The Very Revd Lister Tonge writes:
ON ONE occasion when a former Bishop of Pretoria, the Rt Revd Edward Knapp-Fisher, was presiding at the eucharist in the Jane Furse Mission Parish, he instructed the lay assistant to tell the congregation to kneel for the eucharistic prayer. The man didn’t respond. “We kneel for the prayer of consecration!” insisted the Bishop. “Not here, we don’t!” retorted the assistant. The bishop was left to get on with it. That red-haired Liverpudlian assistant was Paul Nener, who died aged 81, on 28 September.
In 1974, Nener, a high-flying surgeon abandoned that career to become a USPG missionary in South Africa. In no time after his arrival, both parish church and hospital chapel were rescued from neglect, the latter becoming the prayerful heart of the place. Paul saw to it that the beauty of holiness, informed by thorough Christian instruction, was what distinguished a mission hospital from any other hospital. The Mission itself had not known such energy and organisation since the Mirfield Fathers had left.
Paul trained at Mirfield and was ordained in 1980 to Warrington Parish Church. The Rector, Canon Joc Colling, was the man to harness Paul’s prodigious energy, depth of commitment, and breadth of vision. Joc’s patience and pastoral wisdom soon showed him that he had been given a gem to polish. The two men, different as chalk and cheese, respected and admired each other to the end of their lives.
Not many people would find it easy to follow a predecessor who had been in post more than 40 years. Paul did it twice: first at St James’s, Haydock, then, at the Anglo-Catholic flagship of St John’s, Tuebrook, in Liverpool.
St James’s was full of life: 350 people on Sunday morning, the same at least for the weekday masses, and large numbers attended Morning and Evening Prayer. Paul and Fr George Guiver CR had developed a simple form of daily office for use at home, but at least 15 people gathered in church each morning to worship together, whether or not the vicar was present, recalls the present Dean of Exeter, who was on placement from Mirfield at the time.
The parish church was a phenomenon. It was filled week after week with local people who knew why they were there and what they were supposed to do about it when they left the building. Paul loved the people and they loved him. They were not used to having a force of nature as the vicar, let alone one whose humanity, huge sense of fun and laughter — short fuse and all — was there for them to see and to learn from. The former mining community respected their vicar of transparent authenticity, who did not let the occasional stand-up row get in the way of forming a genuine, joyful and loving, penitent and prayerful Christian community, committed to the service of God’s Kingdom.
Nener was not a card-carrying Anglo-Catholic in the accepted sense. He did not believe in Catholic societies or pressure groups as though their activities made to the Church of England in some way more authentically Catholic. Until his death, he insisted that the Church of England — in all its forms — was the Catholic Church of this land, simply as a matter God’s vocation and gift. Paul’s latter years were made painful as he felt the Church of England abandoning its God-given charism to witness and minister to all. He believed that this divine identity simply could not be replaced by ill-considered, managerial efforts at ecclesiastical self-preservation. Strategies for “bums on pews” were theological anathema to him and were turning the Church of England into a sect. He thought that the very earnestness of the faltering Church of England was clear evidence of this: “It’s not fun any more” was his most damning assessment.
Opposed in principle to the ordination of women, Paul was a realist who recognised that if his own part of the Catholic Church had made this decision, then he must live graciously with it. Thus, Paul was a sought-after spiritual director to numerous women priests. Indeed, since he received communion from women priests, Paul’s position was considered not quite “sound” to some of those who saw themselves as more traditional Catholics. On two occasions, in different dioceses, such traditionalists intervened to ensure that Paul was not appointed as the local suffragan so that they could stay under the flying bishop.
Paul’s 15 years on the General Synod — during which meetings he and two other Liverpool clergy were photographed by the Church Times fast asleep — and his decades of work for the Guild of St Raphael and his equally long involvement with his beloved Romanian orthodox friends were further testimony to the Body of Christ.
At Paul’s funeral, the congregation of more than 300 heard Fr Florian, a Romanian priest from Chester, reading a moving tribute written by his Metropolitan Archbishop, who spoke of Paul‘s ability to receive people into the warmth of his home and of his heart. Thus, it was that people recognised among them the likeness of God. The preacher at the funeral suggested that if we sought Paul’s monument we needed only look around the room.