Backers Gather Outside Jailed Pastor’s Church

About 100 supporters of a jailed pastor worshiped outside his church Sunday as sheriff’s deputies who seized the church last week watched through locked doors from inside.

The worshipers conducted an hourlong service to protest unemployment and “corporate evil” and to support the Rev. D. Douglas Roth and eight of his jailed supporters who occupied Trinity Lutheran Church for weeks but were arrested Friday after deputies broke into the church.

“Evil may win battles, but we are assured that in God’s right time, the final victory is his. He will protect his own and restore his church. God will see that justice is done for the unemployed,” actor David Soul, said, reading from a sermon Roth wrote from his cell.

The 33-year-old pastor was jailed on Nov. 13 for contempt after refusing to obey Bishop Kenneth May’s orders to relinquish his pulpit.

Church Closed Indefinitely

May said late last week the church would remain closed and under observation indefinitely.

“It is hoped that this will enable all concerned with unemployment to get on with the issues at hand to help people without distraction of the events that have diverted attention from this primary task,” May said.

Soul, star of television’s “Starsky and Hutch” and brother of a Pittsburgh-area Lutheran minister who supports Roth, described the arrest of seven persons inside the church as “most appalling.” He said Allegheny County Judge Emil Narick, who ordered the church occupiers arrested, had applied the law “selectively.”

“If these people are in jail serving sentences, then there isn’t one of us who shouldn’t be there with them. I say the judge should hold 20 pastors, the people who come here, even myself, (guilty) of complicity,” Soul said in his second address at Trinity Lutheran in less than a month.

The worshipers, dressed warmly and holding church bulletins, gathered quietly for Sunday’s service as more than a dozen police and sheriff’s deputies watched through the glass doors and from parked cars.