The Rev Dr Chad Varah, who has died aged 95, dedicated his long life to providing emotional support, caring for people, and teaching others how to do so.

To that end, he founded The Samaritans in 1953 "to befriend the suicidal and despairing". The movement now has 202 branches in UK and Ireland, and some 15,500 volunteers providing confidential, non-judgmental emotional support, at all hours.

Varah promoted the same principle internationally through Befrienders International (Samaritans Worldwide) as its founder/chairman (1974-83), and then president (1983-86). Befrienders International now operates in more than 40 countries, including some where there is no easy access to phones or emails, and where people will walk for hours to receive emotional support. An inveterate traveller, Varah visited most, if not all of them, continuing these journeys into his nineties.

Although he stepped down from day-to-day involvement with The Samaritans in later life, for more than four decades Varah continued to be immensely proud of the organisation. It was only as The Samaritans' 50th anniversary in 2003 approached that he felt it necessary to express his disapproval of, and disappointment with, some of the ways both The Samaritans and Befrienders International were being directed.

However, in the summer of 2005 a rapprochement was reached when he enjoyed a particularly happy meeting with the new chief executive and the then chairman of The Samaritans, listening enthusiastically to news about all those people who continue his original enlightened and essential work. Varah was delighted when, in 2006, his eldest son, the late Michael Varah, was appointed to sit on the organisation's newly created board of trustees.

Varah was a man of immense intellect and linguistic skills, of eclectic interests, originality and practicality. He was the eldest of nine children of the vicar of the village of Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire. His father named him after St Chad, founder of the parish.

In his autobiography, Before I Die Again (1992 - the title referred to his belief in reincarnation), Varah described his father as "a very strong character, a man of principle with firm beliefs and convictions, and a man with the moral courage to speak what he believed, whether it would make him popular or unpopular". His first-born son inherited those qualities: the extent to which Chad spoke what he believed often earned him respect, but often led him into conflict - not that this ever weakened his resolve.

From his schooling at Worksop college, Nottinghamshire, he gained an exhibition in natural sciences to Keble College, Oxford, but switched subjects and in 1933 obtained a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. A keen linguist with a great love of music, he was active in Oxford's Russian and Slavonic Clubs (he would go on to publish two volumes of Russian Orthodox church music). He also founded the university's Scandinavian Club: "not least because of the access it gave me to long-legged, blue-eyed blondes," he reflected candidly in later life.

Despite an initial reluctance to follow in his father's footsteps, Varah was persuaded by his godfather, Archbishop Hine, to study at Lincoln Theological College. Ordained in 1936, he was curate at St Giles, Lincoln (1935-38), St Mary's, Putney (1938-40), Barrow-in-Furness (1940-42), and vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn (1942-49) and St Paul, Clapham Junction (1949-53).

In 1940, he married Susan Whanslaw, who later became a key figure in the Church of England as world president of the Mothers' Union during the 1970s, steering through important changes in the organisation's statutes. They had one daughter, triplet sons (born at home in the Blackburn vicarage in wartime Britain), and then a fourth son.

At Clapham Junction in the early 1950s, the house visits, "open" youth clubs, teaching, and - as chaplain of St John's hospital, Battersea, "bawling prayers at geriatric patients" - meant that his stipend covered only what he had to pay his secretary. So, from 1950 until 1961, he built a second career, working into the night as children's comic scriptwriter and visualiser for Girl and Eagle, Robin and Swift, bringing his scientific knowledge to life in comicbook space stories - notably as one of the brains behind strip cartoon spaceman Dan Dare - and dramatising the lives of famous religious figures for young readers on the back covers of these publications.

These titles belonged to the stable published by fellow clergyman Marcus Morris, another believer that good, popular writing could improve people's lives. (Morris, who would go on to head the National Magazine Company, once described Varah as "the wild card of the Church of England"). This was the impetus, too, behind Varah's consultancy work for the sex education magazine Forum for 20 years till 1987 - in that year, in recognition of this efforts, the aids charity The Terrence Higgins Trust made him its patron, a role he held till 1999.

In 1935, Varah had conducted his first funeral, as an assistant curate in Lincoln, for a 13-year-old girl who had taken her own life, fearing she had venereal disease and would die a slow, painful and shameful death. In fact, the girl had started to menstruate. Varah vowed at her graveside to devote himself to helping other people overcome the sort of isolation and ignorance that had caused the girl to kill herself. He would do it through a combination of education, and by providing access to emotional support in times of need. As one of the earlier proponents of sex education, particularly to poorly educated young people, he earned the label, as he wryly observed later, of "a 'dirty old man' by the time I was 25".

His teaching swelled attendances at his youth clubs, and attracted young couples preparing for marriage - and married couples who had started drifting apart. "It was marriage guidance before it was invented," he said. Varah also gave an early warning of the approach of the permissive society, usually associated with the 1960s, with an article in Picture Post in 1952. Far more important to him than the outraged responses of conservative Christians were the 235 people who wrote in to bare their souls, 14 of whom showed signs of considering suicide as an option.

In the early 1950s, three suicides a day were officially recorded in Greater London. Varah felt that there was a great need that was not being met by doctors and social workers. Some desperate people clearly preferred to turn to someone of his liberal views: Varah pondered that if it was so easy to save lives, why didn't he make this his full-time work? But then, how would he support himself and his young family, and what could be the equivalent of a 999 emergency contact number for the suicidal to make contact?

Such challenges initially deterred him. But, as he related in his autobiography: "Then I said to God, be reasonable! Don't look at me ... I'm possibly the busiest person in the Church of England ... It'd need to be a priest with one of those city churches with no parishioners."

At this point, he set off for a holiday at the English church at Knokke, Flanders, where he received a quite unexpected telegram from the Grocers' Livery Company in London offering him the living of St Stephen Walbrook - just such a City of London parish.

Once instituted as rector there, Varah was soon inundated with demands for help from the suicidal and despairing, and enlisted some of the laity of his tiny parish to help - not as trained counsellors, but as volunteers. Varah founded the Samaritans in the church vestry on November 2 1953 and continued to run the organisation from the crypt, where the first volunteers were based.

In February 1954, he decided the group should become a freestanding organisation. "I called our little band together and suggested that the whole project should be handed over to them, the volunteers, because I should never again pick up the emergency telephone, nor be the person to say 'come in' when someone tapped timidly on the door." In spite of this declaration, he continued to befriend the most desperate and despairing for many years.

Though Varah held Samaritans posts thereafter for decades - including director of the London branch from 1953 to 1974, and its president from 1974 to 1986 - and wrote the movement's handbook, Samaritans: Befriending The Suicidal (1984 and 1988), he ensured from the outset that its voluntary principle could flourish without him.

The novelist Monica Dickens, inspired by Varah, set up the first American branch of The Samaritans. In her autobiography An Open Book, first published in 1978, she wrote: "The recruiting slogan is 'Are you ordinary enough to be a Samaritan?'" Varah, paradoxically, was not ordinary at all. How else, Dickens suggests, could he have set up a method of befriending which is so simple, so direct, and so purely human that it can work anywhere in the world.

In 1972, BBC television screened Varah's play Nobody Understands Miranda as part of a six-episode series called The Befrienders, loosely based on The Samaritans casework. Varah's battle for well-informed sex education continued into his eighties: in 1992 he founded, and from 1999 was secretary of, MAGMOG (Men against Genital Mutilation of Girls), going into the homes of immigrants from East Africa to convince them of the pointless cruelty of the practice.

Only in 2003, at the age of 92 and 50 years after he had founded the Samaritans in its crypt, did he finally retire as rector of his beloved church, St Stephen Walbrook, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. He was, at the time, the oldest incumbent in the Church of England.

The desire to speak his mind and take on contentious issues never left him: some would say that it was what had kept him going. He would not easily drop an issue in which he believed. More than once did Samaritans (the name was changed from his original The Samaritans in 2002) remind him that it was literally impossible for him to resign as founder. But despite any disagreements he may have had with those to whom he handed over the organisation, it was his inspiration and determination that created and developed it. He never lost sight of his early ideal of making suicide "unimportant as a cause of death" all over the world.

Though Samaritans has kept up to date with the changing needs of society and developments in technology - support service is now available by text as well as email, face to face, by letter and telephone - it has always remained faithful to the founding philosophy of "active listening therapy", as Varah called it.

Among many awards, Varah was made a Companion of Honour in the Millennium Year honours list. His wife died in 1993, and he is survived by four of his children.

· Edward Chad Varah, clergyman and founder of The Samaritans, born November 12 1911; died November 8 2007