PASTOR Mick Fleming and his Church on the Street, in Burnley, will be known to many.

Since 2020, he has featured regularly on television and in newspapers. His work with the poor, the homeless, and the addict was seen on Songs of Praise in 2021. In 2022, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited the church, spending time with service users, and this was reported internationally. In the present cost-of-living crisis, Pastor Mick is someone whom journalists and broadcasters go to for a comment. He is an impressive figure.

When I read this autobiography, therefore, I knew about his work and that he had turned his life around — “from drug dealer to life bringer”. So I looked for some insight into how someone is drawn to criminality in the first place and how they get themselves out of it: critical issues, if we are to reduce crime.

He writes in a colloquial style, no doubt to create a sense of authenticity. You have to get used to such sentences as “I began talking to my new pal the Holy Ghost. . .” Yet he has a degree in theology from Manchester University.

Perhaps a more formal style might have enabled some better reflections; for the book conceals as much as it reveals. It is a collage of incidents and people from his life. There are enigmatic glimpses of his involvement with drugs and gangs and carrying a gun. He writes about his appalling treatment of his mother — he steals from her purse as she lies dying — his wives and children, though we have no idea what became of most of them. There seems little remorse for many of the lives that he must have blighted.

Above all, and disappointingly, there is little by way of deep reflection on any of it.

The Revd Dr Alan Billings is the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire and the author of Lost Church: Why we must find it again (SPCK, 2013).

Blown Away: From drug dealer to life bringer
Pastor Mick Fleming
SPCK £19.99
(978-0-281-08663-4)
Church Times Bookshop £17.99