Word: lutheran
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...normally quiet hillside street in Clairton, Pa., a detachment of 44 sheriff's deputies armed with billy clubs arrived last week at Trinity Lutheran Church. After pushing waiting reporters off the church lawn, Allegheny County Sheriff Eugene Coon pointed a chrome bullhorn at the gray stone building and snapped, "Those of you inside the church, do you hear me? You have a court order to vacate. Open the doors and come out!" There was no response. Half a dozen of the deputies then broke down the rear door and arrested four men and three women occupying the church in defiance...
...ardent supporters of Trinity Church's controversial pastor, D. Douglas Roth; their arrest marks the latest episode in an extraordinary series of events at his parish. Roth, who was appointed pastor of Trinity Lutheran in 1978, is a member of the Denominational Ministry Strategy, a social activist group of Pittsburgh-area clergy. D.M.S. is allied with a militant group of local labor leaders and unemployed workers, which has accused banks and businesses of undermining the local economy by investing funds and shifting jobs overseas...
...complaints of conservative parishioners about D.M.S. partisanship were relatively restrained until last year, when members of the contentious group began disrupting worship services at area churches attended by executives of targeted corporations. As a result, 71 of the 145 members of Roth's church petitioned the Lutheran regional synod to investigate their pastor's conduct. The parishioners accused him of devoting more attention to D.M.S. than to his flock's spiritual needs. In October the synod's executive board and Pittsburgh's Bishop Kenneth May, applying rarely used provisions of the Lutheran Church in America's national constitution, decided that...
When Roth refused to comply and barricaded himself inside the Clairton church, Bishop May won a court order to oust him. Roth eventually surrendered, and on Nov. 13 was sentenced to 90 days in prison for contempt of court. A special Lutheran panel will soon consider whether Roth should be defrocked...
...Department reacted angrily. The U.S., it said, "can find no reasonable basis" for the court's decision. "We do not consider the matter closed." Meanwhile, the violence goes on: the mutilated body of the Rev. Ernesto Fernández Espino, 37, a leader of El Salvador's Lutheran Church, was found last week in a village near San Miguel...