He came to national attention when a television documentary was made of how he continued his work in the parish after telling his Bishop and parishioners he had AIDS - the first British priest to do so.
His father, the Reverend Walter Bailey, was a Baptist minister who combined conservative evangelical theological convictions with social radicalism.
[1] Simon Bailey continued his education at Regent's Park College, the Baptist permanent private hall of the University of Oxford, where he read English Language and Literature under John F. Kiteley (himself once the pupil of J. R. R. Tolkien).
Unusually, he chose to live not in the more middle-class suburb of Norton itself, but on a rough part of a council estate on the edge of the parish.
[3] The then Bishop of Sheffield, David Lunn, put it in stronger terms: "It was unspeakable, you picked over the lads demolishing their motorbikes in the corridor, the debris, the row going on outside, the unbelievable neighbours, the violence.
It built on the mediaeval tradition of mystery and miracle plays, and was performed with dancing, acting and music in the churchyard of the ancient parish church of St. James.
This year had also involved a mission by the American evangelist Billy Graham and Bailey sought to offer an alternative to the individualism stressed in evangelical Christianity.
[10] For several years he worked in the parish without obvious symptoms, but when he became too unwell to conceal his condition from the people around him he informed the diocesan authorities and from 1992 on, gradually introduced the news to his own parishioners.
Though not the only Anglican priest at that time to be HIV-positive, and eventually to develop AIDS, he was the first to stay in parish ministry, continuing to celebrate the Eucharist until only a few weeks before his death.
His sister Rosemary Bailey wrote a lengthy article for the Independent on Sunday ("A Parish Learns to be Positive"),[12] which was published on the same day.
It is rediscovering the Story, the Myth, reawakening it, drawing life from it, discovering it alive in our midst to invigorate us, right in the middle of the community".
Among the sacred places most important to him was the small island of Bardsey, off the coast of Wales, which had been a great centre of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.