The chairman of Ashill parish council complained: The normal Sunday morning services are now

The chairman of Ashill parish council complained: "The normal Sunday morning services are now very happy- clappy, with people diving around and getting messages. "They have gone for informality and spiritual renewal, and they're packed on Sundays."When Down proposed livening up his own services by removing the oak pews to make room for charismatic displays of devotion - including "dancing worship" - the traditionalists protested. Clearly, most locals were underwhelmed by an institution that no longer can claim to be the organising intelligence standing between the world and chaos. On the other hand, there are some - not all of them regular churchgoers - whose priority is to preserve the mores antiquii of church services from the modern happy-clappy charismatics who are, Down said, the key to the Church of England's future.

"Look at what's happening at Holy Trinity Brompton in London," he said. The churches are each capable of holding 200 seated worshippers, yet the average Sunday turnout seldom exceeded 40 at St Nicholas's and 30 at St George's (even though the combined populations of both parishes has risen from 1,000 in the Fifties to their present 3,000-odd). The Downs have not yet found alternative accommodation, but the Church has promised to rehouse them. The couple, who have two adult children, profess to be happy with their alternative place of worship, Ashill's community centre, where there are no pews and people drink coffee before praying on their feet and singing to the music of a six-piece band which when I visited a couple of Sundays ago drowned out the cries of newborn babies and the creaks from octogenarian bones. From the first day of January he will not be allowed to conduct services in the church of St Nicholas or in the church of St George, also within his ministry, in the neighbouring parish of Saham Toney.

Nevertheless, what has happened to the Downs is very odd, very rustic in its curmudgeonliness, and very bureaucratic. "You can observe the predicament of the Church of England in microcosm here," he said, without visible rancour, almost echoing John Keble, leader of the 19th-century Oxford Movement ("If the Church of England were to fail, it would be found in my parish").Soon after his arrival in Norfolk (from Lincolnshire, where he tended five parishes), Down decided that Sunday attendances at St Nicholas's and St George's were not good enough. Early in the New Year, Christian Research will publish a book whose title, The Tide is Running Out, is a succinctly dire summary of its contents. By then, Down and his wife, Maureen, will have been forced to leave the rectory. And, Down concluded quietly, "If the Church continues to resist people's desire for change, then it is death."He is far from being alone in his pessimism. In the nave, energetic crudity jostles with riotous absurdity, while at the altar elegant mediocrity bumbles on.