Protect the building – keep everyone out.

J G Ballard in Miracles of Life tells of his experiences in China under Japanese occupation. As he went to school each day from the internment camp he passed Chinese who had been hung from lampposts; women who had been raped and left to die; back in the camp he watched fellow inmates starve to death. At the end of the war he was sent to his grandparents who lived in West Bromwich and it is the year he spent with them that he describes as the “lowest point of my life”. It hasn’t changed much.

I couldn’t move into the vicarage at Hill Top because the local children had used it as a playground and eventually torched it. The diocese had been told that it was vulnerable as the previous vicar had had several break in’s. But rather that put a security fence around it – which would have cost £1000, they left it open. After it had been empty for a few months it ceased to be insured so when it was burnt down the diocese had to sell the site and only got the value of the land. For the want of £1000 they lost a £200000 house.

They moved me into a house in the centre of West Bromwich three miles from my churches. There I was greeted by a solidified turd in the downstairs loo. The diocese had turned off the water and drained the system when the previous tenant had left; and only then had someone decided to go to the loo and then leave it for nine months.

My introduction to the people of West Bromwich came from one of the local Labour councillors soliciting votes. I had to say that I was not yet on the voters list so couldn't help them. But could they tell me the councillors for the area I was going to work in. "They are a bit slow so don't expect too much," I was reliably informed. This attitude to their fellow Baggies was reinforced when I went to Smith’s to buy the Independent. There were none on the shelves, which seemed strange at about 10.00am. Surely they hadn’t sold out. “We don’t have it.” “Why not?” “No one would understand it.”

No one came from the churches to welcome me and there wasn’t the usual food parcel in the kitchen; so my introduction to St James church came from a meeting with the congregation. The first one took me on one side and said, “You don’t want to trust a word B says”; the second, “You don’t want to trust a word C says”; the third, “You don’t want to trust a word D says”; and so on until the last predictably said, “You don’t want to trust a word A says”

When I had my interview, with Bishop Mike on hand, I had made it clear what I was going to do. The church at Hill Top had been rebuilt after the old one showed signs of collapse through mining subsidence, but no one had thought to claim that the hall also needed rebuilding. So it was left. With rotten floors that the brownies went through at their discos; bare electrics hanging from the walls and an asbestos cement roof, which was beginning to break up. I planned to develop a scheme for a social enterprise company which would rebuild it to modern specifications; open it and the churches to all comers, and as a spin off reduce the average age of the congregation from 70 something down to about 45. I made it clear that if they didn’t want any of that then they shouldn’t appoint me. They agreed and Bp Mike witnessed the agreement. He made a point at the induction of saying that I could halve the average age, double the congregation and double the church income on five years. That was the plan.

Lots of people, well forty, turned up for the first Sunday in St James. It was more than they were expecting so everyone was pleased. I discovered at the last minute that I was doing a baptism after the main service. No one thought they ought to tell me in advance so I could visit the family. I just had to wing it as far as the service was concerned. And of course there were no baptism cards in the church so we couldn’t give one out. St Paul’s, the other church in the benefice, about half the size and more traditional, also turned out in strength.

In hindsight I should have insisted that the diocese send in a turnaround team with me, but I was left to build my own. Dag was the resident minister of St James, Nigerian, with extensive contacts in the black community; Phil was the Church Army officer for West Bromwich, but who had had a great deal to do with St James; James was the Methodist minister who had a church at Hill Top; and there was also Jan, a neighbourhood manager at Harvill’s Hawthorn estate who could give me inroads into Sandwell Partnership and funding. Added to them was the local ministers fraternal: Bill the Baptist minister and David from the Pentecostal church. We all seemed to be on the same wavelength and want the same sort of involvement of church in community. Renewal in the right way; community empowerment; growing together the spiritual and the political. There were comments about the dullness of the churches from all sides and the inability of some in them to grow in their experience.

I met up most days with Phil and Dag and we had a long discussion before, during and after morning prayers. It was all about being open and inclusive; doing new things with people who wouldn't normally be associated with churches; and developing spirituality rather than pushing dogmatism. Pretty much what I had always done, or tried to do.

Shortly after I arrived there was one of those state occasions that the church thinks is important. The churchwardens had to be wheeled out to meet the bishop and the archdeacon and get their instructions for the year. And it was all about money. "If your church doesn't pay the diocese you won't get a priest." So what about all the creative imaginative outreach stuff I had been talking about? Is that to be abandoned just because there is no way the people Phil and I want to meet would or could pay for the privilege of us being with them. It looked as if maybe the diocese wouldn’t be so supportive after all.

At the 8am service I suggested that it might be more sensible to change the service to a later time to save me hanging around for an hour as it really didn't give me time to go home and get back for the 10. But one of the two women who came said she had to get back to get the lunch on. Which means she starts getting lunch at about 8.45am. What can she cook? I unilaterally changed the service to 9.00am and never saw her again.

Then my car lost its innocence as well. I came out of church to discover no passenger window and no radio/CD player either. Autoglass said they could get to me between four and six in the morning. They came at three, though they did ring at half-two to say they were on their way, so I had a chance to wake up a bit. Then I had to get the car to a body repair shop to take the scratches off and I had to suffer the indignity of driving round in a Renault Clio for two days. Toad Radio put in a cheap Pioneer radio to save it being stolen again. They explained that Ford cd players are stolen to order for West Africans as Fords only have cassette players there. 57 had gone in the West Midlands that weekend. Shortly afterwards at the same place – outside St Paul’s Church – I found a nail had been punched through the sidewall of the tyre, maybe as retribution for putting in a Pioneer CD player. And to rub the point in, they did the same to the new tyre a couple of weeks later. It was interesting though that after the service, while I was inspecting the damage, the congregation filed out of church and passed me with a cheery goodnight. No one bothered to stop and ask if there was a problem, let alone stop to help change the tyre.

There were three schools in the parishes, though no church school. Hateley Heath was full of exciting plans to expand and get into new projects to open up to the community. Offering life-long learning, breakfast clubs, after school clubs and schemes for adults to learn alongside their children. I was invited to be part of it so I could network with all the local project organisers and get into community renewal.

We had been asked to host a couple of Malaysians. Daniel and Manee had high hopes that the people would invite them in for a feast and gather their neighbours round to hear of the love of God in far-flung Malaysia. That is what happens if you go to their churches; as I discovered when I went out a few years later. England sadly is a bit different and as expected those who did invite them round kept it very quiet. But they were also active in services so I hoped something would catch on and would really stir the place up. After the parade service one person said as she left - "I think I'll start to come every week."

They were around for ten days. They had come to look at the churches involvement in justice and care which would take about five minutes in my churches. But coming with tales of the project work they do in running free clinics and even free haircuts in their church; they could give a new angle to the narrow parochial vision of the English. I think St James had managed to raise about twenty pounds during Christian Aid week and hoped not to get involved in actually meeting the poor; especially the ones who lived next door. I ended up introducing the visitors to people outside the churches because that was where the action was and also where the people were most happy to meet them.

Church Army Phil was also hosting another two and he turned up with possibly the worst pizza I have ever had. The visitors kept saying how nice it was. Half of the inedible concoction went out for the dustmen on the assumption that even the rats would refuse to eat it overnight. I kept wishing I had said I would cook. On the Sunday, after three services, I arrived home at 8.00pm and cooked for the two visitors and myself and it took exactly half an hour. Mind you they did disappear to bed immediately afterwards.

Having them with me gave me an excuse to get around some of the groups that I had yet to make contact with. Stephen from the town team was particularly good - and not just because he gave us free mousemats and mugs. The Sandwell regeneration crowd all seemed keen to involve the churches. So it looked as if I would be able to get involved in the local community.

They didn’t have anything planned for their day off so I took them up to Wales to show them the countryside and visit St Melangell and St Tecwyn. It turned out that the Guardian of the shrine at St Melangell is Linda Mary who I was at Cardiff and Lincoln with many years ago and when we got up to Llandecwyn, Jim was busy and had asked Donald to look after the church. He had done his national service in Malaya, in Ipoh the town my two were from, and remembered enough of the language to greet them. And he had also, many years before, been at the same school as me - though quite a bit earlier.

Earlier in the week Manee had been quite concerned that I was cooking and cleaned my own house. Malaysian men tend to wait around for their wives to do it all. On one occasion Daniel even waited in the dark for his wife to switch on the light so that he could read the paper. But on their return to Malaysia I got a nice letter from Manee thanking me for my hospitality; and also for setting an example. Daniel had now started to help around the house.

As a result of all the contacts I was making I was invited to a Sandwell Partnership consultation and found lots of enthusiasm for doing something with the church hall - which is more than I had got from the church. There was great excitement about the prospect of creating new groups and building community. I had a long discussion with the healthy eating group, followed inevitably by a buffet consisting almost entirely of bread and pastry - samosas and such. They are delighted that they are now the eleventh most deprived borough in the country. It's the first time in ages they have managed to get out of the bottom ten. So cause for celebration. One speaker said we need to get more people with literacy and numeracy skills into prisons. I suggested arresting more intellectuals. I came away with lots of contacts and three more invitations to the neighbourhood management group. Everyone on the group had now invited me so I felt it should be OK if I turned up. Eventually they made me their Chair.

So I held a big conference in church to decide the way forward. As we had about forty regulars on Sundays between the two churches I expected about six to turn up. In the end twenty-five came at some point during the day - that is more than half. I gave them the usual chat about how decline was not inevitable and that it was possible to reach out to people. And it went down well. We had some wine at lunch so the afternoon session was a bit sleepy, but then I had headed it "paralytic" in the programme. It was one of my interactive Bible studies to explore what it is that prevents people coming to God. What barriers do we have to break down. In the end I asked for volunteers to join a ministry team to spearhead new thinking and ended up with a team of ten.

I eventually discovered where all my mail had gone. Despite asking the churchwardens in Aldersley to forward any personal mail from my last known address, nothing had ever arrived. Included were all my bank statements since the Bank of Scotland were congenitally incapable of getting a change of address right after their amalgamation with Halifax. And there was also an invite to a get together for all the past clergy from Sedgley. Not that I would have gone to that but it would have been nice to be asked.

Anyway when a letter that I knew had been forwarded didn't arrive I phoned the Royal Mail. They told me that they never deliver "unofficially" forwarded mail. In other words if you want them to actually deliver mail sent to an old address you have to pay them again to send it to the new address. And they will also send on all the parish stuff you don't want sent on and that you then have to send back. So all those letters over the years that have gone to the kids at Uni, or to past residents at various houses: they haven't really been delivered because the Royal Mail doesn't deliver them.

Instead they send them to Belfast where someone opens them, reads the more interesting bits and then sends them back to where they came from. But that takes months. So the person who wrote to you in the first place just thinks you are ignoring them, because like everyone else in the country they assumed that even if you have moved, someone would put the new address on the envelope and send it on, which is what we have done everywhere forever. And no one has told us it doesn't happen any more because everywhere else it does happen, but not in West Bromwich, where rules is rules and can't be broken.

Coincidentally my Bank statements arrived, correctly addressed, HBOS finally realised that the four phone calls and two letters to the five different “customer service centres” saying that I have moved, meant that I had moved. Just in time for me to set about trying to change my accounts to a bank that works.

Meanwhile the diocese, chasing me for the £20000 St James owed them, said that they would write half of it off if we used it to set up a social enterprise project based at the church. So the diocese had called my bluff and I had to act on my dreams. All I needed is the right person to get it going. The problem was there was no guarantee of funding beyond the £10000 write off; and if we didn't have it to pay the diocese we didn’t have it to put into the project. Still they gave me to the end of the year to sort it out and it did mean they were back behind the development of the church at Hill Top.

I had an interesting week which began with a woman showing an interest in setting up sure start (a preschool parent and child group) and ended by being told it couldn't happen because the church is exactly on the line between two neighbourhoods and belongs to neither for regeneration purposes. So the funding for the project might not happen after all unless I could find it from church sources. With Tony Blair’s New Labour having given up the pretence of even being a social democrat let alone a socialist party it was back to the churches to meet the needs of the people for some sort of social provision.

I was invited to a meeting to look at setting up a memorial to the people who died in the old West Bromwich workhouse. The scheme was firstly to be project based in schools and community to raise awareness about poverty and its consequences. I naively thought that it would be ongoing and the memorial would be used to generate continued interest in the issues. But no, the project was simply a way of getting grants for the memorial which would fill up an unused corner of a cemetery. It was just a way of funding yet another block of stone for an historical society to gloat over. And it wasn't even in a central position where people would see it on the way to the shops and ponder their mortality. I went to a few meetings where the focus was clearly on the design of the stone and not the social project and soon began to make my excuses and not attend further meetings.

At St Paul’s they had planned some building work, putting in a partition towards the back of church and installing a kitchen area and disabled loo. As the project had started before I arrived, I said they should follow it through as it would be silly for me to take over half way through. So they left me to liaise with the architect, finalise the funding, uncover the trust funds – not a lot really. I discovered they had arranged funding from a local charity and signed a contract for the building work thinking that the builder was the only one who needed paying. The architect had just sent in a bill for £4500 and there will be another £600 or so professional fees to find. Needless to say there was no money in the accounts and only about £100 a week from collections. Luckily the charity, knowing who they were dealing with, had allowed for it.

The project also meant getting rid of a few pews. At the meeting they left it up to me to get some idea of what we could get for them and who would want them. So I discovered from the internet that there was a glut of pews and you could hardly give them away. I dutifully reported this to the church only to be told that it had all been sorted ages ago. The local cricket club was to have them to put around the pitch. They wanted me to do it so that they could tell me I had done it wrong.

I told the church a month before the work would start at the beginning of August. When I confirmed it the weekend before and asked what they were going to do with all the stuff in the way, they said, “They haven’t given us much time have they?” Well yes actually, they gave you a month, but you ignored me so it’s up to you now. I suggested they have a site meeting to meet the contractors before they move onto site. Good idea they said. So the meeting was naturally fixed for Friday, when I should have a day off. Of course they could have taken responsibility themselves and left me out of it, but no, they wanted me there.

The church was in chaos for four months while the work went on. Webb's Funerals booked a funeral into the church without telling anyone. They left a message while I was on holiday, which naturally I didn’t receive. They only contacted Dag after they had told the family the arrangements and put my name on the service cover. As he didn't hear until late in the week, he couldn't warn the builders to clear the church and arrange to be out of the way. We never did receive official written notification that the funeral was on.

Only as the work was being completed were we told that the disabled toilet, which was a major reason for the project, cannot be connected to the mains drainage because South Staffs water have built a new four foot storm drain across everyone’s frontage and no new connections can be made to the foul drain. So we can invite the disabled in and have complied with the Disability Access Act as long as no one uses the loo. No problem the architect said, we’ll put in a septic tank. It won’t need emptying that often. So in it goes in a corner of the churchyard. What she didn’t tell us what that she had planned its capacity based on the existing church use. But the whole point of having it was to increase church use. So it needed emptying every six months at £250 a time.

As usual baptisms, weddings and funerals were a source of conflict. I had arranged a funeral complete with hymns, with the family. Only to be told by those that knew her in church that “she would have hated those, you’ll have to change them.” Of course they could have told me what she had planned in the first place but preferred to wait until I had made arrangements with the family so that they could make me look stupid.

Then someone in church told me what a shit I really am. What took them so long to find out, I wondered? It was all because I had suggested to her son that he might like to make a slight effort to pretend to believe if he wanted me to baptise his child, who at that moment was creating havoc around the church. My attitude was that people with half a brain would realise that you shouldn't tell the vicar you don't believe the crap he is peddling, but your mother wants the kid done so it has to happen. But of course the idea of a connection between spirituality and the practices of the Church of England is so alien to the popular consciousness that it was I who was being offensive and having an attitude.

Anyway what was really bizarre was that I did agree to go ahead with the service - I even offered the five minute full immersion option, and suggested that I substitute bleach for the tap water for the extra clean rising again. But nothing was good enough so they are going down the road.

At another baptism interview I was asked to ban the grandfather of the child. He was alcoholic, the grandfather, not the child. And had rarely been there for his daughter, so she didn’t want him interrupting the service. Even more likely if he was banned I thought. So I gave her a copy of Philip Larkin’s poem “They fuck you up, your mum and dad…’ She pinned it to the fridge for a week or so and then rang to say she had invited her father. In the end he was as good as gold, the grandfather not the child. The power of good poetry.

And just to prove that it was possible to increase congregations through baptism, one couple said they would start coming so their daughter could join the Sunday School, another that their daughter would like to join the rainbows. I just hoped they would be welcomed when they turned up.

I found out that someone wasn't talking to me because of something they imagined me saying several weeks (months?) previously. As many of the people in the churches were always on the look out for some way to put me in the wrong, or to take what I said the wrong way, it was impossible to keep up with what they thought I might have said. If they had really known what I really thought then they would have been justified in being offended. But usually I kept that to myself.

Chris was the secretary of the Tenants and Residents Association on one of the most run down estates around. It was due for a revamp and I had met her a couple of times at meetings about that. But she wanted to get involved in what we get up to in St James hall. I explained it wasn't much apart from the uniformed organisations. But there are a couple of groups that meet. A craft club - a spin off of the scouts and guides. Largely producing cards and gifts for the couple of sales we hold each year. And there is the model rail club that puts on an annual exhibition.

Chris wanted to know more and in particular whether they would take part in family learning week in October. As neither group has looked much beyond its own membership I wasn't sure, but Chris remained hopeful and persuaded them to reach out to the community by putting on a workshop or two that week. Which all proved that it is the community which is pushing for the church to be more open.

Well we had the first meeting of the team. At first they didn't know what to expect as they have always simply had to manage the church before and I was giving them some spiritual and mission stuff to do. But it went well for a first go and seemed to promise some hope for the future. Only H, the organist, managed to put a damper on things. He is of the Spring Harvest persuasion. Sing lots of choruses and all will be well - that sort of thing. But he is convinced that everything is in decline and will never turn around. So when Phil countered with the news that a third of all churches were growing. He simply replied, "Well they're not really Christian are they". So for him a sign of true Christianity is if your congregation grows old and dies out.

The local community hit the headlines with the trial of a twelve year old who raided the local grocery store, a couple of streets from me, with a sawn off shotgun. The Asian store owner suggested that the lad shouldn't have the cigarettes he had asked for and gave him crisps and pop instead. Meanwhile the owners mum, talked to him about his life - forced out of his foster home and thrown out of school. When the police arrived they in their infinite wisdom took him off to "local authority care" where he could learn that he really should remember to load the gun next time and how to buy crack with the proceeds of such robberies.

Once again they have proved the "humiliate the vicar" theory. I discovered there is no organist for church on Sunday and there is no one out there prepared to play. I was in a panic trying to phone everyone I could think of. Then I decided no problem, we'll do without. There were some CDs but in the end we sang unaccompanied just to show the organist wasn’t indispensible.

I was asked to take a service in one of those churches which don't approve of women priests, or even those who have been in contact with them. Quite why they asked me as I had participated in the first ordinations of women was not clear. So I went along, reading up on the arcane practices of the Roman Missal on the way.

When I got there I found that there was a server there to help me. So I approached him for a run down on how things should be done. "Don't know Father" was the happy reply. Do I use the nave lectern or do the whole service from the altar? "Don't know Father" Well, for instance, do you have three readings or two. "Don't know Father, I have only been doing this for a year." None of them knew how to turn the boiler on without assistance either. Perhaps we could try to press the button labeled "on"? But that had been too difficult for them since their vicar left. So they know that men priests are the only valid ones but they haven't noticed anything else that happens around them. As long as there is a man at the front everything is OK. Though mostly they don't really notice who is at the front: man, woman, or animal, vegetable or mineral.

I began to hold some family-centred services. For the first of them I had put on an early morning service for those that wanted communion and the whole of the normal congregation turned up to avoid being polluted by contact with children. It worked well for those that did come - largely the scouts and guides and a few parents. It had been written by the leaders and involved everyone. So there is a church in the making. All we have to do is hive off the others to a time and place when they can do no harm.

When I asked for help with a drug awarness course, just someone to do some coffee and tea for the participants; I turned up to find they had got the cups out of the cupboard and filled the kettle. Of course they wouldn't turn up themselves, they might meet someone from outside their church. Although it is possible that they thought I was going to invite the addicts. When I asked someone why no one had come to help I was met with the complaint that she had done a lot in the past but never been appreciated. So I suggested that if they had once opened the door to someone younger than themselves the church might be active and there would be others to take over the jobs. But they kept everyone else out and are now claiming that the diocese wants to close them down. In reality if anyone else had tried to do “her jobs” they would have been sent packing. Another woman asked if I was going to a Mothers Union meeting and on being told I was on holiday that week phoned someone else to tell them I had no interest in their meeting and I was a dead loss.

Meanwhile Phil had found a couple of gap year students and I managed to get it into their remit that they would survey the needs of the area as well as the unattached youth work they were coming to do. The money that was supposed to there for them was never confirmed and couldn't be granted till October, if then. The students arrived at the end of September and their accommodation had to be paid for from August. One of the churches had to pay but was desperate to get the money back eventually.

When they arrived at St James we discovered that Hayley and Jenny were from rather smart areas of the country and used to big lively churches. One was a Baptist and this was her first contact with the arcane rituals of the CofE. Of course no one sat with her to help her through the service and I tried vainly to indicate which page we were on while trying to keep the service going. No one bothered to speak to her after the service either or offer her the tea and coffee that the regulars were sharing at the back; so she will have got a fairly accurate picture of what the church is like. I hoped she also grasped the fact that the faith can exist without church structures.

Just as they arrived the funding disappeared - the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund wanted us to do all sorts of record keeping to prove that we will have an effect on the anti-social behaviour around here. Making the arcane distinction between outputs and outcomes, that sort of thing. Whether persuading the churchgoers to offer tea after the service to newcomers instead of keeping it to themselves would count towards the target I wasn’t told. It was just trying to cut the anti-social behaviour of the average churchgoer. In the end we put in applications to two charitable trusts and hoped the money would turn up.

The letter to request an emergency payment from a local charity wasn't delivered until after their meeting. I dropped it into the wrong letterbox - one of those roads where there are few house numbers and there are a lot of infill houses so twice as many houses as numbers. Number 8 is several doors away from number 6 not next door as I supposed. The main bid was now looking further away than ever. The plot to make us jump through ever-smaller hoops seems to have been a ploy to save some funding cash as the budget has been over allocated. We are being squeezed out.

I began two enquirers groups. After all the doubters and those who said no young people were interested in religion, nine turned up followed later in the evening by two adults. The youth group was a laugh from start to finish. They don't take anything seriously, which was great. Whether anything sunk in I doubt but at least they now think church can be fun. Then at the end I decided to leave in the prayer time though they were really hyper by then - maybe drip-feeding them Tango throughout the session is not a good idea. But in the prayers they were coming out with really deep stuff about the people in the hurricane zone and the homeless and showing a concern which puts the normal adult congregation to shame.

One evening I found the scout leader was cutting the grass - part of a clean-up to try to be able to see the war memorial for Remembrance Day. So I thought I had better mention: “You do know that the old vicarage has been sold and is being done up don't you. Please let the scout parents know not to park in the drive as it is in use at all times.” Later. His wife, Nicola, guide and scout leader, stormed at me – “you can’t expect people to help if all they get is their ears chewed off about parking and never get any thanks for all that they do it’s no wonder no-one does anything if that’s all the thanks they get....” I tried to explain I was talking about one of the parents who had blocked a JCB the week before. Next time, I later told the new house owner, drive the JCB over the cars and ask them to move afterwards.

After years of serving on committees I was beginning to take a break; but I thought I should turn up at least once to Churches Together. It fulfilled my expectations and was as dire as it could possibly be. Are these people really the best that the churches have or do they just send people they can't find real jobs for. There was no spark of life in any of them and the whole thing was taken over by one of those house fellowship leaders who won't be given responsibility by any church so he went off to start his own.

From time to time Rural Deans have tried to get me to clergy chapter by holding it at my house. On this occasion the Archdeacon (of Lichfield) was coming. I couldn't take him too seriously as I knew him at college thirty-five years ago. It was all about the usual lack of money and shortage of clergy. So they want a few more posts to be cut and the rest of us to do twice as much for the same pay. It was effectively making the clergy personally responsible for the parish’s failure to pay the diocese. There seemed to be no recognition of whether the area needs the church, just can it pay. There were the normal comments about how the churches are full of the retired who live on fixed incomes and can't afford to give any more; and I dearly wanted to say: so what is it that puts everyone else off then? But I kept quiet.

Meanwhile I was asked to go to a house where strange things had been going on. The mother had been involved at one time in the local spiritualist church and her daughter had an imaginary friend who had become rather more real than imaginary. As I talked to them it became clear that the daughter wanted to keep her friend and was not in the least frightened by the experience. But in subsequent visits the mother asked me to bless the house and lay to rest any disturbed presences that were there. The daughter made sure she was away for the evening.

Then I went to a day in Birmingham on Small Pilgrim Places. Based on Jim Cotter's model at Llandecwyn. Providing space for people to find quiet and peace in the midst of the chaos. It’s something I would like to have developed but in the urban wilderness rather than out in the country somewhere. There seem to be lots of them in the countryside where people can get peace and quiet anyway - provided the local hunt doesn't come through. But in towns and cities there is an assumption that you like all the hastle and noise. The meeting was in a wonderful church in Ladywood in Birmingham which showed what could be done. They have spent over £1m on it in the past ten years and now it's used for drama and music as well as meetings and the ususal services.

I went to a conference to review my first six months. I could only report a 30% increase in congregation since I arrived so they probably still think the church is dead.

I held a second meeting to get the community onside to redevelop the hall. This time with the whole community, not just the church. To try to show the church how much the hall was needed. The local neighbourhood manager, Jan, was there together with the sort of people who are likely to use the hall if it ever gets revamped. This time there was a sense that things were really happening locally. We introduced our two gap year students and talked through their contribution, the local "Older People's Champion" (yes, really) talked about the groups she was getting going. Out of it I got one offer to be the project manager for our scheme for three months in the new year. And Jan also gave her full support suggesting that the next year should be the year of St James - especially necessary as the regeneration zone runs up the road in front of the hall but doesn't include it so funding will be dodgy. Needless to say no one from the church showed any interest in the scheme or offered to help.

After a couple of meetings with the Sandwell partnership I had the promise of at least £600000 to do the job. Even though it might cost upwards of £1m in the end there were two other groups competing to give money to it. One was Regenco who were charged with the commercial regeneration of the area but who also had to commit part of their funding to community development; and Riverside Housing who were active in the Harvills Hawthorn estate and who also were looking for community benefit.

We had the confirmation service for the young people who have been exploring faith over the previous three months. A hundred people were in church and the Bishop of Lichfield came down. So after it was all over did anyone say how good it was, or how nice to see a full church. Of course not, instead they carried on with their usual moans and gripes at me and at each other. What we needed to do was think of other ways to involve the teenagers as we desparately needed to keep them away from any of the other church members. So I left the family service the next week up to Hayley and Jenny and had no idea what they planed to do.

But there is something about counting chickens… One of the gap year students broke her leg. Hayley had gone back to her boyfriend for the weekend and fell down the stairs. So she will be in plaster for a bit. She didn’t seem the sort to carry on regardless, on crutches. And on the project Jenny isn't allowed to stay on her own. So if Hayley didn't come back till Christmas it would all be off. And naturally at the same time, after keeping us waiting for three months, the various trusts all came up with the money for the youth project; so we now had twice what we needed but no one to run it.

And then they had a go at me. "Why haven't you got the heating fixed"; "I can't fill in this finance form for the diocese, you'll have to do it"; "Npower have sent our bill to the burnt out vicarage again, haven't you told them yet"... Well no actually, none of those things were my job; they could find someone else capable of lifting a phone. I had spent the day bringing thirty people into the church who wouldn't otherwise have been there for a neighbourhood conference; produced a service that channelled healing to a dozen people. But I ended up looking the miserable sod who won't help people. And no one knows why the security lights at church only go on during the day and never at night. Nor does anyone show any interest in doing anything about it.

Myers Briggs and Belbin list the personality types but forget to include one that appears more often than any other. The Complainer is a feature of most parishes. Although most people at St James complained some of the time and some complained most of the time. There was one who complained all of the time.

One Sunday I preached on the two men in the temple, which was the gospel of the day. One claimed to be doing all the right things, seen in the right places and at the front whenever something is going on and he looked down on the other. The other hid in a corner and simply said: Have mercy on me. You know the story. So I preached the usual stuff about being humble and not scapegoating people like asylum seekers etc.

Anyway at the “peace” would you believe, The Complainer comes up and tells me loudly, so everyone can hear, how offensive it had been. Who did I think I was to put people down? She had run the church for fifty years and kept it going when no one else would and all I could do was criticise. As you can imagine the rest of the church were fascinated as I tried to continue with the service.

I wasn’t too bothered as she had had a go at me the first time I had met her and in fact every time since. But what was really interesting is that the Nicola playing the organ had watched it all in stunned silence and then turned to me and said – she’s acting just like that bloke from the reading isn’t she. So no need to think of an illustration for the sermon. It just happens in front of you. And there were some people at least who could make a connection between what they heard and real life.

Then in the evening at St Paul’s; same reading and sermon and there’s a bloke at the back; the last time he came, he had gone out shouting and swearing – we assume Tourettes rather than disapproval – but this time he remained calm throughout, has a rational conversation with a couple of people afterwards and said he enjoyed the sermon.

It’s the ones who think they are sane you have to watch.

One of the many complaints The Complainer made against my ministry is that I don't smile all the time. She is possibly the most miserable of all the people I have ever met. She then went into a great long tirade about how her father had told her on his deathbed to keep smiling. She didn’t appreciate me telling her that I had always been suspicious of those who go round with a fixed grin on their faces all the time. It looks as if their teeth have been wired together. Even with the most appalling news they will carry on grinning. Someone once told me to cheer up: "Think about all the children dying in the world", she said. That really cheered me up.

Phil came up with a plan to send Mary and Joseph around the parish to see if they can find somewhere to stay in the weeks up to Christmas. All was explained back in September. It had featured in several meetings and was given a page in the magazine. But still they said more people might take part if they were told about it.

After several months changing my accounts to the Co-op, I discovered that they had simply kept for themselves the cash I had given them to pay my Visa bill. Visa then charged me £30 for not paying and the Co-op couldn't find what happened to the money. It didn't help that they had been taking lessons from the A&E department and simply put me in a cubicle and forgot about me for an hour while they dealt with simpler issues till I went storming out telling them what to do with their accounts. So I started all over again shifting to another bank. They finally got round to paying the visa bill in December three months late.

One of the other schools in the parish was Kent Close which the LEA wanted to close. It missed out on being the worst school in the country by a very fine margin. As there were only 7% at ks2 level 4 it seemed difficult for other schools to beat, but one in Rotherham managed it. I went to the parents meeting on the closure and one of the parents said that local people actually want their children to go there and won't send them anywhere else if it does close. Which sort of illustrated the aspirations of the people round on the estate. Level three at Key Stage 2 is all they expect so they are content if that is all that is delivered. They would be rather frightened of a school that expected half of them to get up to level 4 and a few to level five. Which is what is taken for granted in the school they were to merge with; less than half a mile away with a similar catchment area but which has high expectations and high results - 47% at ks2 level 4. So it can be done.

Watching Jerry Springer the Opera though made me sympathise with some of the inarticulate people who struggled to get heard and are certain the world is against them, which it is. The parents determined to keep their school open had difficulty putting two words together and could only express anger and frustration. If only the public meetings had been run like the JS show they would be in their element and the annoying people from the LEA would run for their lives.

The gap year students lasted just three months. Doing unattached youth work in one of the roughest bits of the Midlands didn’t really seem to suit them and they had just settled in to the local uniformed groups and some work at a Methodist drop in centre as intergenerational outreach. The idea of going out of the church onto the streets proved too much. All their friends were in nice big middle class evangelical churches which had large youth teams. So they gave us an ultimatum - find them a full time Christian youth team to belong to by the end of this week or they would go. It seemed a bit bizarre though. If we did have a big youth team doing the outreach then why would we need them in the first place? They complained that we were using them to do our youth work for us. “Well yes. That's why you're here.” What were Oasis doing sending teams into churches that already had teams? And I did have a bit of experience of getting ultimatums from women, and the answer then and always is "goodbye".

And what if they had had to deal with the situation that Ali and Dave had faced. At 18 Ali was driving an aid convoy through Bosnia with the shelling of Sarajevo in the distance, Dave had guns pointed at him in Bosnia too. In Africa and India respectively they had turned up 6000 miles from home to find they were not expected, most people didn’t speak English, and no one knew what to do with them. In Africa Ali had to make a quick exit from Zimbabwe to Swaziland as violence erupted at the time of the 2000 presidential election. But Oasis gap year workers can’t cope for six months in a Church of England church in West Bromwich.

But their departure led to another of those really good meetings with the local regeneration people and the youth team. They all wanted the project to continue (we were afraid they'd call back the funding). This time we just had to make more of an effort to recruit someone who is street savvy and can work the area.

Earlier in the week I had to go to take an assembly with fifty of the little local angels in Harvills Hawthorn School. And they couldn't have been nicer; polite, welcoming knowledgeable and interested. So what happens to them between seven and twelve to turn them into asbo fodder? Is it just that everyone loses interest in them and they live up to expectations? Not that they are unintelligent, the best item on the neighbourhood management group was the one about the local kids putting carpet gripper down to puncture the police bike tyres. Then when the PC runs after them, their mates trash the bike. Seemed to me to suggest some ability to plan and work as a team.

The teenagers simply needed someone to listen to them on their terms. I was in the church with the churchwarden when six of the local young people came into church. The warden cowered in a corner and asked me to get rid of them. They were always hanging around and were probably the ones who had burnt the vicarage down. So I ushered the warden into the kitchen and told her to make me some coffee and went to talk to them. Had they ever been in church before – no, they had always been chased away. Did they know what went on there – no, what were these things (the altar, lectern, pulpit) for? After a brief run down of what was around them and saying this was a place we could bring our problems to God; I asked if there was anything they were worried about. They said that a friend of theirs had died suddenly on the football field and they hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral, which was family only. Did they want me to pray for him? No not really. OK, I said, I’ll keep the warden out of the way, stay as long as you like. So they sat quietly for twenty minutes in the stillness, these six who had never been allowed in a church before, and remembered their friend. As they left they each came back to thank me for allowing them that time.

The builders turned up again at St Paul's and finally agreed to put in a sink that doesn't pour water all over your feet. Though they still couldn't get hot water to go all the way across the room to the sink in the disabled loo for people to wash their hands in (rather than to the cistern to flush with). The MD of the bullders couldn't find the church when I tried to force him to come to see the problems his workers had created. They have been on site for six months (for a six week contract) and he still had no idea where it was. In pre GPS car navigation systems they relied on the A to Z and the West Midlands one didn’t include our Bagnall Street in its index so everyone went across town to another Bagnall Street entirely and wondered why there was no church there.

The Complainer kept up the complaints. I was keeping everyone in the dark and no one knew what was going on etc. I waited till the service was finished before pointing out I was as much in the dark as she was. They know I have had meetings about redeveloping the hall. But of course no one wants the bother of attending. So they leave it to me and then complain I am doing it behind their backs.

In the new year (2005) the hall was finally condemned and might have had to close before I had time to plan the rebuild; there were now cracks appearing in the "new" church as well. The treasurer also announced she was giving up in March after just one year and the person who had promised to run an over-sixties club in the newly refurbished St Paul's has pulled out before the first meeting.

Needless to say this was simply a misunderstanding. She had said she could only do it on Tuesdays so that is what I had arranged. Then she said she couldn't do it at all. So I said I would do it for a few weeks to see how it went. Then she said she was able to do it but couldn't do Tuesdays, so if it moved to Thursdays she could do it. So of course it started on Thursdays despite the fact that the magazine and a hundred handouts over Christmas had said it’s on Tuesday.

I got a call from a couple who have a "health ministry" that seems to consist of selling a bottle of pills guaranteed to cure Alzheimer’s, downs syndrome, multiple sclerosis, prostate AIDS and skin cancer. They tell me if I sell them through the church all my congregation will go out and convert the world.  Apparently lots of churches do. They had managed to get one of my congregation to sign up for a pack of pills each month for a mere £130. I declined to take up their offer and persuaded my parishioner she had been conned.

Meanwhile I put to the church council the exciting prospect of a new million pound hall being built in the semi-derelict shell they have created. Did they jump at the chance? Course not. A social enterprise would mean they lost control of the building. Only if we retain control, they said (they would – through appointing a majority of trustees); we will have to pay to use it, they said (no, the lease could provide free use for a number of occasions each year). Still they weren’t satisfied. Give me £150000 by Easter and you retain control I said, and anyway look what your control has done to it. And they had agreed at my appointment that that is what they were going to support. They only said that to get a new vicar, they had to say what the Bishop wanted, they said.

James had had a similar response from the Methodists. They had formed from two churches but the two congregations remained fiercely separate, one in the morning and one in the evening. Their building held a lunch club but no one from the congregation would support it and it was sometimes left to the minister and his wife to produce the lunches. As part of the social enterprise it would have some refurbishment and a management input, which would relieve them of the admin of the hall. But no – they too wanted to retain control of a half empty building.

The following Sunday I saw that the guide leaders were gathered around the organ. They had tried to get a bit of a choir going but there is the great divide between them and the rest. Especially with the “normal” organist, H. So as they approached the organ he took refuge in the coffee corner. They in turn put a CD in the player so loud that no-one else could hear themselves think and made an effort to learn a new song for the parade service next month. Then later someone said how nice it was to see the group leaders there. It would have been a whole lot nicer if someone had spoken to them, or, heaven forbid, joined them.

The same thing at St Paul’s in the evening. It was the patronal festival and they had arranged tea and coffee as a special treat. Only they didn't tell anyone except their friends - not even their relatives as it happens. So an elite group of about a dozen stayed behind to scoff the tea and cakes. I pleaded another engagement and left.

Well it was the day of the big meeting. Launching the Parish Mapping to judge the needs of the area. And the people massed together to ensure their will is heard. The reps from the council and the community associations were equally stunned by the turnout. Forty people representing all the hall users plus a few from the community. Oli, the churches Link Officer, had prepared 1000 questionnaires and expected to get a few hundred out. In the event no one voted to close the hall, though there were one or two murmurings at the end, all they were worried about was whether they would retain control. Only two people signed up to be part of a development group, so it looked like everyone else wasn't bothered about exercising control, they just wanted to have it. Take power, prevent others having it and then don't use it. Easy really. But they took the questionnaires in handfuls, until only about 200 were left.

There was progress on the youth project too. I met with Nicola W, the youth leader from Open Heaven and she was really interested in getting youth work going in the area. They were an Assemblies of God church plant in Friar Park; an offshoot of Junction 10 church at Walsall. I had worked closely with the Assemblies in Sedgley and so knew they were OK. Open Heaven had a big youth team and were training young people in youth work so we could get a couple of part time workers in to do the work the gap year students had left unfinished. We agreed that things could move fast in the area and that there were good things happening. But the problem was the funders. They wanted to withdraw funding and make us reapply as if it was a new project. Meanwhile time is running out. The two people most likely to get involved came to the end of their contracts with Open Heaven at the end of the month and we needed to get to them before they got other jobs. But the funders wouldn’t meet that quickly. So once again the problem was, do we employ them in the hope the funding will come through or abandon the project?

But with every step forward there have to be a couple of steps back in the C of E. There was another stand up fight at St James. The trouble was that the Bishop has called his Lent appeal "Family Matters". That was a red rag to The Complainer. Quite what she objected to, in what was essentially an innocuous and therefore inevitably ineffective campaign of back to basics, I never did work out. But blood was almost shed over the suggestion that we should love our families. (I had at one point tried to find what it was that had damaged The Complainer so much, either in her family or in her relation to the church, but never got anywhere.)

On the way out of church the St James treasurer decided to say that she was going to do the annual accounts her way and wasn't bothered if it was illegal. The problem was that the Charities Act changed the way churches run their books. No longer was it enough to keep everything in a cardboard box somewhere full of post it notes and envelopes covered in scribbled sums, with an exercise book where it was more or less put together. We were expected to account properly for the money taken off the people.

But in my churches at least it never happened. At St James there was just the one signature on the accounts, the accounts were kept as a cashbook without detailed analysis, no record was kept of amounts restricted to particular purposes and I was never given any idea of how much we had or how much we were spending. Everything was put down as gift aid to get the tax back regardless of where it came from, even car boot sales income was counted as gift aid. So the place was wide open to prosecution on any number of counts.

So from time to time I said it should be done properly. And then all hell broke loose. It’s as if I had propositioned the woman. She was so offended that I should suggest that she was doing it wrong. She has been doing bookkeeping since 1825 and knows it all. She claimed no one will help her but I offered to take her through the new system, as did the treasurer of St Paul’s. The diocese run courses for treasurers and will give advice. There are sample accounts available to show how to do it, and even account books already set up which just need filling in and which make it simple to keep everything in the right place. It’s actually easier to do it properly. But of course it all came down to her pride in her own righteousness. So I got it in the neck.

Gradually the people around me announced they were leaving. James the local Methodist had decided to leave after a couple of years. And the Churches Link, represented by Oli, who were doing my social audit didn’t get their grant renewed and so wouldn't exist after March. Which meant my hall project was up in the air as funding would be dependent on the results of the social audit. I started to feel I was not sure I would make one year, let alone two. Oli did resurface and collect the questionnaires so the Hall project moved on a stage. And the neighbourhood management group started doing some leadership training based at the church which Jan wanted me to be a part of -"as a key member of the group". But the project manager became unobtainable we needed him to put in applications for funding.

There was an attempt to get churches to work together in "cluster groups" in anticipation of the day when there would be only one priest in the whole West Midlands and churches had to run themselves. Anyway the group I was put in didn’t include the neighbouring churches as you might imagine, but lumped together churches on opposite sides of West Bromwich which had nothing in common and were from opposite ends of the theological spectrum. We had been told to make a few suggestions for a programme for the bishop when he came in April. I developed a day for my end of the group, which would show the Bishop the good, and the bad, only to be told to wait till the meeting. At the meeting one of the other clergy, having started by saying that she didn't want to push her church forward, then went on to dictate how the day should go, simply wiping out all the plans I had suggested. So it was back to square one. I was left with the tail end of the visit when he had seen all the great things the other churches had to offer and was too tired to take in any more. Then I got an email - well five actually - from my neighbourhood manager buddy. Jan had got excited about the coming of the bishop and had lots of people to introduce him to, which will prove there is life outside the churches and that the churches have concerns outside their usual navel gazing.

I had tried to introduce meaningful services on Sunday nights but all the people wanted were those dreadful "Songs of Praise" nights, with lots of meaningless choruses congratulating God on choosing people like us. And then naturally they had to read "Footprints". I'm sure that this is just one of those Readers Digest staffers ideas of cosy piety written in the 20s - like "Go Placidly..." But it has entered iconic status. What it is actually saying is that God is just there to prop us up. We don't need to work through the hard times, God will carry us then. But it could be that at those times God's footprint isn't beside us because his boot is firmly in our backside telling us to get on with life and stop whingeing. As usual everyone came out saying what a wonderfully uplifting service it was and I went home and had a stiff slug of Te Bheag.

I abandoned the St James Lent course as there were no footsteps at all in the snow up to the church. I had after all pointed out to them just how significant it was in terms of drawing the people together. But as that's the last thing they want they didn't bother coming. At St Paul’s I tried to start a lunchtime session of meditation and prayer for peace. After three weeks of freezing in a bitterly cold church I managed to persuade them to award me the key to the boiler room. Given the key, I turned the boiler on and six people came.

Much of the two years in West Bromwich was taken up trying to change the signatures on the Trust accounts. No one had bothered with them for years and most of the signatories were dead or long moved away. In one case even the bank couldn’t tell us who the signatories were; in another they claimed the account had been closed but couldn’t say by whom, when or where the money had gone. One of the forms to change the signatures came back because only one of the former signatories had signed and not two. The previous vicar probably wasn't a signatory but I got him to sign anyway, the bank didn’t know any different.

One Sunday I thought I was ready for them. Some hope.
“Where’s the simnel cake?” “What simnel cake?”
“We always have simnel cake, it’s Mother’s Day”
“You really don’t want to try my simnel cake”
“But we should have it”
“I am not responsible for providing it”
“We’ve normally had it every year.”
As I didn’t know there was supposed to be one, let alone who should have made one, I refused to feel guilty about it.
Then: “Why didn’t you ask me?”
“Ask what” “About the candles”
“What about the candles?” “You said they shouldn’t be changed.”
Every week the candles are changed and new ones replace the hardly used ones from the week before which simply pile up in a box in the vestry. The church was £20000 in debt it seemed a small way to save a little. I had spent six weeks trying to find who the mystery person was who changed them but no one would tell me. But of course they could tell her. “I did ask who it was but no-one seemed to know.”
“Well if you’ve got anything to say, you can say it to my face.”
No doubt there were people celebrating another brick in the wall; another little division in the church.

No mention of course of the 40 young people in church that Sunday, the hard work of the brownie leader preparing the service, which we dedicated to her gran who has just died. So I got my own back by announcing to the whole congregation – “There’s tea and coffee at the back for everyone today.” There was a rapid scramble to get a few more cups out. And tight little clusters quickly formed to ensure that newcomers, tea in hand, were left outside the circle. And I notice as I leave that the cup cakes still sit untouched in the Tupperware, they at least were to be protected from strangers.

As usual I was in trouble for not knowing what went on in Holy Week. I did ask the church council and at a couple of other meetings but then as usual they waited to tell me when I had already organised something else. So they told me that they usually have a Passover meal and hand washing. Hang on, I said, you mean foot washing. No, hand washing.
Foot washing is a memorial of Jesus stripping off and washing his disciples feet. It shows we are dedicated to serve each other and the poor. I've even done it in the past with a bit of aromatherapy oil to get the feet smelling nice after.

But hand washing. The only hand washing they could possibly mean is where Pilate washed his hands of responsibility for the crucifixion and indicated that it meant nothing to him what happened to Jesus. So yes, hand washing was more appropriate at Hill Top. Maybe I should have introduced it after all.

In the end the young people turned up in droves for Good Friday morning at St James. I got them making donkeys from pipe cleaners and laminated crosses to take home and we all had hot cross buns. I made my usual edible Easter garden. Of course no one from the normal congregation came when the young people were around But the more formal Good Friday devotions afterwards attracted only two people, the assistant priest and the Church Army captain; and then hardly anyone bothered to turn up for Easter Day, so few of the supposed "normal" congregation celebrated Easter at all.

Down at St Paul's meanwhile I had decided to do the full Holy Week works for the first time ever there. And with an ASA (Average Sunday Attendance) of 18 we had 14 on Maundy Thursday, 16 at Good Friday Tenebrae and 18 for the Saturday Easter vigil services. What a difference half a mile makes.

I had chatted to one of the Archdeacons about everything at the Maundy Thursday do at the cathedral and he said it sounded as if St James don't deserve to have a church. Which is true but where does that leave the new youth congregation that is developing there.

Of course after that all the St James crowd went off to Spring Harvest to tell God how wonderful they are.  And with them away St James had a different feel about it this. If only they could all stay on in Minehead and carry on annoying God from there and leave the rest of us to build a real congregation in Hill Top.

But with Easter came resurrection. The funding for the youth project came just in time, at least for the next year and maybe a bit longer. And so did our new leaders, Charlie and Gemma. They were young and had so many ideas; and more importantly they were used to working in the area after growing up on the streets of Walsall (literally in Charlie’s case). I them to get some proper youth worship going with their band; they had not one but two youth bands to hand. Suddenly the angels might be able to get out of the box.

Then there was the monthly neighbourhood management group which always lifted my spirits. The tutor who was supposed to be training us - so that I could get an NVQ level 3 in management! - didn't turn up so we just talked about the area and what needed doing. Mainly communication and motivation it seems. It got a lot done in a couple of hours and established contact across a set of local groups who otherwise wouldn't meet. Over the next couple of months we met fortnightly so that I had something to look forward to.

Whenever I do anything in the garden, the cuttings, weeds, clippings and grass go onto the compost heap. There the hedge trimmings lose their leaves, most cuttings rot away happily and everything turns into reasonable mulch by the time spring comes. So in the spring I sort through the heap and take out all the woody bits which haven't rotted and bag them up to take to the recycle bins at the tip. There they are supposed to shred them and compost them further so that I can buy them back later in the year to put back on the garden. It’s known as recycling.

But not in Sandwell. When I arrived at the tip I was told not to throw plastic in the bins. Well I wasn't. I was emptying the bags into the bin and then throwing the bags in the general rubbish bin. But no - it all had to go in the general rubbish. It might be contaminated by plastic. Eight bags of ready-made compost material that just needed shredding. Six months of preparation time and about five days work went into the landfill.

I came back off holiday to take a funeral. Joan had been a stalwart of the church. MU member, always helping at fairs, that sort of thing. She had also been a nurse all her life. Worked in London for a time at the Royal Free. They wanted her to be a Sister but she chose to come back to look after her parents and nurse in the local hospital. Then she became a district nurse. That was her life. She did marry - the son of one of the patients, when she was in her forties. She never lived in a big house, or travelled much, or met famous people. She simply cared for those she knew and who she was able to look after.

On the same day the Pope’s funeral was happening a long way away. Well at Joan's funeral about twenty people celebrated her life. Not a head of state among them, so we didn't need to close the roads. But then she didn't tell people that condoms cause Aids, or defend paedophile priests, or protect dictators who had killed thousands of their people. In church she was more interested in making it a welcoming place than in controlling what people thought or in creating empires. We went back to the sheltered housing where she lived and had sausage rolls and tea.

So which is the Saint? Which life reflects the call of God to humility and simplicity - to live simply that others may simply live?

Then it was time for the annual meetings. The difficult one was at St James where there was really no one I would choose to have on the committee and quite a few I simply couldn’t work with. I noticed The Complainer picking up a nomination form; if she were elected (by default as there wouldn't be enough people standing) the committee wouldn't function for a year. In the event the usual suspects got themselves elected and my mortal enemy refrained from putting herself on the committee which would have meant permanent conflict. As expected no one will be treasurer so that disaster area will continue. As hardly anyone has given anything recently there is no problem there.

The Complainer started banging on about why anyone should give anything anyway. There are supposed to be charities to support churches like this and shouldn't the Church Commissioners do more. Well, I said, if the Church Commissioners killed off a few of the retired clergy then they might have the money, but shouldn't they give it to churches that were doing something for themselves and not support those where people simply couldn't be bothered. She also moaned about how she had been housebound for six weeks up to Easter and no one had gone to fetch her to church. Well no, we were too busy enjoying the peace and quiet. She then pointed out how good her local church had been (she lives four miles away) so we all started encouraging her to go there instead.

The Bishop and the Archdeacon came for their visit. As I expected a couple of people from the deanery gate-crashed my bit of the day and made it impossible for me to get to have my say on how I felt about the parishes - which I had thought was the idea of the visit. All they did was compare how things were in my parishes with their own - which supposedly put them in a better light than simply taking the Bishop around their places in the morning would have done.

At the Diocesan Clergy Conference the sycophants had surrounded the Bishops and Archdeacons as if their lives depended on it. The Archdeacon who I had told on Maundy Thursday how bad things were studiously ignored me.

I took a day off and went up to Dunham Massey with a friend. Which would have been nice except they don't open the house when I am there. It's only open on days when I am working. So only the gardens are open. But when we walked through the open gates and under the archway and up to the garden we were stopped by the usual retired brigadier type.

"Tickets please." "We are members" – we show the cards. "You still need tickets." "Can we have two tickets then." "No - you have to go back to the gatehouse." So back we go to discover a room hidden in the archway dispensing tickets. Then back to the garden guardian who gets his big moment of power clipping our two tickets.

So do the tickets show how many visitors that day, or that we are members and not simply ordinary people. Of course not. They were both the same with the same number 000001. Should I have told them that they could fix the machine to get the number to go round so that when the big man from head office calls it will not look as if they have only had one visitor all year. I decide against it.

Usually St Paul’s were a refreshing break from the terrors that were St James but then St Paul’s told me that whatever it was St James wanted they wouldn't agree. It was over the venue for our local farewell to Phil who was off to Manchester in June. St James is the bigger venue so it made more sense for St Paul’s to close that morning. But of course that is cooperation too far. Why can't St James cooperate and come to them, they said.

Almost exactly a year after my induction I wrote to the Bishop to say that life in West Bromwich was unsustainable. The new Archdeacon, Bob Jackson, was anyway at the clergy lunchtime get together and I made a couple of comments about how it would be better for all concerned if everything closed down for a time and then see what emerges in a year or two. He had come to talk about employing a couple of people to do work among the 18 to 45s who hardly feature in our congregations. The other clergy were horrified. These people should be in their churches being bored to death not being part of a new grouping where they might enjoy themselves or get some spiritual input. When I mentioned my new youth team the other clergy in the area said I should insist that all young people who come to their activities also come to church on Sunday. I had actually thought that they should be barred from coming to church; it would put them off for life. Bob is a bit of a statistics wiz so I managed to get in the joke about my congregation being broken down by age and sex.

We moved onto a discussion about how to say farewell to Phil, who had asked for a deanery service. But no one was interested in hosting it. So the Rural Dean (sort of boss lady of the district) suggested doing it a week early when we already had a service booked at St Paul’s. This solved the problem. The deanery say farewell one week at St Paul’s, St James the next. They then don't then have to meet each other.

The organist’s wife had cancer. Naturally they had told everyone apart from me. The previous vicar had even visited her in hospital before I was told she was there. When I did arrive H was in the process of telling the staff they would face a disciplinary tribunal and be sued if she died. I told them he was always like that and took him into the waiting room, where I spent the afternoon being told that everyone at St James hates me and they want me to leave. They didn't see why they should leave their church to get away from me, so I had to go. The problem was apparently that I was too close to the guide/scout leaders. I was letting them take over the church and the people wouldn't stand for it. Except that those leaders were the only people doing anything to help the church and the only people who were encouraging young people into church - with a little bit of help from me. And H’s daughter was also a leader of the uniforms, so was she included. As she was present at the time, I assumed not.

I escaped again. This time in a balloon. Well, actually, it was over the Masai Mara. Down below, all the animals hid very carefully apart from a few giraffe who failed to get their heads down in time. So there were only a few photos to show for it. It was followed by champagne breakfast in the bush. Not quite bush tucker trials, though I did have to be careful as my digestive system had packed up earlier in the holiday and it was my first day at attempting real food.

Lions, cheetah and a couple of leopards had dutifully appeared earlier in the week to get their photos taken. Except for one leopard where a couple of kindly Australians in a land cruiser decided we didn't need to get a view of it and parked themselves in front of us. At least the leopard had the sense to walk away when it saw Australians coming. Probably afraid they were about to show a new series of Neighbours.

There were about fifteen lion in the pride, lying around doing nothing as usual. The old man asleep on a hillock with his wives and children around him. All looking incredibly well fed and fit. Later we caught up with him asleep in the bushes, presumably having sent the women out to get his meal ready. Wake me up when it’s done. That's the life.

Meanwhile away at the waterhole at Treetops an elephant and a rhino were doing their "Who's the king of the jungle" routine. Charging about and snorting at each other with a spotted hyena wondering if it was worth the wait to see if they had a real go at each other. And on the lake a few English ducks looking really out of place, leftover from the past glory days of the empire.

And another relic of a former time was the Maharajah of Rajasthan who just happened to be staying at the Mara Simba Lodge at the same time. He had, he said, brought the Indian cricket team to the UK in Len Hutton's time. We indelicately asked how many tigers he had left on his estate and he blamed it all on the 4x4s which blind the tigers in the headlights enabling even the poorest hunter to kill them. Hunting on elephant back requires a bit more skill and enabled most tigers to get away apparently. At least one member of our party got an invite to India on the basis that she had delivered Len Hutton's papers and said what a sod he was to all his neighbours.

Then 24 hours later I am back to England with lots of strange silences when I turned up to the church car boot sale.

The training sessions started and we had three trainers in three sessions for the management stuff. So none of them knew what we had covered or even whether we had even registered. So all we did was yet another Belbin type indicator. Apparently, I'm a "Shaper" which means that I know what to do but am congenitally incapable of carrying it out. I need to work with a "completer" who has no idea what he/she is doing but gets it finished anyway.

Then we did a "count all the triangles in the picture" exercise. By ourselves to start with, then as a team - could we find more as a team? Of course not, we spent all the time trying to explain which ones we had spotted ourselves. We were supposed to be doing a leadership style exercise but the trainer had forgotten the last page of the test sheets. Which taught us that some people can get away with being leaders while being total bollocks at their jobs. Which encouraged everyone no end. I never did get my NVQ level 3 certificate, but then no one has ever asked my if I have got one either.

The "don't bother knowing more than your students" philosophy of teaching cropped up in the other training sessions as well. We had asked to do some stuff on Powerpoint. Especially how to get any windows programme to do what you want and not what it thinks you want.

So the trainer turned up and told us all how to set up a master slide. The problem was she got us all to type in data onto the master, which should really be used only as a style template. Then every slide thinks it is a master and all hell breaks loose when you try to do anything with them. What didn't help was being given an exercise where I had to type about three pages of A4 onto the slides. The laptop was set to auto complete and after I had typed a couple of words decided it knew what I wanted to write and filled in the rest of the page. So the typing took me an hour and a half, which didn't leave much time to play with the programme. Most people seem to have given up on PowerPoint and are doing it all in HTML so I'm not sure any of it was any use. And anyway if I had listened to the earlier session what I really needed was a "Completer" to do it for me.

My ministry review was coming up and I made it pretty clear that I was fed up with being treated like a football by people determined to destroy the church and wanted out. I had written to the Bishop and Archdeacon at the same time. But after an hour of looking at the situation it all came down to a handful of people who are making my life a misery (and the lives of a few others too) and the rest is more or less going to plan. So why should I move on and let them get away with their emotional blackmail. The consultant agreed - well he was the one who put it like that. He reckoned the Bishop and Archdeacon should support me and will write to that effect so that if, having called their bluff, a whole lot do walk out I will have their support too. The Bishop said he would support me come what may and even suggested I should throw out the troublemakers.

So I was free to go ahead and annoy the hell out of the oldies and get on with the things that excited me - getting the youth work up and running, doing more group work and community involvement, and sorting out the church hall without feeling guilty every time one of the congregation has a go at me.

Meanwhile, Nicola and Dave, the guide/scout leaders invited me round to talk plans and eat curry and their friend Kay was prepared to be treasurer, which really pissed off the oldies as it confirmed their worst fears of the take over of the church. I arranged for the old and new treasurer to meet. But when it came to the handover the old treasurer just dumped everything on the table and walked out without making any attempt to explain to the new one what it was all about. She had meanwhile handed the keys to the churchwarden who pointedly didn't hand them over to the new treasurer, who then couldn't get into the safe to get the money to the bank.

Gemma and Charlie began to work with young people and soon had 35 every Friday evening in the church hall. Charlie also took over the over sixties at St Paul’s as part of the cross-generational remit. She brought in games: we did one based on modelling things out of playdoh and everyone else had to guess what it was. But another week we had to do one of those guess the word on the card games. Trouble was that this is West Bromwich. I had Charlie on my team and in the geography section she couldn't come up with any clues for me to guess "San Francisco" and had never heard of Amsterdam even when I gave her the answer. The over 60s were no better so it took an hour and a half and we were less than half way round the board. Charlie did get Shakespeare right though, but no one knew that Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings. One week she told them about her life on the streets of Walsall as a child which had them all in tears. She hadn’t been in school much so it was not surprising she had missed out on education but she was genius at getting people together and getting them enthused about what was happening so I could forgive her anything.

I was cornered by the National House Condition survey. The guy had put four cards through my door over a three week period and then camped out outside until I got back. Just to fill in a survey about the house, which isn't mine anyway and as a diocesan house is regularly inspected. So he filled in the whole survey with me saying, "fine, Ok, no problem" to all the questions. When the results come out will the government base its policy on people like me being annoyed at being hijacked at 5.30 when I wanted to get my tea on and getting rid of the questioner as soon as possible? Or will they just do what they were going to do anyway and base it on the irrelevant results of an inadequate survey that they will spin to reflect whatever they want it to?

H invited both previous vicars to his wife’s funeral service and in fact told them the time of the funeral before I knew myself. The funeral turned into a two-day affair - requiem one evening followed by the funeral the following day, with over 250 attending one or the other. Martin, my predecessor, gave the address during which he continually made the point for my benefit that St James was the friendliest church he had served in and it was down to H and Jill. At the funeral someone read a story for kids called "The Waterbug". Everyone seemed to think the point was about the bugs in the water that think that that is all there is but then they climb up a stalk into the open air and become dragonflies. So the person who died is now a dragonfly.

But the subtext which wasn't really spelt out is that she had escaped from the pondlife she left behind; the inhabitants of the primeval swamp that have never really seen the point of evolution and so have let that pass them by. As Monty Python's Meaning of Life points out: "There must be intelligent life out there because there's buggerall here on earth."

But after the funeral I really did think that perhaps I would be back in H’s good books.

It didn’t last. The next Sunday was a parade service. This time it was the brownies taking the lead. All of 3 of the “normal” congregation came. And they all managed to get in a moan about something. The guide leader was, as usual, in tears about how her work goes unnoticed. I tried to rationalise it by saying that maybe as they had all been in church during the week they were taking a Sunday off and wouldn't have been there anyway. But clearly they were just staying away if the young people were there. Naturally the kids picked up the message that they are not wanted, which sort of negated all that I had done over the year.

So I whipped off another letter to the Bishop asking him to get me out of there. In it I pointed out how sorry I would be to leave the young people who were just getting to use the church. But after all the past few months have had in store for me, the Bishop still wanted me to stay on. I had written that as I now seemed to be part of the problem I thought I was better out of the way. He said that the parish needed to face the problems that I presented them with and would not move forward until it did. He wanted me to stay for another year. I persuaded him to at least include me in his thinking when other parishes come up and he said I was free to look at other possibilities.

In search of inspiration, I went off to a Church Growth conference in York. Led by the mad Robin Gamble it proved just what can be done if there is the support there. He said that church growth is always inhibited by people always saying "But". "So it all depends on how big is your But". Anne Wood, who runs a turnaround team in Bradford started with fifteen in church. Five left and she now has 85. So as I started with double that, if I lose 30% I should end up with 160. Which is what the Bishop wants me to do. But I was still not sure that I could take the stress and the waves of hatred that hit me every Sunday.

When I got back I think it had got out that I want out. Everyone started being extra nice to me - including those who were calling for my lynching a couple of months ago. I even got a couple of soppy Father's day cards to "Father Peter". Which naturally made me even more determined to go.

We were supposed to have a Chapter (the local clergy) meeting one Monday. I had said that I couldn't do Thursdays, so the rural dean said the meeting should be on Thursday at my house. She then sent an email out which said the meeting would be on Thursday at Mike's. Without saying which Thursday of course, or giving a time. I asked her to put out a correction; so late on Wednesday night she re-emailed everyone to say it was "tomorrow at Peter's". Still no time given and a bit of a problem if you didn't read it that night but the following morning when tomorrow had become Friday.

Not surprisingly few people turned up. Of course no one asked why I sat in a corner with my head in my hands and didn't speak to anyone. They decided that Thursdays was obviously a good day to hold the meetings (which it was for the seven there, but clearly not for the ten not there) and so all future Monday meetings would also be on Thursdays. I decided not to bother finding out which Thursdays or where and when.

St Paul’s had a window that was full of cracked plain glass. It was right next to where the font had been moved during the reordering and so was rather prominent during baptisms. I had suggested that instead of simply replacing the plain glass we looked at the possibility of stained glass. I thought if I tapped all the people who had had funerals there recently and some of the baptism families we could raise the money. So I invited several stained glass artists to look at it. We picked on The Art of Glass in Bromsgrove and one Thursday afternoon took all the Thursday Club members and a few others off to see the window being made. They made it for a very reasonable £6500, which still seemed a lot for the 18 regulars in church but with a few donations we soon reached £5000 and I went to the local charity who helped with the balance.

At St James I thought it might be a good idea to get everyone to work together on a festival for the tenth anniversary of the new church building. A concert one evening, then have the church open all day; get the congregation to bring in their crafts and things; provide tea and coffee and the organisations could do some stalls in the early afternoon and put on a bit of a show later. On the Sunday have a special service and a gift day to try to balance the books. Everyone could share and get to know each other and make a bit of a new start. That at least was the plan. So at the opening concert 45 young people performed watched by 55 family and friends. Just two church members, but never mind I thought, they would all be there for the open day wouldn't they.

On the morning I discovered early on that "the church" were only doing their displays until the organisations turned up at twelve. Then they left, complete with their tea and coffee. Not that they served anyone other than their friends. A family I had been in touch with came along to see what the church was like. They tried to get some tea and coffee. But the regulars made a barrier around the coffee table to ensure that no one else got a look in. And despite having focused on Fair Trade for a few weeks and even provided a Fair Trade stall for them (with no-one to run it obviously) someone turned up with the largest bag of Typhoo teabags I have ever seen. It would tie the church in to unfair trade for the next five years at least.

Few church members turned up at all and the total take for the Gift Day bit was £140 of which one person gave £100. When it came to the gang show there was only one church member present to watch the kids strut their stuff.

The best of a number of rows on the day was when the churchwarden asked the guide leader why she hadn't bought a raffle ticket. She pointed out that since the churchwarden didn't show up yesterday at the show, wasn't staying today for it and hadn't even looked at the guide stall, why should she bother. Why indeed.

Somehow I was awarded a "Labour of Love Award" for work with young people in Sandwell. I'm still not sure who nominated me and to start with I thought it was a mistake. The youth work was being done by Gemma and Charlie and run by Open Heaven but it did mean a free buffet at the Hawthorns - home of the legendary West Bromwich Albion. So off I went. And just to rub it in I took with me one of the churchwardens from St James where both young people and I are despised at a level that has cleared all known charts. I thought it might do her good to see that someone somewhere thought that what was happening under her nose was worth a trophy.

Sadly the commendation wasn't printed or I could have reprinted it in the magazine. It was to the effect that I had worked to put young people’s work at the centre of the life of Hill Top and had set up a scheme to provided for a couple of workers to do it. In other words, all I had done was to see a need and then let someone else get on with meeting it. The churchwarden mumbled something about having worked for 26 years as a brownie leader and no one had even thanked her let alone given her a prize.

The Bishop finally accepted that I needed to leave to retain what was left of my sanity. He made a few suggestions as to what I might go on to do. But mainly it was jobs cobbled together from bits left over as proper jobs have been cut back to the odd 0.5 here and a 0.3 there. He sent me off to the local young offenders institution. But the “chaplaincy” role was really simply supporting the authorities keep the kids on remand under control. Little space for real dialogue with the offenders who were only there for six weeks or so. When I told one of the locals I was leaving she emailed "Sorry to hear you have given up on St James - another notch on their belts which will make them even more insufferable."

Someone came up at church one morning and said that "this is the friendliest church they know". Which says a lot about how other churches are. This was the place where the guide leader was in tears most Sundays because people let her know how much they hated her; where a woman was in hysterics because someone else had watered "her" flowers; and where the new treasurer is being regularly slagged off for not knowing what to do - when no-one has told her what to do and actively hindered her in doing it. And that’s just for starters.

But of course if you are one of the accepted few then everyone is friendly. A regular’s daughter came with her children and they were all over them. But these were people who won't let their own Rainbows into the church services.

The project manager for the hall project hadn't replied to stuff I sent three months ago despite regular attempts at contact. Instead he contacted the Jan to ask when the meeting was - which is what I asked him to set up. Jan had had enough after a couple of years as neighbourhood manager and was off to the North-West. With James, Phil, and now Jan gone, and my job search ongoing, I quietly let the whole thing drop.

At the church council we were discussing the various appeals. Niger, Darfur, the London bombings, even Boscastle got a look in because it has been on the telly. But then someone said of the Niger appeal: "I don't think we should respond because they never give to our appeals do they?" There are sometimes when there really is nothing that can be said. But the image of the Médecins Sans Frontières workers going around the camps collecting for Boscastle stayed with me all week. What is really depressing is that people really do believe it. And they thought I was out of touch with reality.

On the way out the churchwarden bawled out a couple of local kids for dumping stuff in our bins. She didn't bother asking what they were doing. If she had she would have found out the kids were actually clearing rubbish from the churchyard and were about to start weeding the car park. But of course it’s always better to shout first and ask afterwards. Another couple of kids who will never go to church. When I asked her why she had done it she said her first responsibility is to protect the building. Presumably best achieved by keeping everyone out.

I went off to Wales for a break. Wales was good as ever. Good weather too (for Wales). I called in on Jim at Llandecwyn and there were a good crowd there. Someone who Jim knew when he was in Leavesdon and a woman from Oxford who is training for the ministry. The church was peaceful and we just sat in silence for an hour or so before Jim made some tea and we chatted for a bit before ending with prayer. I did the usual walks around Llyn Mair at Tan-y-Bwlch and added in a walk from Porthmadoc to Criccieth which I had wanted to do for a long time. There was a freezing wind along the coast so I had to keep walking but the views were spectacular.

They do say you should never go back. But I went back twice over a couple of months. Once to the Christ the King barbeque and then to the opening of the new community rooms and cafe at St Paul’s Pendeford. And they proved how things could be. With a bit of imagination and a few people prepared to do some work, churches can be fun places to be. There were over 200 at the opening and it seemed like everyone was having a good time. And that is just what I wanted to do at St James - to turn the dilapidated hall into a set of meeting rooms and a centre for community activity. I even took someone from St James to show him what could be done. He was duly impressed. But the reality is that there simply isn't the commitment necessary to see it through. Pendeford started with the congregation pledging £40000 start up funding before they looked for other help. I knew that wouldn’t happen in West Brom.

Every month or so was the joint service with the Methodists. Despite being almost opposite St James they were linked with St Paul’s. So their ten sat on one side of the church and our ten sat on the other. At tea after the service they stood in church groups talking to their friends. Only one person dared to cross the divide and talk to someone from the other church. Then the churchwarden from St Paul’s started complaining that the Methodist rota didn't mention the next service was at St Paul’s. The Methodist lay leader was next to him but he wouldn't turn to ask her if they had made a mistake. He just kept on at me about it. I did think maybe I should introduce them despite the fact that the joint services had been happening for twenty years.

Not that the Methodists are any better. They have an evening congregation that has never met the morning one. They were also part of the youth partnership that employed our two youth workers. So when their mother and toddler group leader went off to get a job Gemma and Charlie thought they might like an after school club to bring in some youngsters, in contrast to the ten to fifteen over seventies who normally turn up on a Sunday. Not a bit of it, they wanted to charge £15 an hour for the use of the hall. No amount of telling them that this was their own project would make them move. So it looked as if the after school stuff would move into our hall as well as the youth club. Then they wonder why other churches are full and expanding and they are dying by the day.

The chap who has bought and rebuilt the burnt out vicarage had the temerity to think that he should be able to get out of his drive. When he discovered that a brownie mum had parked in the way, the brownie leader went out and gave him a mouthful. The guide leader meanwhile had for some reason decided to burn his post - still delivered to the hall, instead of putting it into church where he could have collected it.

Then there was the long-standing fight between the guy who runs the model railways club and the guides. John did all the odd jobs around the hall and was in the process of turfing out all the rubbish to make it less of a fire hazard and create more space to store stuff. His fellow modellers helped out with the repairs to the roof, floor and doors and had saved the church thousands over the previous year alone. But of course occasionally they moved something that belonged to scouts, guides and brownies. So we had the guides claiming the railways were taking over the hall; the railway guy saying he would take his group elsewhere because the guides were taking over the church; a couple of church people sticking their various oars in (not to mention a knife or two in various backs when they got a chance) and I was somehow meant to hold it all together.

Well the railways did pull out. Overnight. No warning. Packed up their toys and walked out. The biggest earner for the church. The hall looked really big now there was all that space. Quite how the church would cope without the income I didn't know. But I hoped that shortly that wouldn't be my problem. I did hope that maybe it would sink in that if you are nasty enough to people eventually they will take their train set and play somewhere else. But of course that is exactly what St James did want. So fewer people took part and spent even more time agonising over why so few people took part.

After a month or so the railway man came to tell me why they had left. I had thought it was because of some almighty row over the use of the hall that was the impression they had given when they left. But no. It turned out that the rain coming through the roof bent their baseboards and they decided not to fix the roof any more but go somewhere dryer for the same rent. They could have asked us to fix the roof which could be done in a week for a couple of hundred quid. But they preferred to go off after sending me a letter saying they were horrified by the church councils attitude. And it all came down to the damp. But then he did live up to his image. He said he will never come to church again until certain people leave. (And not me this time). I tried to remember when the last time was that he had come to church but failed.

Meanwhile at St Paul’s down the road the main concern at the PCC was that I haven't yet painted my name and phone number onto the notice board outside the church (don't forget to do the signwriting course if you ever think of ordination). Little did they realise that I wouldn't be there long enough for the paint to dry; the first of my applications had just gone in.

Charlie and Gemma led the Sunday service which went well with Charlie (age 17ish) preaching. Of course as expected it was boycotted by the 'normal' congregation, but that was their loss. It would have shattered their illusions about how no one goes to church anymore. They took a load of kids skiing a week ago and also completed the Quest course with them, all in their first three months.

Meanwhile they were getting ready for the first of their "Bridge Builders" events. They have a music group who were coming over and I hoped about 30 of our kids would turn up. I wasn't going to go but it looked as if some of the oldies might turn up as they were worried about what would be done to “their church” so I wanted to be on hand to make sure that the youth partnership can do what they want.

Charlie was doing tile painting with the over 60s one Thursday and one of the oldies did a good impression of the stained glass we hope to install shortly. One of them gave me a tile that says 'Jesus loves you'. When I took it home and John visited he pointed out, “Yes Jesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you’re an arsehole”.

Well miracles do occasionally happen. St James actually managed to be nice to someone they didn’t know. A family from Ireland had come over for a funeral and turned up on the Sunday. I mentioned to the person doing the prayers that they should be included. And at the end everyone was all over them. They even offered them a cup of tea, and finished off the biscuits I had bought for the confirmation class. So I carried on the season of goodwill by inviting H to rejoin the church council. He gets everyone's backs up and has a permanent chip on his shoulder, but I thought it would do him good to hear about some of the things that were happening. Then they all queued up to tell me how much the family had thought of them, how friendly they are.

What they didn't notice was that they had once again reduced one of the congregation to tears for mocking her when she said she needed a disabled space the next week when we were to go out for a harvest meal. And they also had a go at me for not turning up to the Mother's Union last week. I had gone the month before and decided that that was my duty done for the year. But even so they were nice to people they knew they would never see again. And maybe somewhere in Ireland they will think that St James is a wonderful place.

The harvest lunch came around. We were meant to get to the restaurant at 1.15pm, so I turned up at 1.00pm thinking that I was early: only to discover that everyone else had gone straight from church and had been there since 12. Of course that meant there was nowhere for me to sit and I ended up perched on the end of a table with a group of people who clearly didn’t want me there.

Everyone sat with their own little group. No one spoke to anyone outside that group. They all said what a wonderful lunch it was. But it achieved nothing in terms of mixing. For the first time ever both churches were represented, but, as they sat on separate tables, they didn’t meet.

I applied for a job just north of Shrewsbury which was combined with a diocesan training post; which means tying in with the training team far away in the diocesan office. Now in Aldersley I had been doing that as trainer for the Ministry Team. I got to know most of the people there so I understood the system. So it came as a surprise to discover, don't ask how, that they had decided not to appoint because none of the applicants had relevant experience. So what did they think I was doing all those years? Anyway it seemed that I was with the old team and there are a new lot in post now and they wanted to have their own people in place so I might not fit in. Dropping the names that I did did me no favours.

We had a Christmas Fair, as you do. A time of joy and happiness when everyone comes together in a sense of common purpose to bring a bit of light to the benighted world.

Well that is the theory. In practice:
The guides asked me if I wanted them to have a stall.
Do you want a stall? I said.
Well no one has asked us, they said.
If you want one talk to the wardens and they will give you a space, I said.
The wardens said to me, Do the guides want a stall?
I think so, I said. Ask them, I said.
Needless to say there was no guide stall. They couldn't bring themselves to talk to one another.

Then on the Sunday, the remains of the refreshments, half eaten pork pies, the bottom half of chocolate cake without the creamy bit, that sort of thing, were left out at the back of church. Among them were some bits of shortbread. The person who made them began to wrap them up to take home. If no one else wanted them she would eat them herself during the week. Seemed reasonable to me. Then someone saw her. She always was mean, they said. So it is apparently mean to take home what you yourself have made and which is unsold and going in the bin in a couple of minutes.

Meanwhile on the job front I checked on another application which hadn't been acknowledged. In reply I got an email addressed to someone else saying they had no way of knowing whether they had received my application or not and they still don't have either a closing date or an interview date.

So off I went to the wilds of Staffordshire to meet the good folk of four country parishes who are looking for someone to annoy the hell out of them and wind them up to breaking point. And there they were. Far too friendly to be part of the CofE. In beautiful grade 1 listed churches. And I enjoyed my day with them and wanted to bring them all back here to show the people here what it ought to be like. And they appointed me. So only another three months in West Bromwich and then I would be free.

Well I'm not sure what reaction I was expecting when I announced my departure. What I wasn't expecting was no reaction. But that is what I got at St James. Not a whisper. No one mentioned it at the end of the service. It was as if they hadn't heard. At St Paul’s there were a few expressions of regret. But then it's not them that's made me leave.

The backlash started on Boxing Day. I was supposed to be off till January but made the mistake of accepting an invite for drinks. Harmless, so I thought. But no. An hour long tirade against "the others". I should have stood up to them and faced them down. They are the ones who should be going. etc etc. I didn't point out that that is why I am going. Because there are "them" and "us" all around. I am just piggy in the middle. That the "others" thought the same about them. All I did was keep an eye on the clock to see when I could safely leave.

People started asking if I'd not been happy with them. Wonder why. Not that I admitted to anything. Anyway my memorial window was now fitted in St Pauls and would be dedicated on my last Sunday. Though I doubted if they would put a plaque under it "in memory of our beloved vicar".

My last St James hall committee. Needless to say it was ignored by half the people who were supposed to be there. But the three who came used the event to let me know the latest rows among the organisations. There had been a blazing row earlier in the evening between the guide leader and one of the brownie leaders. About where the badges were kept of all things. But any excuse for a good row in West Bromwich. Then there was something else being whinged about but by then I had lost the will to live and just ignored them.

And then a couple of phone calls from deepest Staffordshire made me realise what life should be like. The churches are looking forward to welcoming me and wanted to know if I had a good Christmas. They want to know all about me for the village magazines. So maybe life can be good after all.

Into the final countdown. And of course they started to invite me to things as if I mattered to them. The MU were put out that I have refused to join them for a meal next Monday. They have had two years to tell me when they are meeting and possibly even to invite me rather than complain after the event that I wasn’t there; and then they invite me the day after my final services.

I did let someone know how to run the photocopier though. I didn't really want them phoning me next week when the toner runs out. And I have passed on the parish laptop, which I hated anyway, so that the magazine might still get produced. Bill Gates had the last laugh as I had set up the templates on my home computer and got a wonderful error message saying that the version of Publisher on the laptop couldn't read my version. It then refused to do any of things my version does.

The clergy who had offered to cover after I left have gone back on their word and now won't do it. The Methodists are complaining about the once a month joint service - they prefer to sit on their own in their own little box. But then so of course do the CofEs. So much for co-operation and mutual support.

And in the end: the nice people were nice and the nasty people pretended to be nice. Well some of them at least. But just to send me off there was a spectacular row at SJ. The organist hadn't turned up with ten minutes to go so we asked the guide leader to sort out some hymns as insurance as the organist had said that he might not be able to make it.
But just as Nicola was picking the book up, H turned up and said in a loud voice for all to hear:
You obviously don't want any hymns today then.
Yes, I said, we thought you couldn’t come.
No, he said, I've had enough of this lot.
And he stormed out. It later transpired that he had plotted the whole scene to try and upstage my last service. He had told a churchwarden two weeks ago that he would not be there.
Anyway as laughing in the face of adversity is the best defence, we had a laugh a minute during the service and lots of people said how much they enjoyed it. The uniforms at St Jamess also put together a package of stuff which was much appreciated as I am leaving them in the lurch somewhat.

St Pauls gave a dinner in my honour at a local hotel, which was much better than the usual tired buffet after church. And they showered me with presents. The Peter Ashby memorial window was duly dedicated by the Archdeacon at my last service, although it was too dark to show up in church so people had to traipse outside to get the full effect.

And at the Section 11 meeting, to decide the profile of the new incumbent, the St James representatives had a stand up fight in front of the Archdeacon, who then phoned me to say, “Now I know why you needed to leave”.