Reverend Roger McClellan

I was raised in a Southern Baptist Church in a small town in AL. Most every Sunday morning and evening would find us attending services. I was baptized in that church at the age of 11, having made a personal profession of my faith in Jesus.For much of my childhood and youth I was involved in choir, youth, bible study groups and etc.

I first felt called to the ministry first in my teens, but as I grew older, I became quite disillusioned with church, religion and even God, both because of the lack of deliverance from the situation at home and the perceived intolerance of my church. It seemed to me that the only answers given by religion to life’s questions were meaningless platitudes. Sayings such as “God never puts more on you than you can handle” and “it’s not for you to understand” did precious little to ease my pain at the time, or help me find some rationale for the pain in the world.

I married at 18 to an older, worldlier woman with children of her own, in a naïve attempt to create a healthier family than the alcoholic and co-dependent one I was born into. To no one’s surprise but my own, the marriage lasted less than two years. After the marriage failed, our son went to stay with my sister for what was to be a few weeks to allow me to find a place to live, better job and so on. My parents and sister had other ideas and fought my attempts to regain custody of my son, which did not exactly help the familial ties.

At the ripe old age of 22, I sought to join the military in order to make a fresh start. It was during the enlistment process that I met my wife, Melissa. We married about 6 months after we met; 3 weeks before I was to report to basic training. After 16 weeks of training, I was sent to Germany, ahead of Melissa, so that I might set up housing there. In spite of all my efforts to ensure I would not be alone, I found myself alone, across the world from my wife. It was during this “dark night of the soul” that I finally caught a glimpse of a god I could live with. A god of love, rather than the Southern Baptist God that kept score of all the times I messed up and sought to “shove a lightning bolt up my (backside) whenever I made a mistake”. Although I was once again willing to nurture in some small way, my spiritual side; I was as yet unwilling to give an intolerant church and wrathful God found therein another chance, so I avoided church altogether for several years.

Fast forward several years and I found myself in an Episcopal church that more closely met my own understanding, and seemed to present a more grace-filled message. Once again, I began to perceive a call to the ministry and entered a process of discernment and study. After the consecration of +Gene Robinson, I began to see that the church polity and desire for "Anglican Communion" in many ways trumped the message of love and inclusion that had so attracted me. Both my wife and I withdrew from the discernment process and later the church itself. After a couple of years we found a home in an independent progressive Anglican church and entered a discernment process there. We were ordained in that denomination in 2006. Unfortunately there too, we found divisive polity and found ourselves on the far left of that organization. Attempts to reconcile church polity and tradition to the direction we felt led failed, and with much prayer elected to leave that denomination.

As an answer to those divisive elements that we have faced in our own ministry and lives, we set about forming the Progressive Christian Alliance, with the vision of fostering an organization that truly meets the needs of those “Lost, Least and Left Behind”

Rev. Roger McClellan serves as co-Pastor of Prince of Peace, in Anniston AL, along with his wife, Melissa. He is the pround father of 2 teenagers.