Mulder NOPE

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Sam.

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Sa.

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?

I'm sure Mark has a thought.

Yeah. So 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 things 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.

It 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.

Reading the book was a bit eye opening. I mean, we all read with our own lenses.

And I was reading the book and I went away on one level a bit validated just because of some of the things that we've been critiquing that like when we look at culture, we have a principle we call the affirm. And the challenge principle.

It says the gospel affirms something in every culture, but it also has to challenge the idolatries that are implicit within any. In any given location and within a certain people.

It seemed, however, that what he did is he affirmed so much and he was challenging certain things like the. All the negativity and the bad parts. But at the same time, it seemed that he adapted certain kinds of cultural idolatries and baptized them.

Going into debt the way that he did. The marketing techniques in that.

It's not wrong to make a church known having served as a pastor in different sized churches for a long period of time. I've seen churches that then will dictate their theology based on the market of what people want rather than what they need.

It seemed that Schuller did a lot of that. So there was implicit within it some. It was like a Trojan horse and it carried its own demise in it. Would that be a fair assessment?

Well, I think that there's a lot there. Go ahead, Mark.

Go ahead, Geraldo.

Well, I think that there's a lot.

You're just bringing up a lot of things because I think from our part, what I'm careful of is in hindsight, there are things that we can say in the process. I think that there's a sense in which he was creating communities out of strangers.

And so, yes, you had a big campus with art that he wanted to incorporate so that it wasn't just the sterile place, but the people were to have a more holistic experience of whatever spiritual life would be and to be able to create enough meeting rooms so that people or coming from different places and having different needs would be able to meet people like themselves.

And when you see the impressive list of affinity groups that they created, you know, it's like you could say, okay, but this is a place where I can meet people who are like me and could help me. That's the kind of community in that sense, he wasn't satisfied with people just sitting through the sermon.

He was actually asking for people to be a part of communities that they could actually work and share and care about each other. And I think that that's, you know, that's commendable. And I think most of our churches are built that way.

If our churches are small, it's because it's built on one or two affinity groups. If they're large, it's because we figured out that we have several affinity groups.

The other thing I think to acknowledge is that with every culture comes new tools, new possibilities.

And I think that Schuller was trying to say, okay, we now have to come to terms with the fact that social change is happening, that it's so fast and it's just running ahead of us, that we've got to do whatever we can to bend with the culture. And I realize that some people think that that means we're following culture. I would say the church has always had to deal with culture.

We can always look at culture throughout all of church history and be able to point to the ways in which they have accommodated to culture at different points in times. And if we might like particular religious orientations more than others, usually it's because they froze in time at a particular moment.

And what Schuller said was, I'm going to try to keep up with what's going on and manage it. And what I'm also going to do is I'm going to recognize that people are dealing with a changing culture.

And so how do we preach and minister to people who are experiencing their own disruptions, their own dislocations in a market economy at the same time that he pastored on the same principles? So it's interesting that in a sense, his. His people, the people that he.

That he preached to and ministered to, were subject to the logics that we're talking about. At the same time, he pastored on the basis of the same logics. And I think that's the irony that lies at the heart of Schuller's ministry.

The other part that I was surprised at is. I mean, he grew. All the churches grew when he, when he came out there, he just did it better than others.

As you said, he gathered affinity groups and he was managing to transcend the racial dimensions that denominations informed in which I thought was very interesting. The thing that I was very much saddened by was they didn't have a missions focus. At least that's not what I mean.

It was all in house, but at the same time locally embedded, like he was taking care of the needs of the community. But it doesn't seem like his theology translated outside of that particular place. Like you said, constituency contextualization is a big part of it.

And I would say that there was a contextualization, but there was almost a.

It.

It worked for a time, but it, as you said, the culture shifted because that it basically was aimed at white mobile, Mid America, that when that went away, it all kind of imploded. Plus the circumstance of what was going on in culture at that time. But he, he didn't seem to have any heart for missions at all. There was no idea of.

Of proselytization going outside of that. Would that be correct in assuming that, or did he just look at the radio, at the television show to do that?

Well, I think the television show Hour of Power was a big part of that because he actually thought Hour of Power should not be anybody's church. Right. That was a come on.

And to make Christianity attractive to you enough that you would actually go to a local congregation, or if you were out on vacation to Disneyland, you would pop in to the Crystal Cathedral just because of the spectacle of it and then be intrigued by Christianity enough to return home. So I think he did see especially Hour of Power and just the magnificence of the Crystal Cathedral as a form of evangelization. Right.

And I should say, if you think about what the business that occurred in the Tower of Hope, which at one time was the tallest building in Orange County, Right. There was a suicide hotline, one of the first that was hosted by a church. And so that. That's a form of missions. And they did.

Do I know that they were supporting an orphanage in Mexico. And so there were things that they were doing outside of. Of just Orange County.

It's it.

This is a tricky thing because we're dealing with a little bit of hypotheticals here, but I would say that I am guessing that had Shuler's church decided to be aggressive about missions, we would be critiquing their colonial attitude in what they sought to do. So I think it's a little tricky that he, he did have and was full of the kinds of things that he did.

But having that number one certificate of this, of having the hour of power in the Soviet Union was for him a big, big deal. And it was something that nobody else had accomplished, that he had somehow been able to.

To cross into what for many years was deemed to be the godless enemy.

And so for him to be able to have a strong foothold in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, I guess, and then to have relationships with Mikhail Gorbachev, who became a guest on the program, I think he believed that he was making an international difference. So we have a lot of different ways we can sort of measure this, and there's plenty of room for critique.

So I'm not trying to be an apologist, but what I am saying is that to understand what happened as it happened gives you a sense of the remarkable reach that he was able to give for the message of the gospel. And I think that that is commendable in and of itself.

Do you think, though, that it was the gospel at that moment in time? Like, that's the, that's the difficult part. Like reading him this gospel self esteem. And it becomes down to the perspective.

What part do you want to emphasize? What part do you not. Because reading it, you don't really. At least not what I've gathered. And I'm not again, I'm not any Schuler scholar.

While he seemed to have formed classic orthodoxy and categories, it didn't seem. That's what people came to. It became this gospel of self esteem, a therapeutic gospel, something else entirely.

In the process, while he affirmed one thing classically that didn't seem to be what had come out. And feel free to correct me there, would that. I mean, how do you respond to that?

Go ahead, Gerardo.

Well, I was going to start with the. The moment that we have in the book talking about his experience on White Horse Inn, which was a very famous. Right.

Michael Horton gets, goes really at him like he full on attacks him.

And Schuller is caught a bit unaware because he came on the program to talk about Reformed theology, which Schuller feels like he was very consistent with Reformed theology, but he did not know Horton and he was not prepared for the kinds of things that Horton was going to say, nor Horton's callers, the people who he abruptly put on the phone. This, this I record, I wrote this little portion for, for our book because I was so fascinated. But the audio is still available.

You can find it online.

And the thing about it is that Schuller makes it clear that he feels that there is a message that is given in public at the big service for guests, and that is not necessarily the same as the depth and breadth of the faith that is given to those who are already committed and on the inside. And so we can critique Schuller, and Horton certainly does, and others, because Horton says we got to tell them right away they're going to hell.

We got to tell them right away that there are consequences to their disbelief, you know, those kinds of things. And Schuller's like, we don't have to say everything.

And what I think Schuller means is we can craft a message to help introduce people to things so that they can understand them. And then once they are in a community and in an atmosphere, then we can go into greater depth, helping people to understand what the faith is.

So I don't think from things like that that we can measure Schuller's full gospel or what he intends by the full gospel only from what you hear on a 30 minute, you know, abridged Hour of Power program being beamed across Europe, because he is saying, we have to bring people in, we have to drag people. And. And he interpreted that in a particular way for the culture at the moment, but quizzed on a one on one basis.

He would affirm every single point from the Westminster Confession. He would affirm every point that is, that we would say is quote, unquote, the proper gospel.

And so what Schuler refused to do is to be caught up in doctrinal correctness in order to appease these highly conservative, you know, crossing your t dotting eyes kind of people because he wanted to reach people. And that's where it's difficult to assess.

But there are many people even today who are grateful for Schuller's ministry, because it was Schuler's ministry that introduced them, their family members, other people into what the gospel experience was. And so that's where we. We are playing a little bit now.

I'm not a theologian, but we're playing a little bit about how does God work, What is the best or appropriate message to give in order for people to be introduced in the right way.

When we know across Christian history there are a lot of different ways that Christianity has been brought or introduced that today we may call them heresies, but the fact of the matter is that in different ways, the movement of the church and the spirit of church has operated. And so we may sit in a particular place no, this is the only proper way.

But I do think that in our task of trying to expose his motivations, the understanding, the cultural and societal frameworks that he moved in and the surprise moves that he made, I think that's a fully appropriate things that then allows us to simmer and to think, okay, so what does that mean? And what does that mean for the church today? What does it mean for ministry today?

Yeah. What do you think, Mark? Any. Any more thoughts on that?

Yeah, so I. After writing two books on Schuler, and I'll just. I'll just maybe a little bit peek behind the curtain.

I think when Gerardo and I started this project, we thought there's going to be just kind of a critical takedown of, you know, and we are sociologists of religion. That's kind of what we do.

You know, I always think of, you know, Jerry Seinfeld, once he gets accused of being so jokey, and he says, well, I'm a comedian, and sometimes my wife says, why are you always so critical? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm an academic. That's what we do.

But anyway, 10 years with him, I'm more sympathetic to him because 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. And I think we're kind of.

I think what he saw himself doing was lowering the threshold to entry as low as possible. And then in turn, you could be discipled or formed in some other venue, hopefully your home church.

You know, I often think of when I teach my A class on church here at Calvin With a theologian.

And I think what Warren is really. It's a different manifestation of what Shuler was trying to do. But again, I think Schuler was. His biggest thing was his naivete.

That's a great response, Mark, by the way. I. I appreciate how Mark is talking. The warning, I think, is not to exchange one form of hubris to for another.

And I would be cautious before somehow feeling that we've got it right. When there's.

There's a certain amount of mystery of how God works in individuals and the way in which each person is attempting to tap into what is the proper respons of what the gospel work is required today. And I think I'm a little more on the side of the diversity rather than one singular way.

And in that sense, Schuller advocated for particular things, and he could be very insistent on particular things, but he was trying to empower people to be able to make decisions of what was best for their context.

And in doing so, I think that many people hungered for formulas, and he may have accommodated that for church leaders, but in another way, he just wanted people to be free to make decisions about what was best for their communities and. And in doing that, to be able to be more flexible and more responsive to whatever the needs may be.

You know, it's interesting reading the book and hearing you talk. It seems there's two different. Like now you feel much more of an apologist for him, and the book didn't come across that way. So I'm.

I'm trying to figure out how to navigate because he sounds like in many respects that's how he was. There's kind of the both and there's this idea of him.

Like you, you mentioned you didn't delve into the psychology, but there are aspects where you did, as he's trying to find his own affirmation, his own legitimacy. And it seems, though, that 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 Schuller is in it? 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. Of seeing. 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. It's a very sad ending. 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, you know, the place that he had built. They had to borrow it for the funeral service.

Yeah. Well, I'm still going back to your sense of being an apologist.

I suppose if somebody is wildly positive about Schuller, I would make sure and point out some things that they may not know. But, but to those who may feel.

And I think I'm sensitive to the critique that Schuller knew about himself, that he was critiqued nearly all of his ministry, and I think that they were shallow critiques. And, and I came away with a lot of empathy for this man when I came to the end.

You know, I just, I feel for him, and so I don't want to be an apologist for him necessarily, but I do think that he was a person who operated with as. As much integrity as we could expect from a person in his position.

And he did the best he could with what he did, but 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 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 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.

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 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.

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, you know, 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 that Schuller's, what we might call Schuler's 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.

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 jewelryism.

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 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 Brian Burgess 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 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 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, 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 unconscious idolatries that we have assumed over time and how are they contributing to the social acceleration?

Harmut Rose's idea And what does the gospel then challenge within a given culture in order to call us back to that 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 not going to church anymore and 26 higher level Christian institutions closing or merging since COVID something's going on. And so we've been analyzing and this is why we're looking at Christian Smith and your data too. Can we extricate warning principles?

What are the good that came from and some of the things that Schuler 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.

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. 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. And Schuler's model. Right. And it's easy, it's easy to get swept up in the performance.

You know, when you as Gerardo said, when you know that there's a chance that, you know, people outside the church are going to watch my sermon.

Yeah.

How. 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 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. I can't help but think that's going to have some effect.

You might not be conscious of it, 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 Schuller 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 so I think that we. 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.

So we always end the show with a little water bottle.

You've given us a bit of one something for them to think about, to nourish on what is a concluding water bottle from each of you about from your work and what you've noticed on Schuler's life that they can take and be nourished on in the week ahead.

Well, I one thing in our polarized time, one thing I think about Schuller is how he I don't think he was he's a pretty conservative guy. But, you know, his, his longtime executive assistant he hired away from creep, the Committee to Reelect the President, a Nixon back in the 70s.

But he also sat next to Hillary Rodham Clinton at State of the Union addresses and was friends with Clint. He was truly a whole used, you know, church is political. It's a political or, you know, entity.

I guess my thought is Schuller was not sure whether the church was going to last.

But I think that there's another part of Schuller's conviction that he felt that the church would indeed last, but that we wouldn't be able to fully anticipate its form. And he was bold in reimagining a different form for the church for whatever it would look like.

And I'm very attracted to, to saying the church is here. I think I still carry a pretty strong ecclesiology overall, but we cannot fully anticipate what the church will look like.

And so being able to embrace and actualize a variety of different forms for what the church could look like, I think is part of allowing for the freshness and unanticipated moves of the Spirit as it moves forward. So I'd say let's all be a part of that.

Well, 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 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.