THE Methodist Church is said to have lost a third of its members in the past decade.

Last week, through death, it lost one of the most dedicated, most unquenchable, of all.

John Littlefair was 82. Shildon lad, he’d been a local preacher for 55 years, retiring in 2012 – “except in cases of illness or emergency”.

It was surprising, he told the column in January, how many emergencies there’d been.

Always fresh, always enthusiastic, he was a particular favourite at south-west Durham village chapels like Auckland Park, Wooley Terrace and Wind Mill, but when Newton Aycliffe Methodist Church marked its 50th anniversary, it was John they asked to lead morning service.

His trademark, if preachers may be said to have one, was to remove his jacket during the first hymn. John was getting down to business.

“I’m not really an ogre, just a kindly old man,” he told the kids at Auckland Park back in 1995.

“A preacher with more visual aids than the average optometrist,” the At Your Service column observed on the same occasion.

His first sermon had been in the now long-gone chapel at Brussleton, the Stockton and Darlington Railway hamlet near Shildon. The text was the familiar verse about two or three being gathered together. “It was dreadful, awful,” he recalled with characteristic humility, but even that might have been two or three more than one evening at Keld, top end of Swaledale, when only the steward and organist turned out.

He was an apprentice at Robert Stephenson’s in Darlington, spent most of his working life at Thorn’s in Spennymoor, had been chairman of Shildon FC.

He’d also made a single appearance in the Eating Owt column, reporting that he and a friend had been asked at a café in Hartlepool if they were pensioners.

Told it was the case, the waitress cut a dumpling in two and shared it. “I wonder what she’d have done with a fried egg,” said John.

He worried about dwindling congregations, didn’t let it preoccupy him. “I do get a little bit discouraged, the juniors aren’t being replaced, but you have to go on,” he said.

When he was born, Shildon alone had eight Methodist churches of various hues. Now there’s one. It’s there that a celebration of the life of a good, good man will be held at 11am tomorrow.