Tomorrow morning, like every Sunday, Anglican vicar the Rev Graeme Buttery will celebrate a Eucharistic service in his parish church in Hartlepool. If he's very lucky, the congregation might be nudging 40, in a church built to seat 800 – and four of those present will be his wife Gillian and their three children. Afterwards, the family will go back to their 1980s breeze-block vicarage next door to the church, where the glass in the front door was recently kicked in by a would-be intruder. All the windows have bars on them after the wife of Buttery's predecessor was attacked in her garden.

It's not what you might call an idyllic parish. But is being its priest the dregs of life in the Church of England or the 21st-century Christian missionary frontier? That's the question the Anglican church has been asking itself over the last few days, after a survey in the Church Times revealed that, while in London it takes around four-and-a-half months to fill a vacancy for a parish priest, with an average of three names on the final shortlist, in areas including the north-east many parishes are without a priest for two years or more, and shortlists are virtually unknown. Most priests, it turns out, simply don't want to work in places like Hartlepool; St Cuthbert's, another Anglican parish in the city, has just taken two-and-a-half years to appoint a new vicar. Of 75 names on the Lee List, a confidential list of clerical job-seekers, 54 were looking for a parish in the south-east.

The losers are parishes like that of St Cuthbert and another of Buttery's neighbours, Holy Trinity with St Marks. As with St Cuthbert's, it took two-and-a-half years to find a new priest for Holy Trinity after its last incumbent left in 2009; the Rev Roz Hall, its current vicar, was eventually appointed in 2011. The Rev Philip North, who was the vicar of Holy Trinity until 2002, thinks that kind of wait can be "really damaging" to a parish, where continuity of services and events and the ongoing presence of a Christian minister are the main things the Church aims to provide. He thinks his colleagues should be delving deep into their souls and asking themselves: should I be putting myself forward for this sort of ministry?

"When you are ordained, part of the deal is that you will be deployed to areas where there's need," North says. "And I want priests to think about parts of the country where there are communities without priests, who really need what the church can offer. Too many priests seem to think it's grim up north – it's windy and it's cold and they'd rather be in the south-east. I think they have to revisit that." But isn't North the pot calling the kettle black? After all, he now runs the parish of St Pancras in central London. In a sense, he says, the challenge he made was to himself. He worked for 10 years in Durham diocese, and he certainly doesn't rule out a return. "But the thing is that the church in London is vibrant and energetic and there's lots going on in the church, and when you've experienced that it's important to be willing to export it to other areas, so you get a trickle-down effect," he says.

Make no mistake, he says: this issue is the most vital one in the Anglican church at the present time. "The battle for the Christian soul of the nation will be won or lost on the estates of the north-east," he says. "If we abandon the people there, we no longer have the right to be called the Church of England; and I fear that's what we could be looking at."

Back at his St Oswald'sparish, Buttery is talking about his most urgent issue of the moment – how to raise the £20,000 he needs to replace the lead that's been stolen from the church roof – and musing on how he manages to survive here, when many of his brother priests would presumably find it impossible. His two youngest children attend the primary school across the road, of which he is chair of governors (and he's proud that it's a community school, and not a church school) while his eldest son, aged 13, is at a state secondary down the road. "We use the local schools, our children play with the local children, we're embedded in the community and part of it," he says. All the same, he doesn't want to criticise priests who can't make the decisions he made. "There probably are some selfish clergy out there – we're only human," he says. "But I can't condemn my brothers who have to factor in issues like the needs of their partners and children, or perhaps the needs of elderly parents. Not all of them will be able to move to a place like Hartlepool."

Buttery and his wife are both Geordies, though he did his priestly training in Oxford before moving back to the north-east. But a big problem for the Anglican church is that, over the years, the southern half of England has consistently yielded more vocations than the north. And southerners tend to prefer the south, and in some cases know a scant amount about the north, says the local bishop, the Rt Rev Mark Bryant of Jarrow. "They think it's a long way away. Sometimes if they haven't been to the north-east they have an impression of it as industrial and smog-filled and full of scrap heaps," he says. The reality, he says, is very different: when they investigate, they discover there's an excellent quality of life, with good schools and plenty of space.

Rev Buttery and his wife, Gillian, outside St Oswald's parish church in Hartlepool. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

It could, though, be a hard sell. Life has a very different feel when, as in Buttery's case, you're the only professional person in your entire parish, and hardly any of your parishioners are employed. Archdeacon Julian Hubbard, director of ministry for the Archbishops' Council, agrees that it could well be tough for some of them, but says the Church of England has a long tradition of sending ministers into different cultures, and learning to live among the people there. "That's what the gospel is about – crossing boundaries," he says. "I know of outstanding priests who have done that, and it's been a struggle – but in the end it's been the making of their ministry." Bryant, the local bishop, was himself raised in Surrey before going to work in Coventry; he moved to Jarrow six years ago.

Ask Buttery why he's in Hartlepool, though, and he immediately references his own upbringing. "I'm here because I come from a place like this," he says. "I grew up in a tatty pit village, and I know how it feels when you think no one really cares about you, when you feel you can't influence anything and you feel powerless. That's why it matters so much to me that the Church is here, that it's standing here in solidarity with the people of Hartlepool, and that it can help them to realise their power and to become more self-confident about themselves as a community." He thinks it's important that the church is now redoubling its efforts to train priests in the north of England: until recently, almost all Anglican priests were trained at Oxford or Cambridge. Last September, an offshoot of London's St Mellitus theological college opened in Liverpool, 44 years after the last ordination college in the north-west, St Aidan's, closed its doors. And at Cranmer Hall in Durham, a theological college that has been training Anglican priests for more than a century, there's a renewed emphasis on trying to recruit from the local community, according to Bryant.

Buttery has been a member of the church's ruling body, its general synod, for many years; he watched the battle for women's ordination from a front-row seat, and he now feels that too much of the church's energy and attention was taken up with internal politicking, and that evangelisation was neglected. One fallout from that is that areas such as his own have almost slipped below the Church of England radar, with dwindling congregations and a dearth of ministers.

His own guiding stars are the great names of the 19th-century Oxford revival movement, which aimed at reintroducing aspects of Catholic spirituality into the Church of England – figures such as John Henry Newman, who went on to become a Catholic, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, who both changed the Anglican church. Many of the leading lights of the Oxford movement worked in slums, which is why their legacy is so important to Buttery.

And St Oswald's is very much in the tradition of the Oxford movement: it's a huge barn of a church, with oak carvings and stained-glass windows, opened in 1904 to serve the burgeoning working-class population of the then-thriving Hartlepool, one of the centres of the shipbuilding trade. Almost everyone in the streets that surrounded the church back in those days would have been a churchgoer; when the first incumbent, the Rev Harry Robinson, complained about low turnout, he was bemoaning a congregation of 1100. Buttery has photographs of the scenes when Robinson died of scarlet fever in 1919: the wide street outside the church is packed with people as thousands turned out to pay their respects.

The shipyards have closed, the slums have been razed and new houses have been built – but new homes, as Buttery is fond of saying, don't change the people in them. Meanwhile, Church of England congregations have been decimated right across the country, but especially in places like this, where the number of Anglican worshippers is as low as it is anywhere. The first building you see when you come out of the station in the town centre, a mile away, is the former Christ Church, opened around the same time as St Oswald's and now an arts centre. The pulpit is still there, surrounded now by landscapes by local artists, but its stairway descends into a small cafe, and the font has been reinvented as a rather grand flower pot.

Neither Buttery nor Bryant nor North – nor, in truth, anyone else in the Church of England – wants this to happen to St Oswald's; but there are already plans in place to amalgamate it with another parish if and when the post of parish priest becomes vacant. It's fairly clear, Buttery says, that this would be a job that's hard to fill.

Bryant and Buttery both admit it can be tough to stay optimistic. "On a bad day I'm gloomy – but then I go out and I visit a priest and a congregation who are doing wonderful work and I think, with God's help we can do something here," says Bryant. Buttery's logic, meanwhile, is unassailable. "I'm confident that if this work is of God, then nothing can destroy it," he says. "And there are enough signs of hope that I'm not despondent. We've got a congregation, even though it's small; we've got a wonderful school in our parish; we're renovating our church hall and we're creating a community garden." And, though he doesn't want to quite come out and say it, in his bones Buttery can't help feeling that being a priest in the north-east might be a tad more interesting than being one in, say, Tunbridge Wells. The rich need churches, too, of course, but it's just possible, he thinks, that you might have more scope to change lives if you're a priest in Hartlepool.

• This article was amended on 18 February 2014. It originally stated that John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey both went on to become Catholics. It was only Newman who did so. The article was further amended on 21 February 2014, as the earlier version incorrectly suggested that the Rev Philip North was the last incumbent at Holy Trinity (before the Rev Roz Hall) and that he left in 2009.