tastelessness, something radical had to be done.
The creation of an attractive interior that provided facilities which could be used seven days a week became the mirror image of the spiritual pilgrimage of the congregation at the same time. I learned the lesson that no reordering of any building should happen without the spiritual reordering of people. That we were able to raise £350,000 within two years at a time when inflation was raging at around 20 per cent was only slightly short of miraculous. I remain convinced to this day that many congregations do not properly see that buildings may either be part of their successful outreach into the community or, in the majority of cases, significant reasons for the decline of church life.
It is said in the Old Testament that Jacob’s love for Rachel was so special that his seven years of service ‘seemed but a day’. My time at St Nic’s was sometimes tough and always exhausting, but it stands out as perhaps the most significant period of our joint ministry. Eileen was blissfully happy bringing up our four children and sharing energetically in our work together. All of the children started school in Durham, and our eldest, Rachel, went away to college in London, while our sons Mark and Andrew completed A’ levels and ‘O’ levels respectively. Our youngest, Lizzie, was in primary school by the time we left. We lived in a beautiful seven-bedroomed vicarage overlooking the cathedral and castle, with grand, high-ceilinged rooms for entertaining, and a garden filled with adventure for the children and bushes packed with summer fruits. The whole family were to remember Durham with great fondness; it was an idyllic place to grow up.
Eileen’s ministry developed to such an extent in the church family that she provided much of the hospitality offered by St Nic’s, and opened the vicarage for bed-and-breakfast in order to raise money for the building project. Eileen’s mother, Margaret Daisy Hood, now in her eighties, came to live with us, having spent the last ten years of her widowhood with Eileen’s sister in Canada. It was clear that Mrs Hood was suffering from dementia, and this became very distressing for us all. Sometimes she would wander from the house, to be found in a confused state in some part of the city and be brought back by a kindly and sympathetic neighbour. This certainly added to the stress on Eileen. Alas, both her mother and my father died within a short while of each other towards the end of our time at St Nic’s. Both were wonderful Christian people whose influence on us was great. I particularly felt the death of Dad as his passing was so sudden – he had a severe heart attack and died instantly. His funeral in Dagenham Parish Church took the form of deep thanks-giving for the rich life of a truly humble man whose legacy was considerable.
In my second year at St Nic’s an unexpected phone call from Christopher Hill, on the staff at Lambeth Palace, affected my life greatly. Christopher’s responsibility was for ecumenical relationships. I remember that November morning very well.
‘Would you like to spend three weeks in Rome?’ was