REMEMBER the children's song about the world of darkness and the little candle burning in the night? It flickered to mind last Sunday, the Feast of Candlemas.

St Peter's church in Bishop Auckland sits amid rows of Victorian terraces, humdrum and hilly, barely 200 yards behind the town's main street yet out of sight and, seemingly, out of mind.

There is no churchyard, no trees, no greenery. Though its status as a listed building deters developers and other predators, it does nothing to deflect the vandals, the kids from spray can alley and those who would rob St Peter's to pay for the next false dawn fix.

Fifteen minutes before Sunday's service, another broken window is discovered. Two minutes before it, precisely nine people are in church, including the Vicar's wife and son.

"It is a challenge," says the Rev Peter Lee, in the understated way that Sir Edmund Hilary might have supposed that the summit of Everest was rather a tall order.

It is also a struggle and - this from a column which for ten years has tried to accentuate the positive - they are clearly struggling.

The February parish magazine, itself called St Peter's Challenge, records no baptisms, weddings or funerals in the previous month. The retiring collections over Christmastide raised £18, it adds.

Two elderly parishioners decline even to give their names. All they'll say is the obvious, that there've been better times and fuller churches than there are in 2004.

Can it survive? "That's up to the diocese. I don't know at all what their plans are for it," says Mr Lee. "I personally think it's important to keep going, to maintain a Christian witness in an area like this. There is both a spiritual and a practical need for it."

Designed by the architect who turned a parish church in Newcastle into St Nicholas' Cathedral, St Peter's was opened in 1875 at a cost of £7,000. When the parish could barely raise half the amount, the Bishop of Durham - the Rt Rev Charles Baring - provided the rest.

Several lifetimes later, the parish is again unable to meet in full the financial "quota" annually demanded by the diocese. The present bishop is not thought to redress the balance.

Until the Second World War there was a curate, and satellite Sunday schools in Peel Street and Stranton Street. The theatre manager's baby, who was to become Stan Laurel, was baptised in St Peter's in 1891, the composer Edward Elgar - a friend of Nicholas Kilburn, the organist - first performed The Music Makers there in 1910.

A 1923 survey put the parish population at almost 5,000, including those in the Auckland Union Workhouse. Now it's barely 3,000, including those in the hostel for the homeless next to the church.

Even some of those who still attend have moved to outlying parts of the town with names like Rush Park and Barrington Meadows, not Grey Street and Gibbon Street.

Mr Lee arrived in 1991 from a West Yorkshire parish he describes as quite trendified - "quite a nice wicket to bat on". St Peter's, as he knew it would, has proved stickier altogether.

"There are some solid, decent, hard working people but there are quite a lot with difficulties - single parent families, druggies, those who've come out of prison, people who sit in front of the television all day drinking lager."

His wife Diana, his sole churchwarden and principal pillar, believes that the area has changed markedly even in their time in Bishop Auckland. "There are problems for the church, but also for people wanting to move into the area. Most people here are Roman Catholic, the next lot are Methodist and then there's us. Usually it's the other way around."

Do they ever get dispirited? "Oh yes," they chorus, "quite often".

The church, for all that, is both surprisingly beautiful and manifestly cared for, further enhanced by morning sunlight and by banners and other devices to embrace an impression of intimacy. It was re-roofed in 1988.

The "church library" at the back includes a 1977 volume by the Vicar called "Why Believe in God?" His second book was a collection of sermons, his third will be published shortly.

Sunday's service begins with a Christingle, about which more shortly, numbers finally boosted by a procession of getting on 20 Guides and Brownies and by some of their leaders. St Peter's appears not to be a "boy" thing, either.

Christingle, much popularised by the Children's Society and more familiar at Christmas, involves the receiving by each person present of a concoction - some might say a confection - of an orange girdled with red ribbon, into which are stuck four cocktail sticks and a lighted candle.

The orange symbolises the earth, the red ribbon the blood of Christ, the cocktail sticks the four seasons and the bits of fruit or sweets on the end of them the fruits of the earth.

Save for the candle, it looks a bit like a sea mine. St Peter's uses Liquorice Allsorts. A footnote in the liturgy says that the Christingles should be carefully snuffed out.

Readings include the passage from Isaiah about the people who walk in darkness having seen a great light, hymns include the one about keeping the oil in the lamp burning. There's no sermon. Afterwards in the parish hall there's coffee and biscuits and a chance to chat to the Vicar and his wife. That they remain, light in the darkness, is encouraging.

The worry is that, like the Christingle, the candle may be carefully - orcarelessly - snuffed out.

*Principal Sunday services at St Peter's, Princes Street, Bishop Auckland are at 10am and 6pm, the church opens on Saturday mornings from 9.30am-10.30am. The Rev Peter Lee is on (01388) 661856.