Murderer who became a minister
A brutal killer who found God, a theological decision that split the Kirk and an extraordinary story of forgiveness and redemption
WHEN Rev James Nelson climbed into the pulpit on that Sunday morning in 1986 to deliver his maiden sermon, he must have looked out over the pews packed with expectant faces with a certain trepidation.
As the newly appointed Church of Scotland minister of the Lanarkshire communities of Chapelhall and Calderbank, he would have known little of the lives of his parishioners, their hopes, their regrets, their sins.
They, on the other hand, knew all about his. Everyone present in church that day knew that Nelson was a murderer.
In October 1969, at the age of 24, he had bludgeoned his own mother to death in a blind fury, following a row in the family home. He served nine years of a life sentence before being released on parole.
Now, 17 years after committing matricide, here he was preaching the Gospel and offering God’s forgiveness to others. It must have been a striking sight. It certainly ensured a full house for his first service, with the regular congregation squeezed in beside numerous journalists and other observers, agog at the prospect of how a convicted killer would fare as a pastor.
Such huge interest stemmed partly from the fact that so few people seemed to know anything about Nelson’s shaming past. Those in charge of his training had striven to keep it quiet until a newspaper exposé blew the lid off the story and their protégé became known as ‘the Kirk’s best-kept secret’.
The outcry sorely tested the unity of the Church of Scotland, which tore itself to pieces debating what was a simple, but theologically contentious, question: could a murderer ever be a fit person to be a minister? It touches on the great themes of Christianity – sin, forgiveness, repentance, judgment.
Yet the fact that the Kirk did accept Nelson back into the fold is something which the author of an intriguing new book strongly doubts could be repeated today in the face of social media.
‘James Nelson’s story is not one that could occur now,’ said Stuart Kelly, author of The Minister and The Murderer. ‘It would only take a couple of clicks on a search engine to discover his background. Then, even under his own name, he was allowed a second chance. But nowadays, people judge too quickly.’
Any chance of forgiveness or rehabilitation for Nelson, argues Mr Kelly, would be swept away by a torrent of instant condemnation by an electronic lynch mob.
‘People rush to judge too quickly these days,’ he said. ‘The world is a complicated place and it requires cool heads and a lot of thinking to understand how to navigate it.
‘Just going on and saying you don’t like the hot pants that some pop star is wearing is not the same as trying to deal with the crisis in the Yemen. We have too much yabbering and far too little thinking going on in our culture these days. In a way, we need a quieter culture. What’s important unveils itself over time.’
Mr Kelly was moved to revisit Nelson’s story when, a few years ago, he brought up in conversation the fact that the Kirk had once given its blessing to a murderer and everyone else in the room looked blank. ‘They had never heard of him. He had achieved something astonishing. He became invisible despite the public glare. It was, to an extent, his ambition. He once told an interviewer that not being recognised was the best thing about his vocation.’
There was a time, however, when James Robert Nelson could not shake off the understandable public opprobrium directed at him.
On the eve of Hallowe’en 1969, he battered his mother, Elizabeth, to death in the family home in Garrowhill, Lanarkshire, in what was referred to at his trial as ‘a cold rage’.
He had returned from a date with his girlfriend while his father and sister were at choir practice. A row developed between Nelson and his mother, which culminated in him picking up his grandfather’s police truncheon and hitting her repeatedly over the head until the truncheon broke and she fell dead to the floor.
He then dragged her body to the garage before washing, changing his clothes, packing a holdall and leaving the scene with £25 of his father’s money in his wallet. He fled as far as Glasgow overnight – before heading back to confess his crime.
His trial the following year heard details of his unhappy childhood as the only son of a strict church-going couple. His sister Anne confirmed the frequent rows with his domineering mother and authoritarian father, Robert, who ran a joinery firm and viewed his son with barely concealed contempt. His mother viewed her son as a lazy ne’er-do-well.
IN Nelson’s version of events, his mother had attacked his girlfriend’s reputation, denouncing her as a ‘dirty whore’ and keeping up the tirade until he snapped. He denied murder, pleading diminished responsibility and blaming his actions on ‘some outside force’ – but was convicted of the more serious charge.
Behind bars, Nelson was drawn back to the rituals of his church upbringing, singing in the prison choir and studying the Bible. At some point, he revealed a desire to train as a minister and, after his release on parole, was accepted to study theology as a mature student at St Andrews University.
His tutors knew about his background – but nothing was disclosed publicly and none of his fellow students seemed to be aware of the monstrous wickedness in his past.
Some, including his future first wife Georgina Roden, guessed that something was awry – he seemed to know almost nothing of 1970s popular culture. She was 26 – 13 years his junior – and also set on training for the ministry.
The pair married in 1983 but never had children, devoting themselves instead to caring for their flocks. Both embarked on the path to ordination with the Presbytery of St Andrews, but Nelson’s journey was almost derailed as soon as it began when his cover was blown by the newspaper front page revealing his past. It led to the presbytery reversing its decision on his suitability to become a reverend by a single vote. Many were furious at being kept in the dark about Nelson’s unpalatable background.
NELSON, for his part, refused to accept the decision and appealed to the General Assembly, the Church of Scotland’s highest ecclesiastical court, in 1984. Many supported his stance, arguing that if the Kirk was not in the business of forgiveness, then what was it for?
The affair engaged the wider public as no other Kirk business had done in years, with members and spectators blocking the entrances and packing the aisles of the Assembly Hall for the three-hour session.
Nelson spoke first, reaffirming his belief that God was calling him to preach the Gospel. Of the murder, he said he had ‘repented of my crime and repent of it still’. The fact that he had broken the Sixth Commandment placed him in a unique position to advise on ‘the pitfalls of life’.
For many, it was the severity of Nelson’s crime which left them queasy about him becoming a minister. Logic surely dictates you don’t put someone who has taken a life in charge of a congregation’s spiritual well-being any more than a bank would hire a robber to look after one of its branches.
The turning point in the debate came with the speech of a former Moderator, the Very Reverend James Matheson, who said: ‘When we put our trust in God, God regenerates us anew – new birth, new creation, a new man. The other part of us is written off and we are set at liberty with the future God has for us.’
The General Assembly voted by 622 votes to 425 to accept Nelson into the ministry. In the same session, it also deemed a former bank manager who had served two-and-a-half years in prison for embezzlement fit to be a minister.
Outside, Nelson declared his delight that the Kirk had ‘confirmed that it believes the Gospel it preaches’. His wife added that the Assembly had come to ‘the Christian decision’.
Within two years, Nelson was appointed to his one and only ministry at Chapelhall and Calderbank, near Airdrie, just a few miles from where he killed his mother.
The text of his first sermon was
from St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, Chapter 3, Verse 17: ‘And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him.’
He also quoted The Little Minister, a novel about filial piety by Peter Pan author JM Barrie: ‘The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story and writes another.’
The relevance could not have been lost on anyone present.
Not everyone in the Kirk rejoiced over the ‘sinner that repenteth’, not least because Nelson’s repentance seemed somewhat equivocal. In an interview with BBC documentary Everyman in 1998, he claimed he ‘had no great feeling of remorse’ for his crime, saying he could easily have killed his father instead. He added: ‘It wasn’t an accident. It never was excusable, but it was explicable.’
One can only imagine what Twitter might have made of such remarks.
Nelson divided opinion at the start of his ministry. Mr Kelly said some who knew him described him as a figurehead they could trust ‘at their brightest and darkest moments’, while others found him ‘sarcastic and overbearing’. His family never forgave him.
Mr Kelly said: ‘Yes, some people left the parish when Nelson arrived. Others were adamantine in their support for him. But you find that conflict in every parish in Scotland, where some people will like the minister and others won’t. He might have been a bad man but he was not a bad minister.
‘We always say in the church we all acknowledge we are sinners. It is sometimes more difficult than we think to take that seriously.’
Nelson would make headlines on two further occasions – once when his first marriage ended in divorce in 1997 and he went on to marry a divorcee, Nancy Ross, in his church the following year. It was actually her third marriage, following the death of her second husband two years earlier. Despite the odd wagging tongue, the marriage lasted until Nelson’s death on August 1, 2005, at the age of 60.
His death provided a second occasion to re-examine his life, with several newspapers carrying obituaries.
BuT his life is a daily reminder for Mr Kelly, who sits on a committee to find a new minister for his local parish. Would he be comfortable with a murderer as his minister?
‘It is a very difficult question and one I have been asking others,’ he said. ‘I hope I would have a big enough heart to look beyond the headlines and see how did he react to people, how did he preach, how did he behave.’
With criminals, there is always the question of recidivism to consider. It could be argued Nelson’s crime was a one-off. History shows he had a clean record afterwards.
For Mr Kelly, it raises a wider point: ‘Are we more afraid by the idea that a person is fixed in their wickedness or that someone you deemed wicked might actually be capable of change?’
It is questions of forgiveness and repentance that Mr Kelly feels are being crowded out in a digital age in which ‘saying sorry has often replaced being sorry’.
The Church of Scotland has never since ventured down the road of appointing a murderer as a minister, although the precedent has been set. It is intriguing to speculate whether the General Assembly would come to the same decision today in our increasingly conflicted, fractious and hyperventilating world?
‘I hope it would have the moral bravery to go against whatever tsunami of Twitter posts went out,’ said Mr Kelly.
‘James Nelson served his sentence, turned his life around and became a minister. He was still a murderer, but when he popped into his local baker’s it was the minister going in. He was allowed to be forgotten and that’s a thing that social media does not allow.
‘If he has a legacy, I hope it is that the church always tries to make the right decision rather than the easy decision.’
The Minister and The Murderer: A Book of Aftermaths by Stuart Kelly is published by Granta, priced £20.