Owens Measures Faith in Deeds : Police Say Protests by Santee Minister, Followers Led to Bomb Plot Charges

The Rev. Dorman Owens, the fundamentalist minister who along with six of his followers was arrested Thursday on charges of conspiring to bomb a clinic that performs abortions, is an open-collar preacher who is the antithesis of the telegenic, and often wealthy, religious leaders who frequently appear on television.

For Owens, the test of religious faith is not met through the accumulation of wealth, large religious compounds or through the damnation of evil. Rather, it is met through deeds and action.

Owens’ many past statements and interviews with Baptist church leaders and others show a common thread flowing through his Bible Missionary Fellowship church in the 1980s. It’s that the world is either black or white, an absolute vision with no room for grays.

Owens, who sits in the downtown San Diego Metropolitan Correctional Center and could not be reached for comment Friday, has been outspoken about the war he and his “soldiers” are conducting against a plethora of evils, a battle that has isolated him from other churches and caused some in his small flock to leave.

“If you go to church, sometimes the preacher might get up and say something about abortion or homosexuality. Usually, he won’t, because he’s afraid he’ll run somebody off from his church,” Owens said in an interview earlier this year with the Reader, a San Diego weekly newspaper. “I’ve had a lot of people leave this church because of stands I’ve taken.

‘World Greatly Offended at God’

“The redneck who loves America, he’ll be excited about the things I say about standing up and loving America and being patriotic and standing against evil. But when I start standing against his booze, he is not going to like that. Then there are people whom the world has programmed to believe that all religion is good, so when I preach against the doctrine of Roman Catholicism or Unitarianism, they are offended.

“Truth of the matter, the world is greatly offended at God. If you just take this book (the Bible), and just preach it, just like it is, it is going to be offensive to a lot of people. There are people who are going to be mad.”

Owens--who in the past has been arrested for ignoring court orders restricting picketing in front of abortion clinics, as have several of his followers--in appearance is unassuming, a stocky, 54-year-old man who wears dark-rimmed glasses and who, by his own word, owns one suit.

His congregation, which numbers about 300 to 400 people, reflects that, too. They are, Owens has said, “hard-working” people. The parking lot of the congregation’s five-acre headquarters on the 8800 block of Prospect Avenue in Santee is prone more to pickup trucks than BMWs. So far, no one at the church has agreed to talk publicly about the arrests or the congregation.

Owens, who talks directly and bluntly without the flowery tones sometimes given to those behind the pulpit, has said he intentionally wanted to keep things simple when he co-founded the church in 1971. He had been working with alcoholics and derelicts at another Baptist church--where he started his ministry after graduating from the San Diego Bible College at the age of 37. When some came with him to his new church, he felt they were embarrassed to come to services because they didn’t dress as well as other church members. He is paid $22,000 a year as pastor of the church, he has said.

The Early Years

In the early years, Owens’ congregation met in rented buildings and schools. In 1975, the congregation built its current structure, a simple building of corrugated steel and concrete blocks. Later, a tan stucco building was added that houses a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school, a school that is unaccredited because Owens doesn’t want any part of state regulation that would come with such accreditation. His oldest son, Paul, is also a minister.

It wasn’t until about 1982 that Owens and his congregation began to take their faith into the streets. Protests in front of X-rated movie houses, abortion clinics and in the homosexual community became as much a part of church activities as Sunday services.

Congregation Member Arrested

The escalating series of protests led to what police allege was the planting of a bomb in July outside the offices of a San Diego medical clinic that performs abortions. Though the bomb never detonated, police arrested a member of Owens’ congregation, Eric Everitt Svelmoe, 32, for allegedly placing the bomb at the clinic.

On Thursday, after an investigation by local police and federal authorities, Owens and six others in his congregation were arrested in connection with an alleged conspiracy to bomb three clinics. Owens also was charged with witness-tampering for allegedly attempting to talk Svelmoe into not cooperating with authorities.

Some local Baptist pastors contacted by The Times on Friday asked that their names not be used for fear that they would draw the wrath of Owens’ church. “What they are is the exception. They are autonomous and independent,” said one pastor.

Robert Meye, dean of the School of Theology at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, a Baptist institution, said that Owens’ Bible Missionary Fellowship is apparently a very localized phenomena. He said that, while Baptists have a long record of “expressing themselves publicly” on issues such as abortion, it is not part of church teaching to condone the use of violence to express those views.

“I’m personally not in support of abortion . . . but it hasn’t occurred to me to carry a bomb to express my feelings,” Meye said.

Officials at two of the three clinics that were allegedly targeted by the bomb plot said Thursday that they had been told by police early last summer to be on guard against someone trying to plant a bomb.

Deborah Fleming, director of the Womancare clinic in Hillcrest, said that while the office has been the target of Owens’ pickets for four years, the frequency of anonymous phone threats, subterfuge and vandalism increased markedly between February and May.

‘Organization of People’

Fleming believes activities by Owens and his congregation are part of a nationwide movement aimed at closing abortion clinics. “There isn’t just one individual in Florida or in San Diego,” she said. “I know you can’t have this level of activity without an organization of people working for the same goal--closing down clinics.”

Mark Salo, longtime executive director for Planned Parenthood in San Diego, whose Pacific Beach office was one of the intended targets of the alleged Owens conspiracy, said he was surprised at the arrest of Owens and the church’s associate pastor, the Rev. Kenneth Neal Felder, but not of the others.

‘Not Surprised’

“I’m not surprised by the conspiracy . . . I’ve known about the intensity and emotionalism of these people for a long time. They are capable of anything. But I was surprised that a minister and his assistant . . . would lead their followers this way,” Salo said, calling some members of the congregation “mindless followers.”

At least one group that is also against abortion said it wanted nothing to do with using violence to advance their goals.

‘Few and Far Between’

“I think these people are few and far between,” said Ellen Daleke, a member of the board of directors of the San Diego Prolife League, a group that offers counseling and educational lectures in schools in an attempt to stop abortions.

“In any movement there are extremists, and this is one,” she said. “What we want to do is change people’s minds.” She said the confrontational tactics used by Owens’ church--and the allegations about the conspiracy to plant bombs--”certainly don’t do anything to further the cause.”