Having performed several miracles in his time – reviving a career frequently pronounced dead, cheering up a rain-draggled Wimbledon audience, selling 250 million records – Sir Cliff Richard yesterday set himself the most daunting mission yet: trying to revive the Anglican Church.

As part of the events surrounding his 50 years in showbusiness (and 43 years as a committed Christian), Sir Cliff released a new book of his Fifty Favourite Bible Stories for children, with an accompanying CD.

“If it opens the eyes of young people, that’s great. Everyone knows I’m a Christian,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I do this?If this helps to open what for many is a closed book, I’ll be delighted.”

The man once described as “too sexy for TV” and a danger to young women had some sharp advice for the Church.

“Jesus is eternally relevant,” he said. “The Church isn’t always. We live in a multiracial, multi-spiritual country.

“If you want the Church to grow, it’s got to be as combative as everyone else and prove that this is a relevant faith. I am sure the Church isn’t going to be wiped out. We can still do it.”

If it is hard to imagine the singer as the spokesman for a revitalised Anglicanism (the Church in which he was confirmed after announcing his embrace of Christianity in 1964), there is no doubting his sincerity.

Sir Cliff still plays to packed houses but he also seemed to put everything into yesterday’s press conference – even though the audience consisted of only a dozen journalists in a sweltering room in Westminster Central Hall.

At 68, Sir Cliff appeared fit and trim. “I may be the first rocker to reach 50 [years as a performer], but there are others just behind me – McCartney, the Stones – and long may that continue to be the case,” he said. His number one Bible story, he declared, was that of Joseph and his coat of many colours, clearly an appropriate choice for a man upholstered in an amazing multicoloured dreamsuit of violent blue stripes. He spoke of smoking (never, hated the smell), lack of children (“I never had the feeling that I wanted to pass my genes on”, but perhaps he meant jeans), his anger over the murder of his friend Jill Dando (“Who am I ever to voice an opinion to God? He has a plan”), and ageism in the music industry (“If I heard a record and the person was 150 years old, I would only gauge it on whether I liked the music”).

Time and again, he dwelled on his Christianity. “I did genuinely believe I could not be a rock and roll singer and a Christian, but they drew together quite well.”

Asked about declining church attendance and the drift away from organised Christianity, Sir Cliff sighed: “We live in a very strange period of history. A lot of people have never opened the Bible at all.” Noting that President Bush “called the American people to prayer” immediately after 9/11, Sir Cliff said: “They’re attuned to the spiritual aspect of life. Maybe we’ve lost that.”

As for his musical career, Sir Cliff promised to keep on performing, and to keep on promoting Christianity. “There may be a follow-up,” he proclaimed, waving his new book of Bible stories in the air, “when I celebrate my 100th year.”

Stranger things have happened in what Sir Cliff himself describes as a career that has been a “strange succession of successes”.

As he winds up, photographers step forward. “There is a shadow behind you,” says one. “There used to be four,” said the former lead singer of the Shadows, without missing a beat. Only about three people, all over 50, got the joke.

There are times when being Sir Cliff Richard, for all his fabled ability to rise again, must feel very Old Testament.