Preacher’s Son Vows to Carry on Pressure Tactics

His father sits in jail and six other church followers stand accused in an alleged bomb plot, but the Rev. Paul V. Owens says his church plans no change in its controversial tactics.

“We’ll be back on their doorsteps again, the abortionists, the homosexuals,” Owens said in a telephone interview Sunday evening from his home in Ramona. “We have continued everything; everything is going along as planned.”

The comments by Owens, 33, were among the first public remarks by an official of the Bible Missionary Fellowship church in Santee since the arrest Thursday of the Rev. Dorman Owens, the church founder, and six followers. They were charged with conspiring to bomb a San Diego clinic that performs abortions.

On Sunday morning, the younger Owens, who is pastor of a smaller branch church in Ramona, presided over services at the Santee church.

“We just tried to make it an upbeat time, a time of gathering people together and unifying our home base,” Owens said of the services.

In fact, Owens’ followers turned out in force for the first Sunday services since the pastor’s arrest, filling the sprawling parking lot inside the church’s fenced, five-acre compound in Santee with more than 100 pickup trucks and sedans. Owens said that almost 600 people attended the two separate services.

But few members of the congregation were willing to discuss their feelings about the charges against Dorman Owens and the six others. Two large men in blue jeans and cowboy boots stood guard at the gate, barring reporters from the service and the property.

“People think Dorman is like Jim Jones, that we follow him blindly,” said one member of the congregation, who declined to give his name but charged that the church had been misrepresented by the media. “But we follow God.”

A second man, handing out a pamphlet entitled “What Must I do to be Saved?,” questioned whether Owens’ jailing was fair.

“We pray, we pray that God’s hand will intervene,” the man said. “ . . . We put our faith in God, not in the criminal justice system.”

Pastor Owens described the mood of his imprisoned father as positive.

“His spirits are high,” the son said.

In fact, he said his father had already begun Bible studies and missionary work among his fellow prisoners. “That’s what his whole life has been,” Owens said.

The church and family members, he said, are eagerly awaiting a bail hearing scheduled to be held Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Diego. The session may determine whether the pastor will be granted bail.

Owens declined to comment on his father’s case other than to express his opinion that Satan was behind it. “He (Satan) has been involved in the whole process. I believe abortion is satanic in its very core.”

The pastor also spoke of another frequent target of his father’s--homosexuals. “People are deceived when they talk about homosexuality as being an alternative life style. Even an unthinking person can see it’s unnatural.”

The church has gained notoriety for its sometimes fervent picketing of family-planning and abortion clinics and its boisterous anti-homosexual demonstrations, particularly to protest San Diego’s annual Gay Pride Day parade. Critics have said the tactics amount to harassment.

Despite the charges against his father, Owens said the church plans to continue with a pot-luck banquet planned for Friday to celebrate the 16th anniversary of the congregation’s founding.

He said the arrest has been particularly hard on his mother, Jean Owens, the imprisoned pastor’s wife. “It’s tough on her,” he said, “but she’s got three sons, and we’re standing by her.”

He said that his brothers Mark, 30, and Phillip, 26, were both church members.

Though church-goers were hesitant to talk on Sunday, various opinions were expressed on the bumpers of congregants’ cars.

“There is nothing gay about being queer,” read one of more than a half dozen bumper stickers on a single van.