Profile; New model rural vicar; Tom Ambrose

Andrew Brown on a rare kind of priest who is breathing new life into a country parish

Tom Ambrose, 50, is the Rector of Witchford, a village four miles west of the cathedral city of Ely, in the Fens. There has been a church of some sort there since the seventh century. The tower and present church has stood, more or less leakily, for 850 years, since 1150 at least. The Rev Tom Ambrose has been there for four of them.

At first, Dr Ambrose seems the kind of scholarly eccentric you would expect to find in a country vicarage. He has a doctorate in geology, and spent summer vacations while he studied at theological college surveying a mountain range in Spain. Witchford is his only parish, so he is also the diocesan communications officer; and his wife, Gill, is the children's officer. The bishop has put much of the rest of his staff out to work elsewhere in the diocese: at least 10 parish priests have other jobs; one is a doctor. Though he lives in a substantial vicarage, it is a very long way from the sun-lit life of a curate in the Thirties. When Dr Ambrose was a curate, he lived with his family on pounds 40 a week. Once, when a beggar came to his door, he sent him away after working out that the beggar's income from social security was more than the church paid him to raise his family. A rare kind of professionalism is required to choose a career like that, and to stick with it.

Dr Ambrose is mild-mannered, but not ineffectual: last year he knocked down a cornered thief in Newmarket and stood over him till the police arrived, which would have been all right except that he told the story to colleagues on the Internet, who have teased him intermittently as "Bruiser Ambrose" ever since. It was not always thus.

The country vicar belongs in our imagination to a perfect if somewhat confused rural past, along with yokels in smocks, Colin Firth in tights, old maids and warm beer. In reality, this golden age existed for only a few years at the beginning of the century. One of the few bishops who still lives in a proper palace once described his childhood unforgettably: "When I grew up, it was usual for the rector to have gone to the same public school as the people who owned the village. I grew up in an old- fashioned rectory, with servants and a gardener, and a tennis court. It was usual to see people playing tennis in white flannels, trousers held up by a college tie; and, if it were hot, to be wearing a Panama hat, even at the net."

Here the bishop mimed a gentle, back-hand volley and smiled at the memory.

"Nowadays," the bishop went on, "the people with money in the countryside are quite different, and our people feel much shyer about addressing them. The large rectories and the glebe barns belong to businessmen and never to clergy." The modern vicar lives in a modern brick house brought by the Church Commissioners for what they got when selling the old rectory off cheap. Those who do live in a rectory will be part-timers. Either they will have numerous villages to look after: six is common; 12 is not unheard of; or they will have a second job, like Tom Ambrose. For rural pedestrians the part-timers are preferable. A good number of country vicars spend Sunday hurtling through the lanes from church to church, cramming in as many services as possible, and hoping that not too many will be communion services, where they may be required to drain the chalice at the end of each one. A Roman Catholic priest was convicted of drunk driving last week even after he explained to magistrates that his vocation compelled him to drink all unused communion wine.

The traditional country priest was not expected to do anything he did not want to. Protected by his freehold, which gave him a job for life, he could sit tight while the church, and even the vicarage, rotted around him. The full rigours of the freehold system had been moderated by a sense of noblesse oblige, which meant that no gentleman would ignore the desires of his bishop, but as that wore off it became possible for a priest to waste his life in utter futility.

"Whatever I think about the freehold personally," says Dr Ambrose, "my parish have had enough of it. They had one priest from 1952 to 1987 who did nothing, and left church, hall and even the vicarage derelict when he retired. At the one service a week, the attendance was in single figures. He left half a million in his will, which was published the week we launched an appeal to repair some of the long legacy of neglect. That went down like a lead balloon."

It took three years before the vicarage had been made weathertight enough for the Ambrose family to move in. The congregation by then had risen to around ten. Now he expects about a hundred people at the Christmas services; perhaps half that many in the summer, when many of his flock go on holiday, for Witchford is a fairly prosperous village with a steadily growing population, many of them commuters to Cambridge, 12 miles away.

Relationships are not easy to make. Dr Ambrose says that, in the old days, half the village would be in service. Some of them would have worked for the vicar, and there would have been no problem finding out what was happening, or making himself known. But there are no servants, and churchgoing is no longer a social occasion. Nor does he have the time to walk around the village, although he has taken over the editorship of the village paper which keeps him in touch.

"There has been a huge cultural shift," he says. "If you look round this diocese you will see vast vicarages in tiny villages; a couple of generations ago the vicar could pay for anything that needed to be done. All people did was to go to church on Sunday and to the annual fete. They never thought about the cost of it. Now congregations must realise that there won't be clergy, or churches, or parishes unless they pay for them. It is quite difficult to get the message across in a farming community. When people know that the Church Commissioners own land, they assume they are paying for the vicar."

They are not. The Commissioners' income goes almost entirely to paying clergy pensions. What little is left over goes to cathedrals and urban dioceses. Since 1944, while the population of Cambridgeshire has doubled, the number of clergy in the diocese has halved. Ely must support 166 clergy and 314 churches from what its congregations are prepared to give. So attracting, and keeping, worshippers is necessary for the country churches in a way that has never been true before. The countryside is full of abandoned Methodist and Baptist chapels. The Roman Catholic Church has never really settled there at all. The Church of England is the last outpost of Christianity in most of rural England. That forces it to move beyond the traditional services.

Despite his own children's love of traditional high ceremonial - his son was a chorister at Ely - Dr Ambrose believes in all the things that traditionalists writing in magazines such as Private Eye dislike so much: "You can't just stand there with your back to everybody. We do services in modern English, services in which children are involved. So long as you put a lot of work into them, they are appreciated, which means new services are a lot more work. Because they don't have loud voices, you need a loudspeaker system if the children are to speak." In no time, we move on to grave material heresies such as plastic chairs, and lavatories in church.

Dr Ambrose has been one of the enthusiasts behind the church's advertising campaigns at recent Christmases, including the "Bad hair day" poster which so irritated the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, that he had his own press officer brief against it. The subsequent row did not bother Dr Ambrose at all. He is convinced that nothing could be worse for the church than simply ignoring what goes on around it, until it collapses, as the vicarage in Witchford nearly did.

Like many country clergy, Dr Ambrose spends time on the Internet. He is partly responsible for the diocesan web pages, which are among the most informative and comprehensive of any religious organisation's. A group of 15 or so devout and wired people around Cambridge, including Terry Waite, constantly exchange e-mail, on subjects ranging from prayer to whether a vicar may properly use the word "crap". Dr Ambrose is one of the most active participants.

This Christmas there will be a Christingle service on Christmas Eve, an occasion which can prove too exciting for the responsible grown-ups as the village children parade around the church with blazing candles in their hands. There is midnight mass, and a family service on Christmas morning. In the afternoon the Ambrose family will drive into Ely Cathedral for evensong. There is a particular piece of organ music their daughter is keen to hear. It sounds like very hard work, I say, with some understatement. "That's our Christmas. That really is how we like to spend it," replies the new model rural vicar.