Action stations

“By a long chalk the most difficult and daunting work I have ventured into,” he told the Church Times in 2013. “St Pancras is a wholly secular place.”

Now he is settling into Teesdale, where the railway line to Darlington closed 50 years ago in November but where he believes that the church can still catch the train.

The role is ground breaking. He will be priest-in-charge of nine churches in two different dioceses and with about 247,000 fewer folk.

“Success is about increasing the relevance of the church, about being where people want it to be,” he says. “So far as I can see, the church is irrelevant.

“St Pancras was a wonderful experience, a top-class community pitch, with an approach to many different cultures. In its way, this is every bit as challenging.”

IT’S the way that the church now is, the way it has to be.

Each of those rural parishes – Romaldkirk, Startforth, Cotherstone, Laithkirk and Brignall-with-Bowes south of the river, Middleton-in-Teesdale, Egglestone and Forest-and-Frith on the north bank – would once have had its own incumbent.

Some still come to mind: the delightful Carlos d’Aguiar at Startforth, radio ham Peter Midwood finding a wavelength at Romaldkirk, Middleton-in- Teesdale incumbent Gregory Linden, who the At Your Service column suggested looked like a vicar in a Giles cartoon and was generously forgiven its trespass.

Now Mr Barker will not only have nine churches, but two (or more) masters. North of the river is the Diocese of Durham, south the new Diocese of West Yorkshire and the Dales.

He will have two area deans, two archdeacons and, technically, four bishops.

He’s 58, looks younger and insists that his new station in life will be the final stop in his ministry. A childhood train spotter in the days when diesel was replacing steam – that same Church Times piece recorded that his “favourite sound” was a Deltic locomotive passing Doncaster station at speed. Fit for purpose, the new man is also a dedicated and enthusiastic long distance runner, on the roads six days a week, and a football fanatic, still regularly watching Chorley, his hometown club in Lancashire.

Durham will provide him with a part-time assistant priest – “house for duty,” the church calls it – while retired clergy will help with services on the south bank. “We want to see the church out of the box and into areas where people are,” he says. “Maybe we should be doing things differently.”

THE St Pancras role had been made redundant after seven “wonderful” years. “The Diocese of London was really only interested in parochial ministry,” he says.

The possibility of a move north came in a chance meeting when Nick Barker, the unrelated Archdeacon of Auckland, was himself passing through St Pancras. “He could see the vision for Teesdale,” says the new man.

Thereafter he was also visited in London by Michael Sadgrove, the railway buff Dean of Durham, but that was through a long-standing desire to walk on the station roof – giddy heights, it might be added, to which the dean is very welcome.

Ordained at 27 – “I was nine-anda- half years a student” – Mr Barker worked in sports chaplaincy in Wales, spent time in Italy and Bermuda, was a mental health chaplain in Blackpool and a parish priest in West Yorkshire before mainlining to St Pancras.

Station and nearby church – not many may know this – are named after a fourth century martyr said to have died when just 14.

“The station has such beauty and grandeur it actually feels like a cathedral,” the Telegraph once supposed, but to Jonathan Barker it felt like the challenge of which he often speaks.

His flock included not just workers and travellers – “many of them anxious or weary” – but the homeless, refugees and the 30 or 40 people with mental health problems who slept at the station every night.

“I absolutely loved railway station chaplaincy,” he says, “but maybe you can get to the point where you’ve had enough.”

HE is living in the house in Cotherstone to which Dr David Jenkins moved after retiring as Bishop of Durham, answers the door wearing shorts and T-shirt.

He looks nothing like a vicar in a Giles cartoon.

In the same room, the column had interviewed Dr Jenkins on his 80th birthday. His birthday resolutions, said the bishop, were never again to drive more than ten miles or to make a train journey which involved changing at Birmingham New Street.

The newcomer sympathises.

“It could be a grim place, New Street,” he says.

He’s still decamping, books and boxes everywhere. Many of the books are scholarly; many others are about railways or music. There are hundreds of football programmes.

A spare bedroom has already been commandeered by a large table football game and by the battered old cup which, however temporarily, he presents to those who beat him.

There’s even a page from a Chorley programme in which he was asked to do the question and answer. “Dislikes: smoking, Conservative governments and unfit Chorley players.”

Already he’s formally been inducted into the southern parishes; the northern formalities take place in October.

An early move will probably be to organise an audit seeking to discover what the widespread villages want, and expect, from the church. Another may be to seek to appoint an administrative assistant.

“I’m not the sort to get bogged down by administration. We have to offer pastoral care, that’s fundamental, and we have to go where the need is, but the greatest detraction of the Anglican church is its desire for organised religion.

“Traditional church can be done really, really well, but younger people don’t necessarily want organised religion. We have to look at alternatives, do more with our buildings and widen their scope.”

Already he’s sounded out a local hotel about the possibility of sessions combining physical exercise with spiritual reflection. There could be other departures, too.

“At St Pancras people were allowed to be anonymous. Our churches don’t allow people to be anonymous, and maybe they should.

“We need to stop being anxious about the future, there are lots and lots of things to explore. I’m not here to manage decline, I’m here to manage change.”