YOU'VE PROBABLY given Alex Bedford and his banner the nifty sidestep if you've come across him in Buchanan Street. You wouldn't be alone.

Alex doesn't blame us. His younger self would have done much the same if he'd been confronted with someone trying to lure him into a lunchtime church service.

The former daredevil British motorcycling champion would have dismissed the man he is today as a religious crank.

"Religion was for the elderly, whom I imagined were collecting points before they popped their clogs or people who needed a crutch in life," he says cheerfully.

"Or just weird, odd people. I could never relate to people like that. My life was too busy."

But Alex is now spreading the word with the same passion with which he tackled his racing years and subsequent career as a successful businessman.

He's got guts - and you need them in spades in the streets of Glasgow.

"Nobody's thumped me yet," he grins.

"The whole fabric of society is being torn apart so it is time for the church to go out into the streets."

The thing about Alex Bedford is that he is so utterly normal - if you discount a past habit of decorating the tarmac with your body parts at speed.

His eyes dance with amusement and even when he's going full-speed on Bible speak message, he'll stop and say something funny just in time to stop your eyes glazing over.

Unlikely as it sounds, Alex is an evangelist with St Georges-Tron Church, which dominates Buchanan Street.

He looks untouched by life and could pass for 15 years younger, but is actually 47 and has been through the mill and that's not including all the broken bones from his racing days.

His eyes light up at the mention of racing.

"There is something about a motorcycle, a sense of freedom and being out in the elements," he says enthusiastically.

He has survived many accidents and two broken femurs, but shrugs that he's come out better than most.

"In my motorcycling days, you could speak to someone before a race and they'd be dead at the end of it."

Born and brought up in Swadlincote, South Derbyshire, Alex caught the racing bug watching his father's friend race motorbikes, graduating to racing on his own converted road bike, a 400cc Yamaha, at club level and national events.

The love of speed was genetic. His father, Tim Bedford, an entrepreneurial inventor/mad professor' invented Surf Blazer, the forerunner to the Jetski, which was used on Dr Who and the Cybernauts in the 70s.

At the age of 22, Alex himself was racing in world and European championships, having gone professional after being given an ultimatum by his employers, Rolls-Royce.

"At the age of 21, it's quite an easy decision to make. For a young man, it was just so exciting to travel round the world."

"When I was in the UK, I used to win most of the races I rode in, but sponsorship was difficult and my machinery was often uncompetitive or unreliable. When a local car dealer offered to sponsor me in 1988, I won every race in the UK."

He was disqualified at Knockhill in 1988 when winning. Playing to the crowd, he stood up in the seat - he still has a cheeky logo proclaiming Bedford does it standing up' - but discovered he should have waited till the chequered flag was down.

And bike broke down while he was in second position in the British Grand Prix in 1988.

Alex retired in 1989 after winning a British Championship race at Brands Hatch on a Honda and breaking the record.

He had been a nomad and at 29 wanted routine and predictability in his life.

"I had a shopping list," he says ruefully.

Everything went to schedule. The house, the marriage, the business, importing container-loads of bikes from Japan.

One day, a woman in her 60s, wandered into his motor cycle shop. She turned out to be Anne Beverly, the mother of notorious Sex Pistols singer Sid Vicious.

Like her son, she committed suicide, but before she did, she saved Alex's bacon.

"I sometimes wonder if she saw something of her son in me. I've no idea," he says.

They became friends and when he had a cash flow crisis, she loaned him £10,000.

"She lived in a little, terraced house in Swadlincote and there were all these framed gold discs of the Sex Pistols on the walls," he recalls. "And there was a painting of the Taj Mahal by Sid Vicious."

Alex and first wife Dawn split up after just a year.

"We loved each other. But I had moved from spending all my life dedicated to motorcycles to business. I'd found another addiction.

"I went to Relate, the marriage guidance people. Dawn was annoyed, but eventually went on her own and the following week, the lady said to me Dawn wants to leave you.' I guess I'd sensed it, but to hear it directly from someone else, I was devastated."

This was the point in his life when he started asking himself the why are we here?' questions and found answers in the church.

He paid his way through a church college and then through a further two years of theological training at what he calls a vicar factory' in England.

He also decided to sell his motor cycle business.

"One of my customers was killed and that shook me. Young lads of 18 would buy bikes that could do 130mph and I began to feel the responsibility."

The bikes from Japan came with loop key fobs with the company's name and phone number.

"I thought they were trick and trendy and with my engineering background, I designed machinery to make them."

The factory in Swadlincote makes around two million loop fobs a month, but he sold it to concentrate on the church.

"It was not an easy decision. Both were my passion. Sometimes, even now, the company phones up asking advice and I want to go down and play. But once I got caught up in it, I'd be there all the time."

He came to work at the Tron four and a half years ago and only a month later, heard his father had committed suicide over business worries.

There is acceptance.

"I shed tears and I took his funeral down south, but I wasn't angry."

Last September, he married Catherine, a health visitor, whom he had met while they were both working for the church.

Someone sticks his head round the door. A visitor from Canada with a drug addiction problem would like to see Alex later.

Alex nods. "People come here from all over the globe and from one day to the next, you don't know what crisis you're going to be involved in, but I can listen to folk and empathise."

If anyone understands addiction, he does.

"With me, it was motorcycles and business. You do get withdrawal symptoms. I've had to keep well clear of motorbikes because it would be a slippery slope . . . "