PROFILE

The Rev'd Bertrand Olivier

The Rev'd Bertrand Olivier was inducted as 51st Vicar of All Hallows by the Tower on the 4th July 2005. Before coming to work in the City, he served his title in an inner-city parish in Walworth, and then as incumbent in a suburban setting in Wandsworth, where he was also Area Dean.
Bertrand has been a Londoner for 20 years now, although he was born in Dunkerque, France.  He became an anglophile from an early age, having spent many summers in Britain on exchange visits and then a year in London while studying at the French Lycée in South Kensington. He returned to France to study at a Paris business school, and then military service in the French Navy.

Prior to ordination, Bertrand was managing director of a Public Relations consultancy specializing in international communications programmes for the pharmaceutical industry, having worked in the field of Marketing and Corporate communications for over 10 years.

He became involved with the Church of England as organist of a parish in Battersea shortly after moving to London in the late 1980s.

 ‘I found the parish, and the Church of England generally, a place of great welcome and energy’, he says. ‘For me, it was a place of spiritual growth. And of course, before I knew it, I had been elected to the PCC, became parish treasurer, and eventually churchwarden, all in the space of a few years’.  God had other designs though and Bertrand offered for ordination in 1991.  He was eventually ordained in Southwark Cathedral in 1996.

‘While I was going through selection for ordination, I used to commute between London and Paris, where I was opening the French office for my then American employer.  I found the two Diocese of Europe chaplaincies of St Michael’s and St George’s tremendously helpful in keeping me going in what was a very busy and potentially chaotic part of my life. And I can therefore fully support the important role of the chaplaincies of the Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf as a focus of community, hospitality and faith.’ He adds: ‘I very much look forward to continuing the friendship between All Hallows by the Tower and the Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf and its friends, and to find new ways in which we can work together to further the mission of God in the Middle East and London’.

He is a member of the Iona Community and is interested in issues of justice and peace, as well as in the transformative power of liturgy. He has a very handsome yellow Labrador, Hudson, who has adapted very well to City life, and who takes his master for long walks along the historic sites of the River Thames.

Pause for Thought

A group of students, asked to list what they thought were the Seven Wonders of the World chose, in this order, - Egypt’s Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the Panama Canal, the Empire State Building, St. Peter’s Basilica and the Great Wall of China.
Then the teacher noticed that one quiet pupil hadn’t handed in her thoughts.
“I couldn’t make up my mind because there are so many,” she said. “But I think the Seven Wonders of the World are these – to touch, to taste, to see, to hear, to feel, to laugh and to love."