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From Rev鈥檇 Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

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An odd experience for me, doing this slot on a Friday morning, to walk unnoticed past the paparazzi outside, and find myself, a middle aged clergyman run to fat with the dress sense of an embittered geography teacher, surrounded by a glittering constellation of stars.

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Odd for me, odd for you gathered here; but it was not ever thus. For I may be a simple country parson now, but in 1986 I was riding high in the charts, the only Vicar in the C of E to have had a number one record; and although it鈥檚 three decades ago, this morning I recall vividly Jimmy Somerville and I standing nonplussed in a photographer鈥檚 studio refusing to wear a rail of wildly unsuitable garments produced by a stylist, who said, a bit snippily, 鈥淲ell, they were good enough for Spandau Ballet鈥�.

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I raise this not merely as an empty boast, nor because my hilarious and yet 听deeply moving memoir is about to be published, but because so many people ask me how I got from the former to the latter, from pop to pulpit. To them it seems an incredible journey 鈥� I suspect my bishop sometimes thinks the same 鈥� but to me it is just what happened. You know, one day you鈥檙e doing Top of the Pops with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the next you鈥檙e deputy chaplain to the Admiral of the Wash on his Annual Inspection of the Beacons and Buoys.

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And it鈥檚 not without precedent. I was in Olney in Buckinghamshire on Tuesday, where its Vicar, John Newton, another Church of England parson with a surprising past, wrote Amazing Grace. Before he was ordained he鈥檇 made his living in the slave trade, a gruesome business, that would put those who plied it beyond redemption, you might think. But all points are equidistant from God, whose mercy is boundless, love limitless, grace promiscuous, and is after us, wherever and whoever we may be.