It's impossible to visit Church on the Street and not be deeply moved by the work the organisation does for those in need. It is an extraordinary place ... ' HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES , from the Foreword About six months later I was in McDonald’s. There was a guy who [I could tell] was an alcoholic. I got him a drink and a burger and started talking to him. I ended up getting him into [NA] meetings and he got clean. When I was homeless, on my first night ever sleeping on the street, I went into a church. They had tea and biscuits and stuff. I was shaking, because if I didn’t drink, I could have a fit. They were nice people, but they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. I met a guy in church who had just come out of prison. He said his prison chaplain had told him Jesus died for his sins, but he didn’t understand what that meant. He’d been to loads of churches, but no one had been able to explain it to him.

He started his ministry by sitting by a McDonald's restaurant and befriending the homeless and hungry. Now his Church on the Street is a hive of activity, thanks to donations from those who have been inspired by his message of faith and hope.It would be amazing if he finished his boxing career and came and did this – you never know, he could choose to.” The sound that came out my mother – I imagine it’s the sound Jesus made as he took his last breath on the cross. I looked at my mum and dad crying, and I didn’t feel that there was any space for me there. They couldn’t hold it together. And I was holding them in my arms and praying for them while they were crying, wanting life – while churches were shut. I might have been wrong in what I did, but I was trying to keep people alive long enough to hear the gospel, because I knew what it had done for me. Did you always see yourself leading a church one day? Or did Church on the Street come from something that you found missing in other places?

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. It’s worse now. The need is rising, but the resource is less. We’ve got more working poor and pensioner poverty. Children are undernourished and we’re seeing more disabled people sleeping rough. I could go on and on.

I didn’t break any laws – I did my best anyway. The police tried to arrest me once in a car park – I wasn’t brilliant at not hugging people, because the guys I was hugging were dying. On one street where I was delivering food parcels, three men under 40 killed themselves in three weeks. I know he’s never acted before but he has the same mental health traits as me and seems to cope with them in the same way as I do – except I’m not the heavyweight champion of the world. As it got to quarter to seven, I thought: I’ve got to go. At seven, a man came round the corner. I’d never spoken to him before but he worked at the hostel. He was a recovering drug addict, and was running a Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meeting. So that’s how I got into recovery. A lot of prostitutes come in and we have hair a hairdresser who comes in to do men's hair. Every Sunday, in the middle of all this, I do the church service. It works.

We feed people outside, and we have maybe 2,000 people come through the doors [of our drop-in centre, The Hub] every week. We’re open every day except Saturday. We have nurses, doctors and a mental health team here.Then, I got arrested for a minor offence, and I was sectioned and put into a mental health unit for about four months. There was a nun who used to bring me communion. She’d touch my face and say: “God bless you.” This elderly lady taught me that Jesus did love me. There is hot food available seven days a week and we have a huge food bank. We have showers and washing machines and dryers to help the homeless and others. Born into a working-class Catholic family in Burnley, Fleming’s life took a terrible turn when he was raped on his way to school, aged just eleven. In an unbelievably tragic twist, his older sister died that very same night. Not knowing how to process his pain led to a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse, violence and crime. I get more death threats as a Christian than I did when I was doing the other [criminal] stuff! The things that have been levelled at me did upset me: that I’m just a social worker and I’m not giving the gospel. I just think they’ve misunderstood the gospel.

I have been arrested for every serious offence you can think of," he admits with candour. They were leading the life of hurting other people, so drug dealers or whatever. Then I put the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger. Thank God it didn’t go off! I believe that God saved me in that moment, because I knew the firearm couldn’t jam. I don’t know if I thought it was Jesus, but I felt there was something bigger than me out there, and that gave me hope. He died two years later, because he damaged himself with alcohol and drugs, and I never told him that I knew, right from the moment I first saw him, that he was the man who raped me.

Sometimes it’s more like running a hospital, but I think that’s what the Church should be. You’ve got Christ in the centre, and you are being “doers of the word” (James 1:22, NKJV). The secular come in, and they end up becoming Christians – not by us preaching at them, but by the work we do.