When Lutheran Minister D. Douglas Roth last November defied his bishop and refused to leave his church in a depressed steel town near Pittsburgh, police were called in, and Roth was jailed for 112 days. Last week a church synod voted 499 to 33 to defrock the still outspoken minister. It was only the second such action in the 22-year history of the Lutheran Church in America. Said Nadine Roth, his wife: "I guess we're like any other unemployed family now."
Roth and other ministers at first enjoyed the support of the church when in 1980 they proposed to enlist Pittsburgh...