SHEILA Browbank is a Northern Echo enthusiast, likes flirtatiously to announce that she's in bed every morning with Mike Amos, tells the good folk of New Brancepeth Methodist church that if they don't buy the paper, then they jolly well ought to do.

For two years she was also the inspiration, and the chief toiler, behind the flower festival, visited by more than 400 people last weekend, to mark the tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley and the 200th anniversary, next Thursday, of the formation of Primitive Methodism.

Sheila, a woman said to have twisted more arms than the late Jackie Pallo, had even written the 'thank you' cards before the great event took place. "Suddenly, I remembered the parable of the man filling up his barns," she says.

"I asked the Lord that if he had need of my soul, could he possibly wait until Tuesday."

Charles Wesley, John's brother, wrote around 5,500 hymns including And Can It Be, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and, greatest and most uplifting of all, O For a Thousand Tongues.

It is thus a considerable disappointment to discover that, despite several lead-lined hints in the preceding months, Thousand Tongues is absent from the order of service. Wesley wrote 18 verses, abridged to just eight in the Methodist hymn book and in some curmudgeonly Anglican offerings to a mere five.

Sheila, bless her, fits in the first two as a sort of emergency introit. "We can't have you going home in a sulk," she says.

New Brancepeth's a former pit village west of Durham, the chapel built for £580 in 1877 - another anniversary - originally to serve the now-disappeared village of Sleetburn.

We'd been up there a couple of years back, recording at the time another Echo reader's observation that Mike Amos was all right but nowhere as good as Horace and Doris. She's there again on Sunday, protests that we called her "elderly" in print.

It's not true. We've looked it up. An old chestnut, as it were.

Always immaculate, the chapel looks (and smells) simply magnificent. Twenty-six different churches and organisations from as far distant as Frosterley have mounted floral displays with a hymn theme.

Sherburn Hill Methodists has built Let All the World in Every Corner Sing around a globe, the County WI Federation has, perhaps inevitably, chosen Jerusalem. Cupid's arrow represents the bow of burning gold, the presence of a full champagne bottle is a little more puzzling. The Salvation Army has a display called 'Jesus, frankly, you rock'.

There's also a little exhibition of Methodist memorabilia, including the biography of George Tomlinson, a post-war Labour education minister who in 1951 got himself into a fearful kerfuffle with Durham County Council, who wanted to introduce a closed shop for teachers.

Teachers threatened to leave in large numbers, the education system threatened to crumble. It went on for ages before the county council finally learned its lesson.

Introducing the service to a crowded chapel, Sheila recalls the Echo anecdote - it was one of the editor's columns - about the teacher pointing to potatoes, carrots, turnips and what have you and asking the bairns what single word covered them.

Little Jimmy's hand goes up at once. "Please, sir, gravy," he says.

Sheila says that the word which covers the weekend's events at New Brancepeth - "everyone's worked together, it's been wonderful" - is unity and that she and her loyal husband Dennis have been asked what they're going to do when it all finishes.

"I said I was either going to have a week's holiday or a nervous breakdown. I've opted for the holiday."

Walter Attwood, the minister, says that Sheila keeps telling people it's his flower festival. "I reject that entirely. It's hers."

"Tell you what," says a (possibly) elderly feller behind, "we're going to give it some stick today."

Eric Watchman, the local preacher who leads the service, points out that the organist is Iris Simpson. "Iris playing for the flower festival. They think of everything in New Brancepeth."

He talks of the formation of the Primitive Methodist connexion by Hugh Bourne and William Clowes, notes that it was 75 years ago - yet another anniversary - that Wesleyan and Primitive were reunited. Some, of course, have taken a little longer to reunite than others.

Eric also recalls Charles Wesley's happy marriage, which is more than could be said for his poor, put-upon brother's.

One or other of these columns told four years ago how things might have been different for John had Charles not stymied his union with Grace Murray, who kept the Wesley orphanage in Newcastle and whom he is said to have loved "beyond all sense of reason".

"It is a tale," we remarked in 2003, "of intrigue and of dangerous liaisons, of wagging tongues and pointing fingers, of broken hearts, eternal triangles and a strange sort of brotherly love." That's another story, though.

Eric says that seeing beautiful things in a Methodist church is fairly recent. "It seems a long way from the homely chapels in which most of us spent our younger days. We didn't associate Methodism with art and beauty."

The singing is joyful, the service thoughtful, the people wonderful. Afterwards there's what Methodists call a faith tea, and they must have an awful lot of faith because - despite the curious case of the missing lemon meringue pie - they never seem to go hungry.

There may not have been much above a tenth of the Thousand Tongues, but it's been a lovely afternoon. Sheila's still organising right to the end. "Don't forget," she tells those departing, "it'll be in the Echo next Saturday."