Just a matter of weeks ago, shoppers were crowded beneath the magnificent domed roof of Cabot Circus.

Now, as the Reverend Andy Sewell makes his way along the immaculate tiled walkways on an early weekday morning in mid-January, there is stillness and silence.

There is none of the noisy, frenetic atmosphere that could be witnessed as shoppers hunted for Christmas presents or for bargains in the sales.

Brightly-lit shops and cafes have just opened up for the day, but hardly any customers can be seen. For many of the staff waiting hopefully behind the polished glass windows, there is greater uncertainty than ever before.

In recent months, familiar high street names with branches in Bristol city centre – including Peacocks, La Senza, Past Times, Hawkins Bazaar, and Blacks Leisure – have hit financial difficulties, in some cases leading to administrators being called in.

There have been concerns that other retailers will suffer difficulties in 2012, as a result of pressures such as company debts, the fragility of the euro zone, rising manufacturing and import costs, and consumers paying off their credit cards instead of purchasing with them.

However, Andy, who is retail chaplain for Bristol city centre – covering Cabot Circus, Broadmead, Quakers Friars, and The Galleries – believes local retailers are remaining positive.

"They are still working hard in their shops, and in my experience they're doing their best to be upbeat about the situation," he says.

"Even in the places where there are concerns about closures and redundancies people are reluctant to talk about it.

"There seems to be a sense that if you talk about it too much it might happen. When I go into somewhere where there is a fear of redundancies they always try to talk it up rather than down. People here are doing their best to be optimistic."

Anyone who did wish to discuss with Andy any fears about losing their job would find he could empathise with them – he was made redundant from his previous role as a retail chaplain in Weston-super-Mare before he came to Bristol.

"In many ways I was lucky I was able to slip with relative ease from one role to another – but I still remember how awful it was before it happened," he says.

"Things are going on that are out of your control. You're up one minute and down the next. It's very hard living with such uncertainty.

"I've heard people say that sometimes it gets so bad that it's almost a relief when it happens as at least you know where you are, and you're in a position to move on."

In Andy's case, he had been working part-time as retail chaplain in Weston-super-Mare town centre for five years when the organisation funding his post ran into some financial difficulties.

He then saw an advert for the part-time job of retail chaplain for Bristol city centre, and got the job to replace Rev Bob Mills, who had been working with retailers for around 20 years. He has also continued to work part-time in Weston-super-Mare as a minister at the United Reform Church.

"The signs of the recession were there in Weston-super-Mare from when the recession hit in 2008. I started noticing empty shops. It would happen very suddenly, sometimes almost overnight.

"When I came to Bristol in 2010, things were different, but lately there have been shops shutting down, in some cases very quickly.

"With La Senza it was overnight. The shop in Broadmead closed so quickly that I wasn't able to speak to them, because all of a sudden it was no longer open."

As Andy talks, it becomes apparent that he has none of the hostile manner of some in the church towards shopping centres and supermarkets.

Unlike those who deplore shopping centres as modern cathedrals of consumerism for those worshipping the false idols of designer goods, and resent that fact that they are open on Sundays, Andy says: "The reality is that God's people are working in shops or shopping in them on Sundays.

"If people are going shopping on a Sunday instead of going to church then we have to go to them, and be there for them, and not only on Sundays. God is there with us in all things, and is not restricted to the church.

"My job is to offer pastoral support to the people who work in retail in the city centre, and to shoppers if needed.

"In the Second World War, Army chaplains went into the trenches with the men, and chaplains are still going where they are needed today."

The retail workers who Andy is there to support are at the front line of a very different battle involving unseen enemies within the global economy. Yet they are facing the challenges with the same sense of stoicism that could be seen among troops some 70 years ago.

"I remember that when there was the news last year that Thorntons was planning to close a number of shops, I went around the stores in Bristol city centre and they were all saying: 'Don't worry, we'll be all right'," he says.

"Part of my role is to help support people in these situations and offer them sign-posting to places where they can get support, which are very few and far between in the retail sector, although they do have the local branch of the Retail Trust, which is there for all three million people who work in retail in this country.

"The thing that worries me most is that people in retail, particularly those on low wages, can find themselves out of a job very quickly, and it's all too easy for them to slide into poverty."

Andy, who works through the Chaplaincy Trust in Bristol, continues: "I use shopping centres and supermarkets, because that's the way we live, and in many ways they are very positive. They give people choice and it gives people the opportunity to shop around for the best prices.

"It is excessive consumerism that is the problem – people wanting more and buying more.

"I'm not the sort to say that shops should be shut on Sundays and everybody should go to church. I think everyone should try to develop themselves spiritually in some way.

"It's about having faith and having knowledge of something greater. It can help a great deal, just knowing there is something greater in the world."

Rev Andy Sewell spent 20 years in the police force before he gave up his job to become ordained.

"I was a career bobby," says Andy, 53, who started working in Hampshire in 1977, and went on to work in jobs that included the Isle of Wight, in the Metropolitan police, and as a village policeman in West Sussex.

"But I felt the call as they say. I'd been involved in the church since my mum used to take us to church when I was a child, and in 1995 I decided to leave the police force to go into full-time theological training for two years."

At that time, Andy was a father-of-two and his wife was suffering from cancer. She lived to see Andy become ordained into the church.

Was her illness a factor in strengthening Andy's religious faith?

"Such situations can strengthen someone's faith, but I also understand how it can work the opposite way for some people," says Andy, who has since remarried, and now has four children.

Did he not feel like staying in the police for 30 years until he could draw his pension, and then going into theological training.

Andy laughs: "it's interesting how some people get the call after they've served long enough to draw their full pension.

"It wasn't like that for me. I got the call, and I knew it was something that couldn't wait."