I HOPE my boss doesn't go after the Canterbury job and leave me in the lurch. The Bishop of London - my bishop - is a highly intelligent, pastorally-gifted, witty traditionalist. And he didn't tell me to say that. Richard Chartres is one of the few old-style bishops remaining in the jazzed up, dumbed down Church of England. If they make him Archbishop of Canterbury and put in some guitar-strumming, happy clappy smiler with a fondness for the sort of politics that died with Old Labour then, as a traditionalist myself, I'm a marked man.

You couldn't make up what's happened to the Church in the last couple of decades. Let me give you a sample from last week. All the clergy in the diocese of London were called to a Sacred Synod at the Low Church shrine of All Souls, Langham Place - next door to Broadcasting House. The church was packed. The conductor was on the rostrum, conducting the orchestra in the sort of sub-Lloyd-Webber sounds that seem to have taken over church music these days. The clergy were belting out what the programme called the gathering songs. Sentimentality set to a tired rhythm. And the cliched modern hymns written by tin-eared rhymers.

The glory of Jesus majestic to see

Up high on a mountain transfigured was he.

Di diddle di diddle di diddle di dum. Reminds you of those songs of our misspent youth concerning young ladies from various parts of the country.

I've come across this conductor before: he features a lot in the new hymnbook, Hymns for Today's Church. I reviewed this for a church newspaper. The last straw was when I came to a hymn which began, Lord be with me in my depression and I couldn't resist saying it ought to be re-titled, Who would true valium see. There was the conductor leaping about on the podium trying to get the 300 parsons to sing up. The glee was so lugubrious: his expression was like lust recollected in impotence. Given the wall-to-wall carpeting and the soapy music, the effect was of a pop concert in a crematorium.

But these trials were only a prelude to the real horror: The Presentation of the London Challenge Video. After some gooey modern prayers, a white screen slowly descended. Think of the lowering of the safety curtain at half time in the Christmas pantomime at the Sunderland Empire and you'll have it about right. Instantly, there was a loud salvo of heavy rock music and the video began. It was supposed to be a tour of what the churches are doing throughout the diocese. In the whole presentation there wasn't one extract from a traditional service - not a single, recognisable gobbet of religious sanity.

The video took us to a church that was grotesquely overlit, where the priest was turned out in vestments which would have looked well on the Captain of the Starship Enterprise. The modern worship being put before us is not truly modern at all: it is only a third rate echo of recently abandoned fashions in pop culture. Please stay in London, Richard and defend us against this sort of insanity.

Published: Tuesday, January 15, 2002