Soc-ing it to 'em

Nor, so far as may reasonably be ascertained, does the Methodist vice-president go round blasting folk with a shotgun. Though his roots are in the North-East coalfields, John Bell barely seems the type to have peppered a pigeon with a pea shooter.

The president is always a minister, the vice-president a layman - but with little notion of second best. Both hold office for just a year, elected 12 months in advance. Perhaps it's meant as a time of reflection, perhaps simply of repentance.

Mr Bell is the present vice-president. The Rev Graham Carter, chair of the wide-ranging Darlington district, is president-designate. Both have links with Elvet Methodist Church in Durham, and were back there together last Sunday.

"It's an occasion unique in the annals of Elvet and perhaps in all of Methodism," Eric Watchman, who leads the service, tells his congregation.

The rather splendid church is between the city centre and Her Majesty's prison, amid the older edifices of academe and clearly influenced by its scholarly neighbours.

The weekly pew sheet advertises not just the usual coffee and comforts, but meetings of the MethSoc. Universities have more socs than Marks & Spencer's, OpSocs, DramSocs and probably BashstreetkidsSocs, an' all.

There's to be a talk in the physics departments on "Proofs of the divine power"; a "Science and religion" forum boasts more professors than the average senior common room.

Few of the MethSoc seem to have roused themselves for the 10.45am service, though it's no problem for 88-year-old John Ramsden, long retired from the County Hall legal department and an Elvet man for 50 years.

John's mother died young - "She was only 93" - his father reached 99 and a half and was particularly mad, he says, finally to be given out at the start of cricket season.

The church year book has long lists of services and activities, more stewards than a CIU convention, more rotas than a homophonic helicoper. "I just fit in," says John, cheerfully.

There's a chap from West Cornforth who was Winston Churchill's driver - "You came to see me about it when you were just a young reporter," he recalls, "I wouldn't talk about it because Lady Churchill was still alive" - another who's been ever grateful for advice in one or other of those columns about how, scripturally, to confound the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Something about Leviticus and locking up your daughters, apparently.

Mr Bell remembers many of the flock from his six years at Elvet in the 1970s, when a senior manager at the Phillips electrical factory in Belmont, on the city's eastern skirts.

Both his grandfathers were Northumberland miners, his father became a Methodist minister after wartime service in the RAF. After spending his first five years in Newbiggin, near Ashington, he became a child of the manse at Sunderland and at Leadgate, near Consett.

Now 63 and retired for five years, he became a senior Phillips director nationally and now lives in Cheshire.

Graham Carter, Elvet's minister for five years before becoming district chair, looks remarkably chipper for a Sunderland fan. "When he's president, you'll have to bow to him and call him Sir, just like you always did," the present vice-president tells Elvet.

Maybe 100 are present, augmented by an excellent choir and organist. They're friendly, chatty, warmly welcoming.

Mr Bell wears preaching gown and scarf, the first given by his mother-in-law to mark his vice-presidency, the second by former church colleagues in Kent. Among the emblems is pit-head gear; his grandfather was a winding engineman.

His address is called "Discipleship on Mondays", a connection between faith and work. We sometimes think, he says, that the two things don't go together.

There are references to Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard's £90,000 a week ("I'd do it for half that"), to Oxford and Cambridge - "those lesser provincial universities" - and to the value of lay ministry. Ordination candidates, he says, would tell him that they wanted to serve God full time. He'd ask them where they developed a taste for luxury.

"The notion that ordination is the only worthwhile ministry is profoundly wrong. God values the shelf stacker and the bus driver, too."

He also talks of Rosa Leto, a minister in the Bishop Auckland area, with whom he'd strolled around Asda in Bishop a couple of days earlier. "She told me that more people asked her about God in Asda than ever they did in church."

When the Sunday School returns he changes gear to explain the difference between ministers and laymen - "I wear a tie and do a proper job" - and to explain what he's doing there.

"The grown-ups said I could preach," he says. "You did the right thing and stayed out of the way."

In truth he is an articulate, powerful and compelling preacher. Just like Dick Cheney, both barrels.