House of Lords

East Harlem's First Spanish Methodist Church is a congregation of lower-middle-class Puerto Ricans. For three months it has been under attack by a militant Puerto Rican group, the Young Lords, who have demanded church space for a weekday free-breakfast program for neighborhood children. The church refused, saying the congregation itself should organize any such action.

On the Sunday after Christmas, as the strains of the Recessional faded away, a member of the Lords rose and tried to address the congregation. He was ignored. Then, as the congregation filed out, 150 Lords and supporters took over the building and nailed shut its doors with timbers and railroad spikes.

The next morning, First Methodist was a whole new scene. A banner proclaimed, "The Doors Are Open to the People's Church." Posters using Black Panther rhetoric announced: "When One of Us Falls, 1,000 Will Take His Place" and "All Power to the People." A door bore an insigne of a hand clutching a rifle, based on the Lords' chosen symbol: Jesus with a rifle slung across his back. Inside, the militants were dispensing food and setting up classes in a "school of liberation."

Dead Center. Like their parent organization, a former street gang in Chicago, most of the New York Lords are nominal Catholics. But the Lords' "Information Minister," known simply as Yoruba, 20, denies any bias in seizing the church of a Spanish-speaking Protestant minority. The Lords cite its strategic location in East Harlem--"dead center"--and maintain that while most area churches have attempted some sort of social-action programs, First Methodist "hasn't done a thing."

The church has indeed lagged in community service, but a $75,000 mortgage on its new (1966) brick building bites deeply into its budget; besides, Puerto Rican Methodists are typically conservative and pietistic. But some, in the wake of the Lords' takeover, are urging hurry-up consideration of church-run breakfast and day-care projects. "They are willing to have the building used as a service to the community," says one Methodist official, "but as an expression of their own religious faith."

However, the Lords' leftist program goes well beyond free breakfasts. Now that they are in the building, they want to stay there, though the church has started court action to have them ousted. Until they are, say the Lords, the church is free to hold Sunday services as usual. But on weekdays, they will keep on giving juice, milk and cookies to 100 children a day. They also show films (sample: a documentary on the pre-1968 Olympics student riots in Mexico City) and make speeches urging independence for Puerto Rico, which they view as a U.S. colony.

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