Crusaders Read Free Page A

your age, probably. You don’t know of him by any chance?’
    Gore forced a smile while nodding into the brim of his tea, though it was as if he had just swallowed rat poison. These two were Anglicans, then – his own people – but of a markedly different stripe. Barlow had been his contemporary at Grey Theological College, and ‘brilliant’ was a wildly naive assessment. He knew too that any church where Barlow declaimed from the pulpit was bound to be evangelical by nature, its pews filled by solid suburban couples whose lives nonetheless had seemed listless and grey until the day they met a guy called Jesus.
    ‘Hoxheath, but, good lord,’ exclaimed Tina. ‘You’ll not be short of souls to save round there. Them little charvers what were in your seat? Plenty more of that sort in Hoxheath.’
    He was familiar with such reactions, thought them snobbish, the knee-jerk of those who imagined an afterlife populated solely by their own ‘sort’. Rather than cavil, he resorted to a stock tactic – smiling gently to himself, stirring his tea, meaning his silence to intimidate.
    Stuart, though, was made of impervious material. ‘So how in hell did you get lumbered wi’ this job? I mean to say – youmust’ve done summat awful to get sent to Hoxheath.’ And he chuckled.
    ‘Well.’ Gore set down his plastic spoon. ‘I was serving my title, as we say, down in Dorset, quite happily really. Then the Bishop of Newcastle came to me and said he had a plan for Hoxheath – for a few estates that weren’t getting reached by the older churches. He needed a man, so he asked me if I’d take it on. I didn’t think twice, really. I mean, I took it as a privilege. A duty, if you like.’ This seemed to chase the condescending smiles from the faces opposite, so Gore ventured a sharper angle. ‘It’s a challenge, of course, I know. But that’s what life’s made of, isn’t it? We can’t run from it, we in the Church. We have to be out in the world. Among the people.’
    ‘Aye, right enough,’ offered Stuart, after a moment or two.
    ‘Anyhow – it’s just the world of work these days, isn’t it? You go where you get sent, wherever you’re told to. I was told to plant a church.’
    And Gore shrugged, as to say that was the size of it. Still, just the simple stating of his mission – I was told to plant a church – resonated at his core. He would never phrase it so for the layman – much too pompous to be let away with – but these were the times when he believed he was about the work his Father intended.
    Pleasantry had receded, silence settled. Gore withdrew his pen and notebook from his coat, and started to embroider some jottings he had made toward a sermon drawing on St John’s account of the Good Samaritan. ‘If any man hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother hath need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion against him – how dwelleth the love of God in him?’
    Such a well-minted entreaty, the quintessence of his tradition – the stripe running up his own spine. Mother religion, ‘the heart of a heartless world’. And yet with what ease did a well-wrought phrase become a platitude. What should be the segue? He scribbled quickly. ‘As fellow Christians we are commanded to love our fellow man as ourselves. But it’s not easy. We have all faced a stranger in need and said, “Not today friend, I have troubles of my own …”’
    No, he thought, setting down the notebook. Not easy, by nomeans. Easy to say , for sure. Easy to say ‘You must love’. Easier still to say ‘But it’s not easy’. All talk came easily. Anything worth doing was onerous. ‘He that will eat the kernel must first crack the nut.’ The point was to do it. Also to succeed in it? Gore was unhappily conscious that for large swathes of his life he had sat on plastic chairs in small aggrieved groups, listening to just this kind of pained debate – from Labour Party branch meetings to parish church councils and back