LIKE electrical current and school gymnasiums, the Methodist church is organised into circuits. What goes around comes around, as probably they say when drawing up the local preachers' plan.

Across much of south-west Durham last Sunday, a letter was read after the service announcing that the Crook, Spennymoor and Weardale circuits are to amalgamate from September 2006 - three ministers, 20 churches.

"We are confident it is the way forward," said the letter from the superintendent minister.

Once the area embraced Willington and Ferryhill circuits, too. How many Methodist churches, we ask the folk who live on Stanley Hill Top, would there have been in the same area 50 years previously?

Cheeks are puffed, eyebrows raised, memories marshalled. "Fifty mebbe, mebbe sixty, mebbe more. Every little village had its own Methodist chapel, some had two. The Crook circuit had 17, now it has five."

North Bitchburn, Rookhope, St John's Chapel, Bradbury and Billy Row are among those which have been lost in recent memory. Wearhead holds its last service at 2.30pm tomorrow, and there'll be more of that in next week's column.

Amalgamation may well be the way forward. It's also a sign of the times...

On Stanley Hill Top, sometimes known as Mount Pleasant - "That's just what the posh folk call it," they insist - they're once again at Wooley Terrace Methodist chapel for harvest festival.

It's a bright and breezy former pit village above Crook, four winds and then some. The chapel is next to the near-legendary football ground, where abide spectral stories of hard men reduced to gibbering wrecks and where, shivering, they seek shelter in the Little House on the Prairie.

Sunday suited men emerge from their cars with arms full of greenery, the front of the church bedecked with fruit, vegetables and flowers and with some less traditional harvest gifts.

There's a tin of peaches (in light syrup), a can of Asda's baked beans, a couple of jars of home made bramble jam. (Had it not been home made, they'd have called it blackberry.)

There are also some nick-nacks, made at the little wood turning class which meets in the back room. "It's a way of keeping the church used, isn't it?" they say.

It smells a bit like a village hall leek show, and none the worse for that.

Come ye thankful people, come? About 15 are present, few (if any) under pensionable age. The rest appear to have ploughed their fields and scattered.

"I remember this chapel when we had to open the partition and still had chairs down all the aisles," says the magnificent Billy Ayre, 88 and prospering.

"It was the focal point of the village, everyone came here. Mind, it was as much social as religious then."

Yet it is by no means entirely an ill wind that blows, harvest homely, along Stanley Hill Top.

The love that still is felt for that lovely little chapel is reflected in many a bright burnished surface, the atmosphere is warm and welcoming, the tradition and the camaraderie infinitely worth preserving.

It is a perfect little chapel, a film set chapel, a challenging but unchanging chapel. If this is the harvest table, then Wooley Terrace is in a promotion place.

John Littlefair, the "local preacher" leading the service, sits beforehand in a small vestry out the back. Save for the absence of football boots and embrocation, it's not unlike the Little House on the Prairie - long bench, mirror, electric fire, last minute pep talk.

"They're usually a very good congregation up here," he says.

On the bench there's also a tapestry headed "Tree of Memories", signed in 1958 by the chapel's many members. "God gave us a memory," it says, "that we may have roses in December."

John, Shildon lad and former chairman of Shildon Football Club, is 73, has been a local preacher for 47 years but retains a manifest and indomitable enthusiasm for his unpaid endeavours.

"I just don't get fed up of it at all," he says. "Maybe I'll pack up when it stops exciting me, but it hasn't happened yet. It must be a calling, I suppose, otherwise everyone would have walked out by now."

His jacket's off half way through the first hymn, warm work on Wooley Terrace, his theme (he says) is to be the familiar verses from Ecclesiastes about a time to every season.

Bob Dylan, it may be recalled, had a hit with Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; the Byrds' version was even better.

John prays that we may be content to sow and to plant and "be ready to wait for the harvest with patience and care". He also gives thanks for the "simple and commonplace things of life".

Bill Ayre, whose great grandfather was a lead miner in the "other" Shildon - the hamlet north of Blanchland, Northumberland - says afterwards that his first memory is of the chapel organ arriving in 1921. "Across them field tops, back of a wagon."

He also remembers raising the money to install a proper toilet. "The preacher had to go round the back to the earth closet. We didn't think it was right."

John Littlefair provides a lift back to Shildon in his little car, crucifix swinging alongside the deodorant Christmas tree.

"It's worrying when the trend all seems to be one way, but what can you do?" he says. "It's still really enjoyable to come to a place like Stanley."

"John's a wonderful, really thoughtful preacher," says chapel steward Doreen Ainsley, before heading homeward to ponder more circuit breaking.

It's as they almost say in the ninth chapter of St Matthew: the harvest truly is plenteous, just a pity the labourers have downed tools.

* Wooley Terrace Methodist chapel on Stanley Hill Top meets for worship at 10.30am every Sunday.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk

/features/