‘I remained the lurking virtual Quaker, ill at ease with the establishment.’ Photo: Paul Oestreicher
A Quanglican journey: Paul Oestreicher on the religious background to a life of pacifist campaigning
‘Forget the labels. How about just trying to follow Jesus?’
I arrived in New Zealand in May 1939, the only child of a German-Jewish refugee family. From September of that year, we were enemy aliens. New Zealand and Germany were at war. It took some courage to befriend Germans, even those like us who had fled from Hitler. The churches in our Dunedin home were by and large friendly, but quietly and discreetly. Not so the Society of Friends, the Quakers. They publicly made a point of befriending enemy aliens, befriending my parents. My physician father, with Jewish parents, had already in Germany found a friend in a well-known German Quaker doctor. In Nazi Germany the small Quaker community stood by the persecuted Jews. Some were imprisoned for doing so.
Little wonder then that, before long, my parents joined the Society of Friends. I therefore grew up as a young Quaker. Friend John Brailsford agreed to be my guardian. What the Quakers stood for, I stand for still. A no to war, a love of enemies, and much else that Jesus taught, and that many Christians ignore. The Sermon on the Mount was too demanding.
My critical mind meant I was still not quite a convinced Quaker, however. I was searching. On my nineteenth birthday, Louise, my best friend since the age of ten, and still now at ninety-one, took me to her Anglican parish church of St Michael’s. It was Michaelmas, my Archangel’s Feast Day.
That eucharist – my first ever – had such a profound effect on me that I felt I had discovered a new future – one that was in no way a denial of my Quaker beginnings. I was looking for something less elitist, more accessible, more down-to-earth, more fallible than the Quakers I knew as a small, enlightened minority. That was a very long time ago.
Then: a master’s degree in politics, a dissertation on the story of New Zealand’s conscientious objectors to the second world war, and postgraduate study in Germany on the relationship of Christianity to Marxism. All that led to Lincoln Theological College in England, ordination to the priesthood in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and then to becoming a religious features producer for BBC Radio.
There followed life as an ecclesiastical diplomat working behind the iron curtain and in South Africa. Rooted now in the Church of England, I spent many a frustrating year as a member of its General Synod and the Church’s International Affairs Committee, dedicated to doing nothing. My real home was in the ecumenical movement, embracing divided Christendom. The Student Christian Movement had taught me that questions matter more than answers. I remained the lurking virtual Quaker, ill at ease with the establishment.
It was in the Synod that a self-centred English Church turned down a union scheme with the Methodists. That great liberal churchman Michael Ramsey, who had put his mind and soul into that scheme, wept when the vote was announced. I was angry and wished I had had the courage of Eric James, one of my close colleagues, to resign.
In his sad speech Michael Ramsey challenged the members of the Synod to work boldly for Christian unity, each in his or her own way to contribute to real change. Unity imposed from above was evidently not the way forward. It was that speech that, after years of reflection, made me apply for membership of the Society of Friends. Had I, in my heart, not always been a Quaker? This time I came to it as a priest, determined to remain one. Aged fifty-four, after long and not-at-all-easy discussion with Quaker elders, Blackheath Meeting accepted me into membership.
Back then the Friend and the Anglican Church Times published the same article, in which I explained my reasons for this decision. In the Church of England there were very few critical voices, so respected have the Quakers become. Not so among Friends. Many simply could not understand how a Quaker could be a priest in a church that had persecuted and imprisoned the early Friends, and abolished the priesthood. Many of today’s Friends have left the mainline churches and feel liberated by so doing. They are ill at ease with people like me, apparent imposters in their midst. Yes, I had to learn that there are some Quaker fundamentalists, at ease in their undogmatic freedom.
In his retirement, Michael Ramsey told me how he wished that more of the clergy would take the freedom to leap over walls. He had suffered from his hardliners and I from some Friends who are content in their self-sufficient enlightenment. The good news nevertheless is how many remarkable Quakers are at the forefront of reconciling the world’s conflicts. They really are the Christian elite that, in my youth, I had unwisely questioned.
There have been few occasions in my life as remarkable as the day Paul Reeves phoned me from his London hotel. We had been students together in Wellington. Now an archbishop in New Zealand, Paul and his wife Beverley were about to have lunch with Elizabeth Windsor, the queen, and her sister, Anne. Paul, now awarded a knighthood, was about to become the governor-general of New Zealand. ‘How about coming to dinner with us in our hotel tonight?’ asked Paul.
I will never forget that dinner. Paul and Beverley told us of their lunch with Elizabeth Windsor, who had been surprisingly informal and good-humoured, and, not surprisingly, extremely well informed on New Zealand. But Paul had a further agenda. He urged me to accept nomination as a bishop, in Wellington. For numerous reasons, I resisted the idea. I did not feel called to become a bishop in New Zealand or anywhere else. I did not have the right gifts. Nor did my wife want to leave our children in England. Beverley joined the discussion and added weight to Paul’s hopes. I owed so much to New Zealand, surely now I could give something back to the country of my youth? What is more, I need not take this on for the rest of my life. There would still be life after Wellington.
By the end of that evening my wife and I were rethinking. Soon after, I said yes to Wellington and was elected as the bishop by the Diocesan Synod, with a large majority. I was assured that Wellington needed and wanted a fresh wind. Though still harbouring doubts, I prepared for this new adventure. So did my wife.
The constitution of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, as it is now known, required a majority of the standing committees of the other dioceses to confirm the election. Then the unexpected happened. After a public campaign triggered by Peter Sutton, the bishop of Nelson, who was the interim primate, the standing committees failed to confirm the election.
Peter Sutton clearly did not share my views on many things. But for him the matter was clinched by my also being a Quaker. That, in the letter he sent to the standing committees, made me unfit to be an Anglican bishop. It had become a public talking point, embellished by the press. Given all that, it is not surprising that the standing committee members voted as they did. Unlike the members of the Wellington Synod, they had little to go on. Anyway, they were bound to be wary of this passionate pacifist.
Some wanted to challenge the veto as an abuse of process. I had no taste for further debate. After an initial shock, I felt liberated. My Quaker ‘inner light’ made me feel that the Holy Spirit had a hand in all this. At my first opportunity, I thanked Peter Sutton. I hope he realised that I meant it. He had, in effect, done the right thing for the wrong reason.
One of the things I learned from this experience is that crossing historic frontiers, secular and especially religious, should not be done lightly. People need to be helped to understand. Given their history, the need to take people with me was even greater among Quakers than among Anglicans. The comprehensiveness of Anglicanism came to my rescue. Given the law of unintended consequences, had Paul Reeves not become the governor-general, my life as a bishop in Wellington would have been changed radically – and not necessarily for the better.
For the first time ever, I was unemployed. That too is salutary. Many people felt I had been hard done by. I did not. I was given a task that completely dovetailed with my gifts and hopes. I was made the director of Coventry Cathedral’s Centre for International Reconciliation. This was priesthood as I understood it, and, at the same time, set me free to act on my Quaker convictions.
My Coventry story must be told elsewhere.
After retirement in 1997 and the death of my first wife in 2000, I moved to Brighton where Barbara Einhorn, my second wife, was a professor of Gender Studies at the University of Sussex. I was invited to join the chaplaincy team as a Quaker.
Five years of harmonious work followed. I also became an elder of Brighton Meeting. All things had come together. Even so, some in the Meeting, and possibly in the Anglican parish church too, where I was welcomed as a preacher, may have asked themselves: ‘What is this man really?’ By this time, I would simply have said: ‘Forget the labels. How about just trying to follow Jesus?’
In 2020, aged eighty-eight, while on holiday in Wellington, Covid struck. That, and my failed heart valve, made us decide to stay in Aotearoa permanently. We were back where we had both grown up. A circle was closed. The Anglican parish of St Peter’s-on-Willis ‘in, of and for the people of Te Aro’, our Wellington home, welcomed us with open hearts. I liken St Peter’s to St Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London, where I was once offered a curacy, and where street people and intellectuals and all those in between rub shoulders. My Christian life in Aotearoa had begun at Dunedin Meeting. In Wellington, in 2023, my Quanglican story goes on.
All the above only makes sense in the knowledge that I have tried to model my life and ministry on the dissident rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. Neither the Anglican nor the Quaker tradition – nor Christianity itself – would exist without the Jewish rock on which the Christian faith is built.
Jesus was a prophet in the Jewish tradition, which is enshrined in the scriptures. Christians call them the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus brings this good news to its fulfilment. The corrupt temple authorities, much like many a subsequent church leader, made a mockery of the tradition. Religion, allied to political power, as it was in Jesus’ time, was and remains toxic. The Quakers, recognising that, were a challenge to the Church of England just as Jesus was to the temple.
All that puts into context both my Anglican and my Quaker self. The little girl in my New Zealand primary school who shouted: ‘He’s not only a German, he’s a Jew’, didn’t know how right she was, not because of my Jewish grandmother but because of Jesus, our friend and God.
Comments
A wonderful life-story. I am a naturalised Kiwi having worked there as an academic and still love it, though I live in my mother country England now. I am reading Paul Buckley’s Primitive Quakersim Revived at the moment (Inner Light Books, 2018). It is a wonderful book that shows us how it is possible to live a Quaker life today that is - as yours has been - steeped in the Bible. The Fathers and Mothers of the Quaker faith didn’t have QF&P…!
By markrdibben@gmail.com on 24th June 2023 - 21:31
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