In this episode, we dig into the significant impact Robert Schuller had on American Christianity, particularly in congregational life and the church growth movement. Schuller was a controversial figure whose legacy continues to quietly shape how pastors lead—often without them even realizing it.

Joining me are Gerardo Marti and Mark T. Mulder, who unpack Schuller’s philosophy and show how his entrepreneurial approach reshaped American Christianity—and the way ministry was done and measured. As we trace his life and career, we uncover the tension between innovation and the challenges it created for ministry leaders.

At the same time, this episode doesn’t shy away from the hard questions. We examine the idolatries embedded in his approach—the elevation of growth, charisma, and performance—and the unintended consequences that continue to ripple through the church today. It’s an invitation for leaders to celebrate what was done well, but also to wrestle with the ways these patterns have shaped our culture and ministries, asking: How do we lead faithfully in the midst of these legacies?

Key Takeaways:

• Robert Schuller played a formative role in shaping contemporary American congregational life, influencing both growth strategies and worship practices.
• Many pastors today remain unaware of his contributions, highlighting a gap in historical understanding.
• His entrepreneurial approach to church growth left a lasting imprint on modern ministry practices.
• Schuller’s methods illustrate the ongoing tension between innovation and tradition in church leadership.
• His story demonstrates the complexities of ministry, combining charisma, resources, and community in distinctive ways.
• Schuller’s legacy serves as both a cautionary tale and a guide for church leaders navigating cultural change.

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Because we were convinced that so much of contemporary US Congregational life has been shaped by way by the things that Schuller did. And I think there's thousands of pastors who have no idea who he is. But you could definitely trace what they do on Sunday morning.

And the way they manage congregational life, the way they think about growth, what they think vitality is. How Christian worship service should look can all be traced to Robert Schuller.

Welcome to Apollos Watered.

In the Ministry Deep Dive podcast, we tackle the big questions few are willing to ask about ministry, culture and the challenges you face every day. Ministry is hard. The road ahead isn't always clear. But with God, nothing is impossible.

We come alongside pastors and ministry leaders like you, exploring obstacles, uncovering opportunities, and sharing practical ways to thrive. Our vision is simple to see thriving ministry leaders and churches noticeably transforming their world. So let's dive deep together.

Refresh your soul, renew your vision, and get ready, because it's watering time.

Time.

What happens when the church borrows the methods of business to fuel its growth? Is it an innovation? Is it compromise? Or something in between?

That's really the heart at today's episode of Ministry Deep Dive, as we take a closer look at one of the most influential and controversial figures in American Christianity, Robert H. Shuller. To guide us today, I'm joined by two leading scholars who bring deep insight into the intersection of faith, culture, and social change.

We have Dr. Gerardo Marti is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology at Davidson College, and Mark T. Mulder, professor of Sociology at Calvin University.

Together they've written a fascinating new book, the Church Must Grow or Perish. I love the title, fellas. Robert A. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity. I think this is going to be a fun show today.

Welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Thank you, Travis.

Glad to be here.

Well, let's get into the book, because I have to say I was a little surprised when I saw a book come up that said a book about Robert Schuller, that's not necessarily a name that you have right out in front of you right now. Why did you want to write about Robert Shuler? And you've written about him in the past.

So what is your interest in Robert Schuller and the Crystal Cathedral precisely,

And we realized, like, how is this such a silent death that hardly anybody's taking note of it? Because we were convinced that so much of contemporary US Congregational life has been shaped by the things that Schuller did.

And I think there's just thousands of pastors who have no idea who he is. But you could definitely trace what they do on Sunday morning.

And the way they manage congregational life, the way they think about growth, what they think vitality is. How Christian worship service should look can all be traced to Robert Schuller. And so that's why. And the fact that, you know, I asked students.

And when we started this project, I would ask my students at Calvin University who are in. Who, you know, in the same reform Dutch reform tradition as Schuler. How many of you know who Robert Schuller is? I'd get maybe one hand.

I think my grandma maybe watched him or something. And so just this huge footprint on US Christianity, but largely forgotten.

Well, I think of coaching trees. You know, I use a sports analogy. And you've got. You could look at his coach, like, what tree did he come from and who did he influence?

You got Bill Hybels, you got Rick Warren. And then that just influences so many people. So he's kind of like the granddaddy of the church growth movement.

Would you put him as that kind of title? Would that be fair? I think absolutely.

Go ahead, Gerardo.

No, go ahead. I think it's exactly.

Want it. I think there would be some competition for that because the gentleman over at Fuller were kind of doing it.

They're both in Southern California, see Peter Wagner and Donald McGavren. And they're doing it in close geographic proximity. But for a while, they were doing it parallel, almost in silos. And they almost just kind of. The.

The guys at Fuller kind of like, realized that Schuler was doing something wildly successful.

And the things that they had been doing research about on the mission field and things like that, and then taking it back to suburban United States, Schuller had intuited. And so they almost saw Schuller as this guy. We did all this research and methodology, and Schuler just kind of making it up.

But he's wildly successful in doing very.

So, yeah, that's right.

I think he is one of the granddaddies. But I think, you know, there. There are other.

There's like four or five of them, right? Like church Fathers. It's like the church.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, he's already confident that he's already figured it out. So Schuler already began dispensing his advice and, of course, having people come at him.

And then he creates a system by which he can create a sort of a school of leadership, so to speak. You know, workshops, being able to tell people exactly what to do in writing these things up.

And so I think once church growth material and church growth leaders and the title of church growth came around, it was a way for him to align himself with something that other people were recognizing and had legitimacy. And he's like. He wanted to be legitimated, too.

So he gladly took on the moniker of being a church growth person or church growth expert, even though he would.

He began before those things actually started to come around and fit into the same framework in terms of trying to make church growth a technique, a formula, something that you could figure out and that was accessible to everyone.

You just needed to have the right attitude and then sort of like the right set of techniques and break the church out of the lethargy of tradition, the lethargy of just kind of doing the same thing over and over again and adopt a much more entrepreneurial attitude.

So definitely he was there, and he welcomed anyone who would recognize that he had some level of expertise that would be able to carry the church forward.

Talk about the man for a moment. You spend some time in the book chronicling his bio, his background, which plays a huge role in his formation and his outlook.

And he grew up as a farm kid in Iowa. Right. I mean, so what is it about him? He grew up in this kind of Dutch Reformed enclave of this Reformed idea. Backwood, back road, dirt road.

And then he goes from there to Michigan for school. So he. And he's. And he goes and gets his degree in John Calvin. Right. I mean, really, he's studying Calvin. He's writing all this stuff.

He's uses that kind of to puff out his chest and he's making fun, which I thought was very interesting. He goes on a trip to New York and he encounters who?

Norman Vincent Peale.

Who?

So, yeah, so you're exactly right, Schuller.

I think one of the fascinating aspects of him is he's not a person that you would predict that would come up with a formula to create the Crystal Cathedral, an hour of power, and to change contemporary Christianity as is practiced in the United States. He's just the. You know, from the. I don't know if we mentioned it in the book or not. But, you know, there's. He was such a big deal.

There's an A and E biography episode on Schuller, and they described him as coming from a conservative Calvinist sect in Iowa. A sect. And he belonged to the Reformed Church in America, which is the oldest continuous denomination in. In the country.

And when he's at Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan, they have to take a trip to go see Norman Vincent Peale, who's Methodist by background but is called by the Reformed Church in America to. Well, by Marble Collegiate in Manhattan because of his profile. Right.

And so he gets a special dispensation, even though he has no reformed theological bonafides, because of his stature, they want him associated with Marble Collegiate.

And so Schuller goes kind of forced by the seminary professors in an example of, I think, almost how embarrassing our tradition can be sometime when we don't have guardrails, right.

That we can allow someone like Norman Vincent Peale to call himself a Reformed Church in America pastor, even though he's Methodist in background and what he's talking about makes very little sense in the Reformed tradition. And then there's stories about how Schuller got such a.

A good reaction to his fellow seminarians when he'd walk through the apartments gesticulating and, you know, changing the timbre of his voice to mock Peale when he got.

Yeah, I think part of. Part of what you mentioned, Travis, just to mention this, is that this is where the book draws on different aspect of our biographies.

And so it was going to be a story one way or another, to take something that had been the model, you know, this juggernaut of American Christianity that had crumbled so quickly. It. It. There had to be a story there. And then for Schuller to pass away just a few short years later, there was something really dynamic.

But what I did not know when I began talking to Mark about it was how much Mark's own background. I didn't know that Schuler came from a rural Dutch community in Iowa. I didn't know that Mark also had the same kind of roots in a different state.

I didn't know that Michigan was so central to where Mark is located is so central. I didn't know that the archives would have this kind of material because I came from Southern California.

So I grew up in shadow of the cathedral, growing. The whole ministry was always in the news. There was always something to deal with because there was a lot of drama. I had been there.

Many people I knew had been there for lots of reasons. So I felt close to the cathedral and Schuler's ministry in a very different way.

So to be able to combine these things and to understand something about the long development, sort of the long journey of this person, what they understood church to be, what it meant to be a pastor or a leader of a church, how he understood, what the focus of the ministry would be, what it meant to preach properly.

All of those things went through a dynamic change in American Christianity, but it also is exemplified in the change that happened in Schuller's life directly.

And he is one of the people who prompted those changes, made them legitimate, made them important, made them, in his mind, necessary in order to allow for the church not just to thrive, but to survive into the 21st century. So that's what really drew the project together and allowed for all these revelations to just come out.

Through our archival work and through our interviews, we learned a lot in the process. So as you read with surprise what you encounter in the text, these are the surprises that we had in doing the work.

And that high hut I think comes through in the narrative.

It was very eye opening. Your book is very eye opening. You read his bio, which I related to. I grew up as a farm kid in East Central Illinois.

I didn't grow up Dutch, even though my name is Dutch, but I didn't grow up Dutch. I didn't hear the you're not Dutch.

If you're not Dutch, you're not much until much later when I started interacting with people that came from the area. But Schuler I had heard of. And same with Norman Vincent Peale. I was still too young to really benefit. He was more in my grandfather's era.

My grandfather was a pastor, rural pastor, but admired Schuler. The hour of power, this big glaring smile on television with the robes. And then the crystal cathedral, of course.

And then my grandparents always had the power of positive thinking by Norman Vincent Peale around my mother would refer to these different things. I didn't necessarily equate him with the church growth movement. I pastored in Chicago.

We were in the shadow of Willow Creek, which later and then I cut my teeth in seminary reading. You know, the purpose driven church, the purpose driven life, that kind of thing. And all of those go back to Schuller.

But reading Schuller through your eyes was. Was eye opening.

You start to get the peek behind the curtain and we, we know there's Always the public perception of things, and then there's the private inner motivations, the issues. But we also recognize that circumstance plays a role. And it seems like he goes from this.

This Dutch Reformed kind of in some ways the poster boy for Dutch Reformed tradition that, you know, the Reformed Ch America. He pastors a church in suburban Chicago in the southern suburbs, Ivanhoe. And then he moves from there. The church grows. I mean, he.

He actually saw a lot of growth. He was very charismatic individual. So he starts at this church. And how many members were there when he started?

40, I believe.

And then it went to, like, 400. Yep. So he was out knocking on doors. He was already kind of trying this methodology there. And what years are we talking about?

So that's 50 to 55 that he's in suburban Chicago. And it's not just charisma. The guy could manufacture attention. If you remember that he. He.

He called the newspaper to come take a photo when they were painting the parsonage and part of the church. But he had them come right as the two shifts were both there. So he had a morning shift and an afternoon shift.

But he told the newspaper, come right at noon because instead of 10 guys, it'll be 20 and it'll look like more folks. But then also when they. They built a steeple for the church, you know, he had.

He was up in the cherry picker placing the cross on top of the steeple so that there could also be another photo opportunity and free publicity. And so it was charisma. But there's also these manufactured moments where he knew how to get attention, which is, again, quite intuitive on this part.

I think I have Hugh Jackman in my head singing this is the greatest show right now, as you're describing it, you know.

Yeah.

I mean, he's strategic, and I think that that's important to understand. And he learned strategy in a variety of mechanisms.

Because the other thing that we uncovered is that he went through formal fundraising processes at the church. But he had guidance. Right. So he had guidance from a. From a person who was really very effective and very popular and had been in demand.

But I am convinced that he took very careful observation of what that person did so that he then understood what does it mean to fundraise, what are the techniques of fundraising in order to be able to achieve a goal, the goal of expansion, the goal to building. So it's like, you've got to have a vision, you got to have a plan.

But then, yeah, you depend on people giving generously for something that does not yet exist. But the vision is so compelling that you get people to go ahead and give in anticipation that more people will come and give later. And I think that.

That all of the lessons of Ivanhoe that allowed it to go from 40 to 400 are exactly what he took to the larger experiment that he did when he moved to Southern California.

And it was never to fix the furnace. It was to, you know, build a new addition. People don't want to give money to maintenance, right? Never. You never do something boring like that.

Like, he had a great metaphor his first winter in Chicago where he didn't have enough money to pay for all of his coal. And so he asked if he could buy it on credit.

And he said, I learned this lesson because I went to the bank to see if I get a loan to pay for my coal for the winter. And the banker said, no, we do not give loans for things that depreciate that you're going to literally burn up, right?

And so he took that and said, okay, we're never going to ask money to put in a new kitchen sink or to fix the furnace.

It's always going to be something grandiose that is going to catch people's excitement and they're going to open up their pocketbooks in ever more generous ways.

What prompted him to go from Ivanhoe to Southern California?

So part of it is he was mad about his salary at Ivanhoe. I think we have a great anecdote in the book about how frustrated he was with his. With his raise and how much. How he had grown the.

The congregation so effectively, and yet he was going to have to scrape by.

And there's literally years where, you know, they were able to get milk and things because his mom was sending checks yet to subsidize them a bit from. From northwest Iowa. So there was a frustration in the salary. But I think he'd also has stories about how he was.

He had a quartet when he was at Hope College in Michigan, and they drove all the way out west to California. And he was quite. He tells a story that he was smitten right there.

And so when classes, California called him with this opportunity, I think he saw it as somewhat providential and an opportunity he could not refuse because of. He saw the potential of. Of Orange county in particular.

When he goes out there, I mean, he's there just at the same time that a guy named Disney is getting ready to build. So in some respect, he's there right time, right place, and all of these people are coming from the Midwest, coming From the south.

They're all moving west. And he does something, though, innovative because he talks in the book.

You document how he had a meeting, I think, with other pastors or he had written down all of the different places he could rent to go to, but his wife is the one. He had written drive in movie theater. And he was scratching that off. And she. She's the one that said, why don't. Is that right? Yeah, yeah.

They had a list of 10.

And so sometimes it's interesting because there's a retelling that he's such a great innovator that it was his idea to let's do that in an automobile culture of Southern Cal California. Let's tap into that and let's have it at a drive in movie theater. When in truth, it's actually, I think, the 10th out of 10 possibilities.

Like, it was his last choice because as innovative as Schuller was to the end, he still was wedded to some of the artifacts of U.S. congregational life, the big building and things like that. And he. So I think he accidentally taps into the automobile centric culture of California and gets kind of lucky that he.

This was a last resort, but he was willing to try it for $10 a week just to pay a guy, the union sound guy, to set it up for them.

And then he had to reinterpret a lot of how congregational life is done so that you could baptize babies outside of car windows, that you could pass communion elements through car windows that you had in the bulletin. You had to have a special little note. Hey, don't forget to take your speaker off the car window. And re.

You know, don't drive away with it because you'll wreck things. You know, he's forced to buy the lack of other options to use the drive in theater.

And it just happens to map perfectly on to the car centric culture of Southern California at the time.

Yeah. This is part of the interesting aspect of the story and where Mark and I have written now two books.

And the reason why is because the first was to deal with the organizational aspects of how did this thing implode so quickly. It's really about trying to understand organizationally the. The journey of the growth of the.

To the Crystal Cathedral, the culmination of this ministry, and then how it just crumbled so quickly.

But there was so much left over in terms of the biography, the story of this person, that then we approached the series, the Eerdman's Library series, the editors, and we have a lot of material here. That's just focused on how did this person come about? And both tell compelling aspects of what happened in Southern California.

Now, when I first started studying religion, I came kind of out of nowhere. You know, I studied race and I studied organizations, and I slowly began to adopt a more formal interest in religion.

But every scholar of religion, the dominating paradigm that existed is secularization, right? That religion is disappearing, that the. The religion is really not that. That much. And so you're just trying to pump it up as best you can.

But I came from Southern California, okay.

And when you hear about the Southern California that Schuler ran into, you find that he could not find a place for his church because the Methodists and the Baptists and the Lutherans had already gotten there ahead of him, right? They had taken up every available space, and they were already commanding most of the people with the affiliations that they already had. Right.

So Schuller did not enter in a secularizing environment, okay, Depending on how you define these things. But overall, it was a religiously hot environment.

And the hotness of his environment, he had to accommodate one thing, which is there weren't very many people from the Deutsch Reformed Church. If you have a sign that says, hey, Dutch Reformed people, come on over here, you're not going to have very many people.

So he took a place that was now gathering strangers right, from across the country, mostly from the south and the Midwest west, who were already churched. They had church culture, but they didn't necessarily have a church membership.

And that's where he said, okay, we're going to create new ways for people to connect to each other, and we're not going to demand that they come from a particular denominational background. So his.

His instinct of creating an open atmosphere church, a community oriented church, if you will, that did not demand that you came from a particular denominational background, was able to capt harness, right, the hotness of the religious atmosphere that existed, but then direct it in new ways.

And with a mobile population, people who maybe have a little bit of openness to some differences, some innovation, then the fact that the guy is talking from the top of a snack bar might be okay, right? And so that's where all of the interesting innovations come from.

Because I guarantee that when he went to the snack bar and say, we want to borrow the drive in theater, he's like, where are you going to meet? Because if you've ever seen a snack bar in a drive in theater, you know there's not going to be room for a congregation there.

The ability to say, okay, rain or shine, you know, whether, whether the, the. It's cloudy or sunny, hot or cold, we're going to do this thing from the top of the snack bar.

And to do it for years and years and years is in and of itself a real accomplishment.

And then to invite Norman Vincent Peale himself to come on out as a guest so that he appears on the movie, you know, marquee alongside whatever movie was that particular day grew in.

And to be able to get that in the newspaper so the people in the community know that all of a sudden he's got thousands of people who gather to experience this very different sort of low, low threshold of what it means to be able to come. Highly accessible, but big bang for what you get. Yeah. He ends up building a sustainable ministry that becomes the envy of all.

All of the other pastor friends that he has around him. It's fascinating story in and of itself.

It is a fascinating story.

I think that sharing being on top the snack bar, we should. We should note that behind him is the big screen. And so he's actually sharing space already with celebrities. Right.

It's where Saturday night people come in and they see Clark Gable or whoever ever up there, and the next day it's Schuler's in the sharing. Same space, smaller, but still the same backdrop. And I think that's a.

A thread that's important because of when he starts instituting the Hour of Power. Right. Celebrity continues to be a draw, you know, bringing in, you know, actors and activists and. And singers. His.

His proximity to their glow, their aura becomes part of why people tune in for 40 years to hour of Power to see who's a celebrity that he's going to interview today.

Yeah.

So what other entrepreneurial methods and business methods did he borrow in order to build the church? Which wasn't the Crystal Cathedral at first. It was. What was it? Garden.

Garden Grove Community Church.

Was he one of the first to have the community church title?

Yes.

So that's what all community churches kind of trace back to him.

That's what Warren Bird will say.

That's a key innovation that Schuller implemented because it is deliberately walking away from a denominational affiliation and making that the key thing instead, you know, anybody can come. And that really stimulates a very different orientation of what does it mean to draw in people. It. It shifts the weight of. Of priority.

Instead of speaking to people who are already insiders, it is trying to now move to how do you make this for outsiders? You know, instead of people who automatically should Have a connection or affiliation, often an ethnic affiliation.

Remember, we're Talking about the mid-50s where a lot of churches had explicitly ethnic connections, language practices, other kind of cultural, how you eat, how you, how you associate to something that is welcoming of outsiders and strangers that do not know each other, each other and do not have to presume that they already understand what's going on. So that is certainly what we now think of as seeker sensitive stuff. But he was doing seeker sensitive before it was called seeker sensitive. Right.

That's the, that's the tilt that I think makes Schuler so intriguing in what he did.

We could talk about innovations in many different ways, but the one that I would stress is the way in which he thought about money, credit, the flow of capital.

We, we spend a lot of time when we think about churches on singular leadership and charisma, the ability to, you know, have followers and to be able to speak well and things like that. But what Shuler thought about was how to finance things.

And the fact that he was able to grasp onto not only different kinds of fundraising techniques to be able to get people to give of their, out of their pockets towards ambitious projects, but also the fact that he entered into an atmosphere when the role of credit was taking on a larger and larger role in America.

I mean, we have to remember that in the mid 20th century is when like Sears and other department stores started to cultivate what we now know as credit cards.

But, and, and then as he entered into this atmosphere, banks and neoliberal principles that were trying to open credit across the world were opening more and more of a capacity for people to borrow.

So the fact that he could say, we have this many attenders, we have this much revenue, we can indicate this many pledges that became persuasive enough to unlock literally millions of dollars so that we could begin to think about something in a long term way of building a structure that would last for generations. And that's going to take, you know, generational wealth literally to be able to do that.

The other thing that he was willing to do is he was willing to ask for money outside of the members of his own church. So he was actually drawing on Dutch networks back home in Michigan. He was willing to extend across the TV screen to his people.

The people were listening to him. And so the accumulation of an apparatus of being able to ask for people and who weren't necessarily in the pews to create something for making room.

Right. That more people would come later into the pews is in principle a lot of the way churches began to run later.

But you had to unlock a particular kind of possibility, a vision for how money would work so that people would be able to do that. Instead of a very conservative principle of only spending what you literally have in the bank. Churches don't do that anymore.

And I think Robert Schuller is certainly one of the beginnings of what that logic, how that particular logic began to work. He was very forthright. We are going to build this church on borrowing. We are going to borrow our way to growth. He was not hidden about that.

It was explicit.

Let's talk transition for a moment. You mentioned his possibility thinking, this possibility of what could do.

But he's reframing the gospel in the middle of that borrowing Norman Vincent Peale, but appealing to the very status conscious, economically mobile middle class that seems to move there. Describe though how he shifted his theology and how he reframed the gospel into this possibility thinking.

Well, this is clearly an influence of Peale with his book Positive Thinking.

And there is some disagreement as to whether Peale's wife Ruth suggested to Schuller that you should, we have positive thinking on the east coast, you should have possibility thinking on the west coast. Ruth Peel said she gave that to Schuler. Schuler said, no, I, I came up with that on my own.

You know, I would argue we don't do a whole lot of deep psychological analysis of Schuller, but he's really a lot of what he's doing is preaching to himself. And I think that's especially true when it comes to possibility thinker thinking.

And it comes to the theology of self esteem as someone who comes from the same or a very similar Dutch reform milieu. Shame, guilt, that those Calvinist things are, are what Schuller was pushing back against.

And I think when he discovered positive thinking and he said, you know, and he considered himself the foremost, the world's foremost authority on Calvin because he wrote a, an index on the institutes.

And so he said, well, I think I need to reinterpret Calvin in a way that says that, you know, he actually says at one time he's in a conversation with Lou Smedes and other theologian. He says to Luwell, you know, Schuller's convinced that man's, you know, human beings chief problem is shame and loose.

Me says, well, that's different than what Augustine says. Augustine says it's pride. And Schuller says, well, Augustine was wrong about that. Right.

But I do think it's him wrestling with his own sense of shame and guilt within the Calvinist tradition.

Do you think as you look now at his life, have you gone through the archives? You've read all the different things on him. I mean, we know that he fathered and created the Crystal Cathedral.

It seems though that he had an edifice complex. Like he was obsessed with buildings manifesting and validating himself and looking at all the marketing techniques that he seemed to use.

Once you become, you borrow from the market, you're susceptible to the market and the rules of the market, and that ultimately though leads to his downfall. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, we make the argument in the earlier book that he was dependent on charisma, constituency and capital.

Right.

The three Cs. And when he arrived and he had those in harmony, the thing was humming. Right.

But as Gerardo pointed out, these mega churches have a masked fragility that depends on the three legs of that stool. Capital, charisma and constituency.

And so, you know, when Orange county is no longer an upwardly mobile class white community, it starts changing, becomes much more international. We see the constituency changing around him. When he tries to hand off the church leadership to his son, we see erosion of the charisma.

We heard a lot of personal stories from folks that he came back from that one and was never quite the same, that he was much more emotional, much more prone to weepiness and things like that. So I think we, you know, you could trace the charisma loss to that, but then also the bungled succession throughout the family.

For.

Because they thought that they had not kept their end of the bargain on retirement payments.

There are a lot of things that unraveled. There are a lot of buttons that he pushed too many times, and it just didn't. It just couldn't keep working.

And there was a certain kind of inflexibility in how he saw the world that didn't end up really moving real well.

And I think that had he lived a little longer, he would have been even that much more shocked at how much he missed his blind spots, if you will, you know, of what he did to see. And that's where I think he's coming from. But when you get to the.

The end, if you feel for the guy, then I think we've accomplished the work because things didn't work out the way he thought, and it was very unexpected. And he died in a. In a very.

In many ways in an undignified fashion, even though there were people who did love him and wanted to reach out to him and found him, found ways to find him. But there were some things that. That very much hurt out of the decisions that he made.

And there were people who definitely were left aside and promises that were kept and, you know, things. Things that occurred. So it's a mixed bag, right? It's.

It's neither a hero necessarily, but I'm not sure I would automatically call him a villain either.

Right at the end of his life, he died pretty broken. I mean, even then, he died broke. Like you said, they were living off Social Security at that time. Is that right?

So they had zero money when they died.

Yeah.

One of the most striking things that I remember when I started this project is there was a theological librarian here, Kelvin, whose mom was in the same Christian home, nursing home in Artesia, California. And he said, mark, is it possible that Robert Schuler is in that? Because he's like.

Because he thought of it as completely modest and way beneath someone like Robert Schuller. So he was stunned that someone like Robert Schuller could be in the same Christian nursing home. And his.

And this is a story we don't write about in the book, but we had a co pastor who was a good friend, has a story of scenes going to visit Schuler in the Christian, in that nursing home. And I was kind of shocked at. Schuler was always about dignity and, you know, manicuring his appearance and, and taking care of himself.

Just how he had been like allowed to be let go in terms of his appearance and, and personal hygiene and things like that in the nursing home. So yeah, it is, you know, it's a, it's a very sad ending.

The fact that, you know, one of his daughters had to start a GoFundMe campaign to pay for the funeral. And that led to all kinds of vitriolic comments on, on the GoFundMe page, like, you should be able to afford that.

And so they, they actually had to have the, the Catholic diocese had to allow them to, to borrow space at the Crystal Cathedral to actually hold the, the funeral for, for, for the, the, you know, the place that he had built. They had to borrow it for the funeral service.

Would you call his life or his approach to ministry a warning for pastors today?

Well, I would say that it's still the default method that people have adopted for ministry today. I think I, what I understand is that ministries are very attentive to their budgets, that they are much more attentive to loan mechanisms.

They all have aspirations to build.

Even if you're doing multi site, when people rent and rent for a while, they see the value of having permanent property, you know, and so they all want to have that because that to them is a measure of stability. And I think all of them also always want to have their message be approachable and accessible.

And all of them now, they don't always have partnerships with TV programs or local channels, but just about every ministry today has a camera and puts their stuff online because they believe that whatever they're doing should be heard by more than just the people in the pews.

And so I think that Schuler's, what we might call schooners innovations over time have become the default church management approach for American Christianity.

Which could be both positive and a negative.

Well, exactly.

I think that's where if we say, you know, it's a glass church, it's a mirror, we've got to be able to take a look at it and offer an opportunity to do that. We are not doing it on a theological basis attempting to go line by line on what some people have called jewelry.

What we're looking at is a reassessment of a life in a historical context with very, very specific Christian motives that many people share.

Right.

And so being able to do that, I think the, the book does offer a very particular kind of mirror for pastors and denominational leaders to be able to say what are we doing and how are we doing it?

And, and we not waiting until, you know, we're at the end to be able to assess we might be able to be better equipped to understand how we got to where we are and maybe be able to take a look at what might be the task for today.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned we had Brian Miller, another colleague, a sociologist, on, in his book Sanctifying Suburbia and we were talking about that within Chicagoland.

And one of the things that he and I think Ryan Burges research has shown is one of the issues that churches have, especially as they close within the Midwest, is this the idea of property. You know, I think many of them had the kind of the Schuler idea that we build it and, or I'm going to call it the field of dreams.

If you build it, they'll come. And many of them have become albatrosses waiting down on them and they can't afford to keep up with it.

Whereas one Indian man told me once, it's one thing to pay for the elephant, it's another thing to feed it.

And so I think what you're seeing is as the culture has shifted, like his approach worked in a certain time, in a certain place, but it doesn't necessarily translate outside of it because in some respects he capitalized upon the ambitions of those who were moving from a Midwestern middle class post war boom. And in our multicultural pluralistic world that questions many of those different motives.

I think back to when Rob Bell was starting off and someone said he worked within Grand Rapids area in Michigan, but he wouldn't have worked in Manhattan per se because the context was very, very different. And I just think this is where we have to challenge and understand what does our gospel expression look like in a given place?

What are the idolatries that we unwillingly or unknowingly baptize as we go about it. And I think the multi ethnic part challenges those certain presuppositions about who we are culturally. That's part of what our ministry does.

We created a theological paradigm called missioholism and it's basically Christ sovereignty of all of life and saying is what are the, the unconscious idolatries that we have assumed over time and how are they contributing to the social acceleration? Harmon Rose's idea.

And what does the gospel then challenge within a given culture in order to call us back to that catechesis, those counter liturgies, as Mark, your colleague Jamie Smith has talked about.

So these are the expressions that we're looking at as the Christianity becomes much more global and as we see of course, 40 million people, people not going to church anymore and 26 higher level Christian institutions closing, emerging since COVID Yeah, something's going on. And so we've been analyzing and this is why we're looking at Christian Smith and, and your data too. Can we extricate warning principles?

What are the good that came from and some of the things that Schuller did in order to innovate and be able to relate to this modern world? Because we're not.

I mean, we just had a conversation where we interviewed some of the guys from the Gospel Coalition talking about scrolling ourselves to death. How much is our media ecology actually formed our gospel expressions? And have we unwittingly malformed things and changed the message in the process?

And it's hard, as you, and I think is what one of the things you seem to have intimated is that it's easy to sit in judgment now. Now it's very hard in that moment to be able to critique and see and know because we don't have.

We can't replicate the circumstances in which they lived. And so like you said, there's a bit of an armchair critiquing going on as we're looking back over time.

So we want to be fair, but at the same time we have to say what are the warning signs? So let me ask you this. What I mean, we know about the innovations, you've already talked about that.

What are the warnings though that we can take today and these church leaders can take today, that is say, okay, or maybe words of caution. How about that? Words of caution for people that are trying to innovate.

They may not even realize that they have been brought into this system and inherited it. What, what do we say to them to help them know how to navigate the cultural waters in which they find themselves?

Yeah. So I mean, I think one of the warnings is so much of Schuler's emphasis was on growth and management.

And, and I think we've not said it out loud, but you've alluded to it, Travis, is where's the discipleship? And where's the formation. And that's. That's kind of the whole. In Schuler's model. Right. And it's easy.

It's easy to get swept up in the performance, you know, when you, like as Gerardo said, when you know that there's a chance that, you know, know people outside the church are going to watch my sermon.

Yeah.

How. What. What kind of. What does that do to how you deliver your sermon and the content you give it when you know that anybody could be con.

You know, could be downloading and watching this? Does it change your performance? Does it change your content? And what does that mean for what's going on in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings?

I think that for me, raises a lot of questions about how the very. Tapping into that innovation of. Of putting your.

Your worship service on YouTube for anyone to consume at any time, what does that do to what you actually do on Sunday morning in the worship service? I can't, as a. I can't help but think that's going to have some effect. You might not be conscious of. Of it or.

But I think it's going to happen whether you realize it or not.

Yeah.

There's a lot more that we could say because there's a lot in the book. What I would say for a moment here is my favorite pastor of scripture is Luke 10, the sending of the 70 or 72, depending on how you. You read it.

But here you have this commissioning of unnamed people who are just going out doing spectacular things. And it's so unanticipated in the text. And it happens early, fairly early in terms of what's going on in Jesus's ministry.

What we have is in Schuler, a person who did not trust that the ministry could accomplish outside of his own particular giftedness, his own particular genius.

You know, when he creates a succession plan where he's preaching his last sermon at 100 years old, you know, there's something that's not right there. Right.

And when you see that the ministry becomes financially dependent on Robert Schuler Ministries, you know, where it's the broadcast and it's the media presence, which he just did not believe that anybody else could do at that point. Something. The wheels have come off in. In a different way. And I think that we cannot define the church, any church, around one person.

And Schuller certainly did.

And I think that that in and of itself created another major blind spot that he was unwilling to give up because the only choice his leaders had was either to support him or to just move on. Right. You have no other choice within a system like that and that creates its own issues within the ministry.

I see him as a bit naive more than anything.

And I think, you know, you've been kind of hinting at this, like, yeah, it was a little bit too accommodating and it was too much of people just coming to church to be affirmed.

I want to thank you gentlemen for coming on the show to talk about Robert Schuller and the Church Must Grow or Perish.

It is a very fascinating read and insight into such a major figure in mid 20th century America and how he impacted, affected American Christianity, especially American evangelicalism, and how the fruits of his ministry are still being realized today, both good and bad.

And.

And we can hopefully learn a lot either way from his ministry. But gentlemen, thank you for writing on this, writing this book, and I do recommend it to those that are out there.

I think it will be very beneficial for your library. So, gentlemen, thank you again for coming on ministry. Deep dive.

Thank you.

Thanks, Drogan.

Robert Schuler was not a bad man, but he was naive. His ministry shows us a gospel wrapped in the promise of the American dream.

Possibility, thinking, optimism, upward mobility, and it all was baptized in positive thinking. He offered affirmation and hope, but he did so often at the cost of formation, discipleship, and deep spiritual challenge.

And here's the warning for each one of us, because much of American Christianity today still carries those same assumptions. You may, you might even say to yourself, hey, what's wrong with any of those things? Nothing. Nothing is wrong with any of those by themselves.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have a different perspective. I'm not saying that we shouldn't think about the possibilities in front of us or have a prophetic imagination.

But I do think that we need to reconsider how market Christianity actually shapes our gospel expressions where they are.

Because, see, what happens is that he was chasing success, growth, visibility and cultural relevance to take on so much debt in order to build this church up that he often confused them with faithfulness. We have a tendency to measure impact by numbers, budgets and appearances rather than by transformation, character and spiritual depth.

The Idols before us today are so clear.

Success measured by applause and influence, relevance that smooths over the gospel, the Gospel's call to repentance, and just really a preoccupation with self where leaders are defined more by their charisma and their brand, not by Christlikeness and an affirmation more than valued, more than the challenge. And then lastly, an image that is elevated above the substance.

You know, these idols blind us to the real work of discipleship because we're so busy trying to keep up those other things that these other more important things that get lost. That's why I think we need to reconsider the metrics that we use to determine success or define success.

Some grace metrics, if you will, measures of ministry that focus not on visibility, growth or popularity, but on formation, transformation and faithful obedience. We have to ask ourselves three questions, really. For example, who is actually being transformed by our gospel or by the gospel that we present?

Secondly, where is grace actually reshaping hearts, relationships and communities?

And then thirdly, how is the Spirit building Christlike character in our leaders, in ourselves, I mean, and in our congregations Now, I think that there's a whole host more questions than that, but that's a good starting point. You know, grace metrics, and this is. Going to be the hard part for.

Many of us, is that they're slower, they're less flashy, and they're often invisible. They don't play well or they don't. They lack the oxygen to be able to breathe well in our performance driven environment or atmosphere.

But they are what lasts. See, they guide us to invest in depth over breadth, to value faithfulness over applause, and really to prioritize formation over performance.

The church that Jesus builds isn't a glass cathedral or big monuments or a media brand. Chances are those things fade away anyway.

But what we offer is something that's living messy and a spirit filled community of disciples, people being shaped into Christlike likeness in ways the world may not see. But we have to take great strength from knowing that God always does see.

That's the work before us and that's the call to confront the subtle idolatries all around us, embrace discipleship and let grace, not applause, define our ministries.

So as we rethink what faithfulness looks like, not through the lens of success or size, but through grace and formation, we are reminded that God's kingdom is far bigger than the American story. It stretches across cultures, languages and worldviews.

And next week, join me as we'll step outside our Western framework a little bit as I sit down with Dr. Timothy Tennant, professor of Beeson Seminary, to talk about Hinduism and global Christianity, not in the context of just doing missions, but here in the United States and how the Gospel meets the great religions of the world and how we can reach Hindus with the Gospel. You you won't want to miss it.

Thanks for joining us on today's episode of the Ministry Deep Dive, a podcast of Apollo's Water, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics. We hope it helps you thrive in your ministry and in today's culture. Let's keep the conversation going.

Check out our ministry@apolloswater.org and be sure to sign up for one of our ministry cohorts. Connect with others in the battle. We need one another. And remember, keep diving deep and as always, stay watered. Everybody.