Tidings

A PASTOR BEHIND BARS

Ever since its protesters disrupted Easter Sunday services in Pittsburgh's wealthiest Presbyterian church, Denominational Ministry Strategy has become the best-publicized clergy group in Pennsylvania. Made up largely of Lutherans and Episcopalians, DMS and its militant labor-union allies want to force the Mellon Bank and U.S. Steel to pump more money into the sagging local economy. Among its tactics: repeated harassment at worship services attended by executives and disruption of bank operations, notably by putting dead fish in safe-deposit boxes and skunk oil in ventilation ducts. Last week the noisome style of DMS culminated in the imprisonment of an activist minister.

In the dying steel-mill town of Clairton, 71 of the 135 members at Trinity Lutheran Church had complained about Pastor D. Douglas Roth's support of DMS to Bishop Kenneth May and the regional synod of the Lutheran Church in America. Eventually the members demanded Roth's dismissal. When the synod decided to oust Roth and he refused to obey, it won a court order early this month requiring that he leave. Instead, Roth, 33, barricaded himself in the church and preached his usual Sunday sermon, telling the congregation of 75, "It is a sin to destroy people's lives. Christ would never have come out on the side of the corporations."

The Allegheny County sheriff, who hesitated at first to enter church premises forcibly, finally ordered Roth arrested near his altar last week. For disobeying the court order, Roth was given 90 days in prison and a $1,200 fine. While Bishop May decides whether to defrock the clergyman, Roth vows to remain in jail until he is reinstated at the church and executives agree to negotiate with DMS. Considering the hard feelings that now exist, his sentence is likely to run out before there is any compromise.

A NEW TASK FOR TUTU

The South African Anglican Church had been looking for a new Bishop of Johannesburg to oversee its largest, mostly black, diocese, and the best-known candidate, obviously, was Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. But last month the diocesan electors deadlocked over Tutu's antiapartheid militancy. As the debate flared, the national hierarchy intervened and, in secret session last week, twelve black and eleven white bishops chose Tutu. The bishop, who has led the activist South African Council of Churches since 1978, found a change of tasks entirely welcome. "The time is just right for me to leave the SACC. The world has given its verdict with the Nobel Prize," he observed, adding, "I am fundamentally a pastor. That is what God ordained me to."