Holy Orders
Such a lawsuit as this, something about feeling called to the ministry as a means to increase one's income from annuities with aid from the British government via the Church of England, is extremely unbelievable in American life. We just don't do it that way. You do not go into the ministry because you want to get rich quick or even because you feel yourself holier than thou. Here in America all kinds of "unholy" people have no problem getting ministerial licenses despite having committed all kinds of crimes and done bad things in their childhood, myself being the exception to the rule. Here in America just having a ministerial license is no guarantee of income from the church organization. It is equally, possibly even more likely that one may be fired and starve to death in case one was planning to depend on income from a church or parachurch organization as one's livelihood. Here in America one goes into the ministry because one is personally called to share the gospel or support the sharing of the gospel in some way and maybe God will reward you and maybe you will get fired. There are no guarantees in life. You cannot expect the Church of England to grant you a ministerial position solely for the purpose of increasing your annuity income. What are you going to do for the Church of England anyway? What's in it for them? Do you even know what the Bible says? How are you going to preach a sermon when you do not even have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord? That said, I cannot be expected to understand the complexities of English church law especially since I am an American citizen and have not had the time nor inclination to study their system. I can only imagine that this type of lawsuit provides a feast for cynics who imagine that all ministers are actually not sincere in preaching the Word but rather are motivated in the first place by greed and the need to secure a substantial income in order to hobnob with the well-to-do parishioners whose approval is so necessary for the maintenance of their positions. Thus, a preference for keeping the status quo rather than any inclination to sacrifice one's own livelihood ensures that the pastoral shoes are often filled by persons who feel themselves entitled to positions of eminence by birthright and inheritance rather than anything of merit that they have ever done. This also ensures a certain amount of inertia is inbred into the system, a certain inertia that is not desirable and must be avoided somehow, one imagines perhaps by barring Lord Kirkcudbright from any hope of attaining any church position, a position that would serve only to enhance his cash flow but would inflict on the hapless church people a minister whose credentials are perhaps less than sterling, who perhaps lacks the ministerial training or personal inclinations that would make him fit for such a position. One can only speculate because the facts of Lord Kirkcudbright's life are not known here in America. He is not really our direct ancestor. While he, Sholto-Henry MacLellan, and his brother Camden-Grey were living in London, England, hobnobbing with the British aristocracy and perhaps representing Scottish interests in Britain, my ancestor John McClellan and his brother Henry, who interestingly lived at about the same time as those guys in the UK, were living in Virginia and maybe Tennessee, in rural towns of Appalachia and having very little contact if any with the British aristrocracy which, nevertheless, is not represented by Catherine Marshall's mother as fictionalized in the novel "Christie." Neither could my ancestors said to be the backwards lowlifes described in the novel "Christie" which is actually set in West Virginia, not Virigina. I seriously doubt that my ancestors were ever encountered by Catherine Marshal's mother, my ancestor John McClellan having married Margaret Brownlow whose family, the Brownlows, were quite industrious and operated their own school which taught Latin and Greek and where, it is thought, the future governor of Texas, Sam Houston, received his early education. One of the Brownlows' own grandsons, William Grannaway Brownlow, was a governor of Tennessee. Thus we see that the Cumberland Presbyterian people really went haywire trying to dump us into the deep blue sea after the denominational split of 1906. My great-grandfather, Alfred Lewis McClellan, was apparently among those ministers who preferred to merge with the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America while those opposed to the merger with PCUSA went to court to prevent the PCUSA from carrying away all of the Cumberland church properties. That is really a stretch of those Cumberland folks, trying to put us over in Britain when actually the family just kept going west, all the way to California where my grandfather was just a working man raising a family and not really trying to go into the ministry and perhaps disillusioned with Christianity due to the bitter experience of his youth. I am not really sure what happened. Perhaps if my great-grandfather had known how liberal PCUSA would get 100 years later he would not have jumped fences but hindsight is not foresight. All I know is that the Presbyterians have a long-standing tradition of libelous crimes in defense of whatever they want. It is very hard to prove libel. In addition to prove that you are lying, we also have to prove the malice of your lying and that is not so easy when you are hiding behind other faces not your own. Anyway, I personally am not so enamored of tulips as to want to be a Presbyterian of that ilk. The contributions of the Protestant Reformation should never be underestimated but we also know that times are changing and what is to be is not yet fully known. It is easy to look back at history and see how God worked things together for good but it is not so easy for me to see in the midst of chase why I should care.
