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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. 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. “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. 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. Dr Ambrose says that, in the old days, half the village would be in service.