Church Meeting Of D.M.S. Ministers example essay topic

The Mon-Valley, once the steel capital of America, was slowly declining during the period from 1960 to the mid 1980's due to foreign competition that decreased the need for U.S. steel capacity. The Mon-Valley area's income basis was also declining. Major layoffs and plant closings in late 1981 began to divide the public, business, and religious sectors of the affected communities. The city of Clairton, Pennsylvania was the first of many communities to fall victim to decay both economically and socially. Bishop John McDowell, who headed a research project sponsored by the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh said, "In such mill towns as Clairton, fully 35 percent are unemployed" (Marquis). "Valley residents have been brutally affected by what has occurred", conceded U.S. Steel spokesman Bill Hoffman (Marquis).

The days of high standards of living and wages were over for many steel workers. Handouts from local area food banks became a necessity. Worker's personal savings were drying up fast. Community violence against family members and neighbors was on the upswing. The suicide and divorce rates were climbing above the national average.

The city's steel generating tax base declined by five hundred thousand dollars between 1980 and 1985. Clairton's infrastructure was in decay for lack of funding. "Technically we " re bankrupt", commented Clairton controller John Mar flak after a counsel meeting (Marquis). Townspeople, who were unable to find work that didn't exist, were forced to sell out and leave the affected areas.

Clairton homes flooded the market. Clairton was just the tip of the iceberg, with other Mon-Valley steel areas feeling and suffering the same disasters. By 1982, a grass roots collection of union leaders, laid-off steel workers and concerned area ministers had formed the Denominational Ministry Strategy for the purpose of bringing aid to the unemployed workers and to make the church "relevant" again by attracting new parishioners. This organization was born under the leadership of Charles Honeywell in 1980, called The Network and then combined with the D.M.S. under the leadership of two area ministers, the Reverend Roth of Trinity Lutheran Church of Clairton and the Reverend James Von Dree le of St. Mathew's Episcopal Church in Homestead. The D.M.S. spend its first couple of years trying to conduct job re-training programs and addressing a variety of community problems related to families, youth, the elderly, and the unemployed. The group's leader's aim was to alleviate the peoples suffering and help the jobless act on their own.

The D.M.S. was dissatisfied with the lack of interest from corporate and elected officials to declare the steel-dependent Mon-Valley a "disaster emergency" area (Gruendl). At a group meeting, Mr. Roth said, "We expect a favorable response. We have plans 'B' and 'C' to back this up if we don't get it. I'm not really ready to indicate what that will be, but it will be quite strong" (Gruendl). The D.M.S. set themselves up to alienation by trying to negotiate from the threat of a smoking gun. D.M.S. strategy changed in 1982 as group leaders concluded that nothing would change for the workers unless the responsibility for their suffering was traced back to the decision makers whose choices had caused the pain. The D.M. S went after Pittsburgh's power elite, namely bankers at Mellon and executives from U.S. Steel.

The D.M.S. tactics were progressively bad for what they thought was a good cause. The D.M.S. branded corporate power as evil to their church congregations and ask them to withdraw funds from personal bank accounts using pledge cards to punish Mellon Bank for their disinvestment policy. This strategy failed to affect bank policy. "We " re too powerless to do anything", Mellon executives told the clergy; "We " re only lenders, not investors" (Plotkin and Scheuerman).

Will lenders lend to those who think you evil? Or is this the proper relationship to develop with a future possible venture capitalist that might be needed to launch an employee own steel mill? The D.M. S continued to work the division deeper by disrupting business at Mellon branches by depositing dead fish in safe-deposit boxes and slowing down window service by dropping pennies on the bank floors while in line. The D.M. S harsher tactics continued as they barged into church services attended by corporate official, confronted businessmen at their places of comfort, all while berating their own church hierarchies at their altars (Plotkin and Scheuerman). Barry Paris, in the December 17th, 1984 Pittsburgh Post Gazette wrote that masked D.M.S. members burst in a Christmas pageant dinner and "hurled balloons filled with dye and 'skunk water' onto the diners", including small children. The Shadyside pastor, the Reverend Pride, said, "It's almost as if it's a group possessed.

They " ve lost a sense of what they " re doing" (Paris). Up to this point, the bad tactics used by the D.M.S. appeared to only label the activist ministers actions as the cause for alienation. In the movie The Fighting Ministers, a church meeting of D.M.S. ministers was presided over by Bishop James Crumley. The avenue of alienation became a two- way street between both the concerned ministers and the church hierarchy when collective comment by both Bishop Crumley and the remarks by the other ministers led to a lack of psychic space along with creating group alienation for the active D.M.S. members, the Reverend Daniel Solberg, the Reverend John Gropp and the rest of the group. Daniel Solberg stated, "Does the church in America hear the call to expose the underlying evil within this world?" only to be met with the belittling remark by the Bishop James Crumley, "I am amazed at how quickly you identify evil". The Reverend John Gropp asked the group the question, "Why is it in the church that the only thing that the bishops and the church hierarchy can see as evil is a pastor?" He was shunned by the group as they hemmed and hawed aloud.

Both were dismissed in favor of prayer. These negative reactions shoved the concerned pastors into a corner, putting them on the defensive, where they could only think of "how to hold their own" against the opposition or how to escape, allowing no energy "to be marshaled for quiet" reflection with clear thinking to collectively resolve these important issues (Overstreet). Elimination of space for self respect and leaving no room to correct errors and move beyond them only strained relationships, leaving both sides of the group alienated from each other. In addition to group alienation, some D.M.S. participants suffered undue harshness and isolation from their own family members. The Reverend John Gropp's wife, Colleen said, "I had settled within myself that this was right, but churning and churning going on... When my husband went to my dad and tried to explain a little bit -- he didn't want to hear about it" (The Fighting Ministers).

Perhaps if Colleen's father had given her "room to turn around, and supportive companionship while she made the turn, instead of edging her into a corner, where, like all trapped creatures, defend themselves as best they can" when their psychic space is violated, she could have avoided bad tactics (Overstreet). Good non-conveyed thoughts possible to change one's mind are like out of sight, out of mind. The D.M. S's confrontational stance continued to muddy up the real issues of economic debate by focusing attention on a power struggle within a single church. Next, a personal attack was launched against the Lutheran Synod of America and its Bishop Kenneth R. May. D.M.S. members threw paint on the bishop's house, slashed his car tires, burned a 25-foot cross in front of synod headquarters and sprayed skunk oil into the air ducts of the synod office building. Such tactics further alienated the D.M.S. members from its superiors and its fellow church members. Nowhere else was this internal struggle so pronounced than at the Trinity Lutheran church in Clairton, Pennsylvania under the pastoral of the Reverend D. Douglas Roth.

A former Trinity church member, Elsie Milton, captured the mood of the congregation when she stated, "Every sermon dealt with the evils of Mellon Bank, U.S. Steel, and Bishop May" (Hopkins). The frustrated congregation, perhaps feeling no spiritual uplifting, asked Bishop May to intervene and the Reverend Roth was dismissed as pastor. The Reverend Roth refused to stop conducting services, forcing the bishop to obtain a court order against him which he ignored. The Reverend Roth's replacement, the Reverend Bower, arrived at Trinity Lutheran church to take possession of the keys and financial records only to be met with chained up doors, baseball bats, gas masks, and the threat of "defensive violence" if entry was forced against them (Hopkins). The Reverend Bower quietly walked away from the church in rejection; the stage was set for another confrontation between paranoid D.M.S. members and the seemingly newly built coalition comprised of bishops, lawyers, business and one judge.

Judge Emil Narick then ordered Sheriff Eugene Coon to arrest Roth for his defiant trespass. Sheriff Coon avoided a much wanted confrontation by the Reverend Roth, who was locked and barricaded within the church, by sending in two elder women sheriff deputies to peacefully arrest the Reverend Roth. While Roth was servicing a 90-day jail sentence for his defiance, supportive D.M. S members also barricaded themselves in the same church. Trinity Church Council President, Wayne Cochran, who was interviewed in the video The Fighting Ministers, must have truly felt alienated from his friends as he stated, "The people who were once-once my friends-and are still my friends-who do not even recognize me or speak to me", was one of eight church members who stood in minority behind the locked church door simply out of belief in their defrocked pastor. During the Christmas season of 1984, the Reverend Roth seemed to have been crushed by a coalition hell bent on putting down any deviations from social norms to avoid anarchy.

The personal attacks on Bishop May and the Bible quoting rhetoric from Roth to Judge Narick lacked wisdom, but the consequences of Roth's defiance far outweighed the reality of his crime. Since when does society dole out sentences of 90-days for simple defiant trespassing and an additional 60-days for freedom of speech, together with a twelve hundred dollar fine and made liable to repay all of the defenses high paid Mellon Bank lawyer's fees just because the Lutheran synod had hired them? In response to the jailing of the Reverend Roth, D.M. S members Nadine Roth, the Reverend Gropp and his wife, Collen, Wayne Cochran and others had all suffered unduly for their beliefs. They must have had misinterpreted feelings of paranoia as they locked themselves up inside the Trinity church in defiance of a court order demanding a surrender of the church property to the Lutheran synod with possible consequences of jail. Each holdup member of the D.M.S. faced feelings of paranoia based on prior events that each personally experienced. Nadine Roth continued to play the taped sermons of her jailed husband to the church congregation knowing that he had received an additional 60-day in jail just for recording them on tape.

Combine her defiance with her sermon playing and wonder just what she thought was in store for her by the law. The Reverend Gropp was saved only by a slim margin vote from being defrocked from his church as Bishop May put on the pressure. Collen Gropp was arrested at St. John's, Bishop May's personal worship place, because she wanted to disrupt services. She stated, "I thought only bad people got arrested" (The Fighting Ministers). Add her denial of free worship to her alienation from her own father to peek into her paranoid mindset. Wayne Cochran's belief that a good Christian as he stated, "Just didn't go to church on Sundays, but did good works all week long... helping and fulfilling needs" (The Fighting Ministers), made him a one man island in a sea of piranhas.

Tally his unpopularity to his support of the Reverend Roth to know he was swimming in paranoia. All the feelings of paranoia came crashing down in January when fifty riot-cad lawmen seized the Trinity church and jailed the protesting D.M. S members who were held up inside in contempt of court. Each member was treated in a similar manner, like the Reverend Roth, by an over reacting coalition who failed to mead out justice based on fairness in their quest to stop an internalized church struggle which totally left the unemployed steelworkers out of the loop. The D.M.S. members not only failed in their mission to help bring about positive change for the unemployed steelworkers, but they failed to recognize the signals that their own bodies gave them that their tactics used were not pure. Some members continued to mask their body signals to justify their actions based on their religious convictions of what a good Christian should have been. In the movie The Fighting Ministers, the Reverend John Gropp manifested his value struggle with such vices as mental stress and physical pain as he explained, "Colleen and I have gone through an awful lot of tearing inside, just sorting through what is right and what is good, and we get the cold sweats and the chills, and our palms sweat".

Additionally, Colleen Gropp said, "I knew it was right. Mentally, I knew that that had to be done... but internally I did not want to do it... It really took me a year to really work through and go through and churn inside, day and night". Darrell Becker, the President of Shipbuilders Local 61 shielded himself behind fear only to be rescued by the Reverend Roth, when he said, "Pastor Roth was the one who pushed me through that fear barrier. What kind of union president could I feel I am if I could let someone else fight my fight". Some might think that if Darrell Becker had arrived in the boxing rink corner of the unemployed steelworkers with an effective fight plan instead of fighting in Roth's corner, he might have been more successful in his action.

Each D.M.S. member, the Reverend John Gropp, Colleen Gropp, and Darrel Becker all had suffered the common malady of self denial of their own conscience, covered over by forced upon symptoms of denial for avoidance of responsibility in order to continue down the path of self-justification that their actions were just and non-violence. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail", Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, "In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action". According to Martin Luther King Jr's., "Letter from Birmingham Jail", the D.M.S. failed to read and follow these steps properly. The D.M.S. mis-labeled the injustice, negotiated from violence, ignored their own conscience and used ineffective means of direct action.

In another quote by Martin Luther King Jr., he wrote, "Over the past few years I have consistently preached that non-violence demands that means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends". Ethical means tied to direct action, such as allowing the media to take the government and business leaders to task as a result of mass peaceful demonstrations together with Martin Luther King Jr's. sorely missed advice and perhaps the D.M.S. might have been more of a help then a hindrance to the unemployed steelworkers of Pennsylvania.

Bibliography

The Fighting Ministers. dir. Bill Jersey. 1985.
Gruendl, Ron. "Clergy Pushing 'Disaster' Help". Daily News [McKeesport]. 24 Dec. 1982.
Gruendl, Ron. "Disaster Ruling Sought for Region by Group of Concerned Ministers". Daily News [McKeesport]. 21 Dec. 1982.
Hopkins, Joseph M. "Disciplinary Committee Votes to Defrock Activist Lutheran Pastor". Christianity Today. 19 April 1985.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail", The Harper & Row Reader: Liberal Education Through Reading and Writing. Second Edition. Ed. Wayne C. Booth and Marshall W. Gregory. New York, NY: Harper&Row, 1988.
394-407. Marquis, Christopher. "When the Fires Go Out: A steel town settles into decay". The Progressive. Overstreet, Harry and Bavaro. "Making Psychic Space for One Another". College English: The First Year. Sixth Edition. Ed. Alton C. Morris et al. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace-Jovanovic h, Inc. 1973.
228-35. Paris, Barry. "Church Diners 'Bombed' with Skunk Water". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 17 Dec. 1984.
Plotkin, Sid and Scheuerman, Bill. "Lessons of the Pastor Roth Affair". The Nation 23 Feb. 1985: 211.