It was as the leader and inspirer of the Samaritans, founded to befriend the suicidal and despairing, that Chad Varah's name became known worldwide. The idea for the organisation, which came to him in his forties, transformed his life. He brought to the task not just a strong personality and a natural compassion but also a firm grasp on the value of publicity combined with a gift for showmanship.

Edward Chad Varah was born in 1911, the eldest of nine children of Canon William Edward Varah, vicar of St Chad's Church, Barton upon Humber. His father was a strict Tractarian, against which the young Chad rebelled, blaming him particularly for his Victorian view of sex, but inheriting from him an inconvenient habit of blurting out unpopular truths.

At 13 Varah was sent away to Worksop College, a school with strong High Church traditions. Having an uncanny memory (to the end he could recite every poem he had ever learnt), he shone academically and won an exhibition in natural sciences to Keble College, Oxford. After two terms he switched to Politics, Philosophy and Economics but did little work and took only a third.

(Many years later, however, he was elected an honorary Fellow, and enjoyed taking guests to convivial Fellows' evenings at Keble.)

From Oxford, he went to Lincoln Theological College, sitting under Michael Ramsey and, after a last-minute struggle with doubts, being ordained in 1935 to the curacy of St Giles, Lincoln. After further curacies in Putney and at Barrow-in-Furness he became vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn, in 1942 and of St Paul's, Clapham Junction, in 1949.

From his earliest days as a curate he specialised in counselling on sexual problems and wrote articles on the subject from a permissive point of view, refusing to condemn adultery in all circumstances, and maintaining that the only law was the law of love. (Called as a defence witness in the Linda Lovelace obscenity trial in the 1970s, he responded to a QC's question about the Seventh Commandment with, “Why are you quoting this ancient desert lore at me?”)

When he heard, while at Clapham, that there were three suicides a day in London, it seemed to him that God was calling him to extend his counselling to those contemplating taking their own lives. But it was only when he was appointed to the exquisite City church of St Stephen, Walbrook (regarded as Wren's template for St Paul's, with central dome) that he was able to put his ideas into practice.

On November 1, 1953, he announced his plans for what was to be a lifelong commitment, originally called The Good Samaritans. God, he would claim, intervened to supply the church with its memorable telephone number — MAN 9000, ideal for an emergency helpline.

Journalists, sensing good copy, rallied to his cause. The first two telephone calls came on November 2, and it was not long before they were coming in at 100 a day.

One secret of the Samaritans' success, apart from Varah's resourceful manipulation of the media, was his recruitment of volunteers who became, by guidance and experience, experts in “listening therapy”, giving sad people their total attention and sympathy. Volunteers were not necessarily believers, and it was a strict rule that no Samaritan should exploit distress by attempting to convert a client to any religion or philosophy. So an ordained minister, operating from the crypt of a famous church, founded a wholly secular personal rescue service.

As something of a benign despot, Varah was a poor delegator, and after a rebellion by the membership was removed as director of the Samaritans' Central London branch in 1974; he was referred to thereafter as the “founder”. He transferred his energies to the movement's global outreach, launching Befrienders International. He also maintained his lively concern for sexual problems by writing a God-slot column, “Christian Lib” in Forum magazine. (He had previously supplemented his income in the 1950s by writing scripts for the “Dan Dare” strip in the Eagle comic and for its sister comic Girl, published by a fellow clergyman, Marcus Morris).

Varah believed above all that clergy should not be exercised by who sleeps with whom, but concern themselves only with real evil, and with being Christ-like and gentle to the weak and frail. In his favourite Punch cartoon, a pompous vicar in the pulpit addresses rows of rustic yokels. “I know what you will say to me!” he is saying. “You will say, ‘Apollinarianism!'.”

Despite being theologically and morally avant-garde — he had long supported women priests, and once told Penthouse magazine that he would rather his daughter became a prostitute than a policewoman — Varah remained liturgically conservative and an adherent to the Book of Common Prayer.

Every year from 1974 until 1986 he travelled the equivalent of twice-around-the-world, encouraging the work of Samaritans overseas and seizing the chance to practise his skill in multiple foreign languages. From the African state of Chad he sent postcards to all his friends saying “Love from Chad from Chad”.

Since St Stephen Walbrook was out of action for nine years, undergoing structural repairs, he had plenty of time. Only in 1987 was it reopened, flooded with sunlight, its pews replaced by chairs constructed by Varah's carpenter son Andrew, and with its magnificent and remarkable new circular altar in travertine marble, commissioned from Henry Moore by Varah's good friend and churchwarden, Lord Palumbo. (At first, an ecclesiastical court refused to recognise this work of art as an altar at all, but Palumbo, later chairman of the Arts Council, contrived to get this judgment overturned on appeal.)

Varah was proud of the fact that, when first given the living by the Grocers' Company in 1953, he had insisted on retaining his parson's freehold, securing his tenure. But with no local congregation, he was eventually forced to abandon Sunday services; however, he indulged his passion for music by holding a beautifully sung Eucharist on Thursdays and an organ recital on Fridays, enjoyed by City workers.

His church remained a favourite venue for weddings: among others, he married Major Ron Ferguson to his second wife, and Sarah Armstrong-Jones to Daniel Chatto.

To young couples, he gave a pastoral pre-nuptial talk which included two pieces of advice: that a loving couple finds fidelity not a problem but a privilege; and that the most important three words in the language are “it doesn't matter” — his way of advocating a sense of proportion. Varah himself, throughout his long marriage to Susan, the mother to their five children and a world president of the Mothers' Union, enjoyed close friendships with many women, including the late writer Monica Dickens, who founded the first American branch of the Samaritans in Boston.

In later years Varah spent much of his time engaging in handwritten correspondence, firing off frequent letters to The Times about the iniquities of female circumcision, or about some precise point of etymology. He read omnivorously and possessed a vast library, his books filling even his kitchen cupboards.

He had conceived, at the age of 9, the idea of a land called Refugia which would provide a homeland for all dispossessed and fugitive peoples; and referred to the Pope as “a good holy man, but Public Enemy No 3 or 4”

for his obduracy on contraception, telling The Sunday Telegraph in 1993: “It was a great mistake to make an ignorant Polish peasant into a Pope.”

Varah's autobiography, published in 1992, entitled Before I Die Again (all his life he had been a believer in reincarnation) turned out to be a curiously ill-disciplined and selfregarding work. It hardly did justice to what had been one of the more remarkable and unorthodox Anglican ministries of modern times.

Varah retired at 92 (he was the oldest incumbent in the Church of England), continuing until then to commute daily by public transport to his cluttered desk in St Stephen from his home in Barnes, latterly aided by a wheeled walking-frame.

His final sermon at Evensong in November 2003 was a doughty defence of the gay Bishop-elect of Reading. At the dinner afterwards he was flanked by two favourites, the actress Joanna Lumley and the opera singer Anne Mackay.

In the summer of 2005 a rapprochement with the Samaritans was reached, and his eldest son Michael was appointed to the board of trustees.

Varah was appointed OBE in 1969 (advanced to CBE in 1995) and made a prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral in 1975. In 2000 he was appointed a Companion of Honour, for services to the Samaritans - his greatest legacy.

His wife predeceased him in 1993 and he is survived by his daughter and three of his four sons (Michael having predeceased him this year).

The Rev Chad Varah, CH, CBE, former rector of St Stephen, Walbrook, and founder of The Samaritans, was born on November 12, 1911. He died on November 9, 2007, aged 95