DAVID Guest, a loving and much loved parish priest and a firm and faithful friend, conducts his final services in East and West Rainton tomorrow.

Rector for 17 years, a priest for 30, he retires at 62 because of a spinal problem.

"We wanted a man with a wife and 2.4 children and we got a bachelor with a dog," says Everett Dobbie, choirmaster at St Mary's, West Rainton. "He has proved a truly wonderful rector."

The dog, a fondly remembered Yorkshire terrier called Sweep, had not only attended his master's interview with the Bishop of Jarrow but nipped the episcopal ankle. If that were an inauspicious start, as David supposes, how now does he read the runes?

Amid the maelstrom, is he confident of the Church of England's future?

"Loyalty demands that I say 'Yes' and I don't want to say any more," he begins, but, unprompted, says much more anyway.

He leaves, is left, with "a sense of foreboding". Like Bishop David Jenkins, whom he quotes, he believes there are far more important things than what goes on in a man's bedroom.

"I fear that some people in the church are becoming more exclusive, and that's hopeless," he says. "It's frightening, what's going on.

"I know there are gay bishops but they are damn good bishops and they care for people, that's the main thing. The tragedy is that so many people have surprised me by their acceptance of the situation."

He was a Barnsley lad, took a theology degree but taught maths, might still have been at the chalkface had they not changed the syllabus.

"Modern maths, all that nonsense," he says, dismissively.

He will retire to Horsforth, near Leeds, where he served his first curacy, thereafter becoming curate at Richmond and rector for eight years of Middleham, North Yorkshire's racing stable.

When last we'd spoken of it, he'd reckoned to have left Middleham because the bishop kept adding churches to his care - "I wasn't going to be Rector of Middleham, I was going to be Rector of North Yorkshire". Now he admits to the part of Canon Michael Perry, then Archdeacon of Durham, in persuading him to the former mining villages east of the cathedral city.

"Michael had a bungalow in Middleham," he says. "The first time he came to the church, he looked so young I thought he must be a curate."

Initially he declined the offer. When the Raintons' appointed rector had to withdraw through ill health, David was asked again. "I did wonder what I was coming to, 17 years ago this week," he tells his penultimate West Rainton congregation. "It's a miracle I got here at all."

St Mary's was "totally run down", both in fabric and in attendance. "It was really rather sad, totally different from Middleham," David says. "I regarded it as my mid-life challenge.

"I'm sure there were moments when I wondered what I was doing here, but the worst one is now. I don't want to go."

Congregations have more than doubled, the church building is wonderfully and vividly transformed, the fellowship manifest and meaningful. When last we were there, on a slightly hung over January 2, 2000, the column observed that worship at St Mary's was "like Alka Seltzer to the spirit."

Last Sunday is no different: a vibrant, caring, almost exuberant congregation welcoming to their first communion the five adults confirmed the week previously, and welcoming back Isobel Harper, home after brain tumour surgery.

Before the service, David plays a piece of classical music which sounds at first like the theme from Noddy but proves to be William Walton's Coronation March.

It's 520 years to the day since the enthronement of Richard III.

"We celebrated it like mad in Middleham," says David.

Julian Ward, the organist, is training to be a lay reader and leads the first part of the service. The Rector plays the organ instead.

The news sheet stresses, as always it does, that all confirmed Christians are welcome to take communion, and gives details of tomorrow's final services and of the barbecue which follows them.

The announcement ends with the code BYOB, now familiar in the Raintons. Whilst BYO might easily be imagined, the B is for neither bangers nor burgers. The departing Rector likes good wine and, as Anglican clergymen should be, is a steam engine buff, too.

"He has transformed the parish, without a doubt," says former churchwarden Bryan Clinton. "His has been an ever-open door and he has cared for everyone in the community, not just those who come to church. "He is a genuinely good man."

Mr Clinton is a retired solicitor. "That was the speech for the defence," says David.

After the service there's wine - "or coffee if you must" - a toast to the newly-confirmed, another "for bravery" to Isobel Harper, a third to retirement.

They've remembered the column's preferences and brought a bottle of beer. Guest ale, as it were.

The wretched, bitter, mind and soul-destroying irony is that there are any amount of David Guests labouring faithfully in the vineyard, perpetually perplexed by their masters' apparent determination to uproot it.

He recalls at the interview with Michael Ball, then Bishop of Jarrow, asking what the important job was in the Raintons.

"Love the people," said the bishop, having recovered from the Yorkshire terrier assault.

"Love all of them," says the Rev David Guest, "that's all I've ever tried to do".