Must the church grow or perish?
Are you at the stage of life where you start looking back? I’ve lived long enough now where I’ve seen lots of things happen—through personal experience and observation. Those of us who look back often try to craft a “mental model” that helps make sense of what we’ve observed and experienced. Those models often shift the older we get.
Reading helps me do that. I just read a biography that not only describes the life and work of a prominent individual during the last half of the 20th century but has helped me think more deeply about convictions I once held rather strongly but have come to reject. The book? The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity (Eerdmans, 2025) by Mark Mulder and Geraldo Marti. This title is part of Eerdmans' outstanding Library of Religious Biography, a series that explores the faith (or lack of faith) of prominent political and religious figures from Dwight Eisenhower to George Whitefield. I’ve probably read a dozen of these over the years and find them engaging, especially in helping grasp the religious life of the public figure in their personal and historical context. After reading this I realized just how much Robert Schuller influenced me without my even knowing it.
Drinking deeply in the well of pragmatism.
In 1975, I took a course titled “Principles and Practices of Church Growth taught by professor C. Peter Wagner (he of later NAR fame). The course met the world mission's requirement for my MA degree and I was happy to take a course that I thought at the time would be practical to future ministry. The “church growth movement” was riding high and pastors and students were drinking deeply in its well of pragmatism. Peter Wagner and Robert Schuller were its gurus, and everyone flocked to their seminars and institutes. What we “learned” included the following:
1. The Bible clearly taught that the church was meant to grow and that declining churches were not part of God’s will and purposes.
2. Church growth principles were flexible and could be applied in any theological, social, or cultural context. Whether your church was mainline Presbyterian, fundamentalist Baptist, or classic Pentecostal (or Advent Christian like mine)—these would work if you applied them properly. What one believed was not the point.
3. People liked to worship with and become Christians with people who were like them socially and culturally. They called this idea the “Homogeneous Unit Principle” (HUP), and it meant that evangelism and church planting must focus on creating congregations where people would be comfortable with folks like themselves.
Wagner and other church-growth advocates showed examples from the Bible that they thought affirmed this principle. Even more, they argued that the HUP was affirmed through countless observations in human history and the contemporary world. Their case appeared strong. And the best HUP practitioner was none other than Robert H. Schuller. And lots of folks, myself included, drunk the HUP Kool-Aid. (It’s something I now regret.)
That sets the table for this fascinating book. The only child of a northern Iowa Calvinist farm family, Robert Schuller left home for college and seminary at two schools sponsored by the Reformed Church of America. He met and married his wife, Arvella, and after a five-year pastorate in suburban Chicago, the RCA sent the Schuller's’ to Orange County, CA to plant an RCA congregation where few RCA congregations existed.
Not your typical Calvinist.
Robert Schuller was not the typical Calvinist RCA pastor. Toward the end of his studies at Western Theological Seminary (in Holland, MI), one of Schuller’s preaching professors sent Robert and the entire class to Marble Collegiate Church in New York City where they heard the renown positive thinker and preacher Norman Vincent Peale. Marble Collegiate was an RCA congregation and Peale was its pastor. But for Schuller’s professors, Peale was the example of how not to preach. In the pulpit, Peale was not textual and he was not theological. Instead, he spoke to what would later be termed as “felt needs,” and his words mirrored what was called “New Thought,” the kind of positive thinking where a person could simply will things into being through their words and their actions. Years later, New Thought would shape Pentecostal movements like the Prosperity Gospel and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), and various New Age movements like Erhard Seminars Training (EST).
If Schuller’s professors thought hearing Peale would inoculate him from all of this, they would be sorely disappointed. Instead, Peale deeply affected Schuller, especially when they were combined with intuitions that young Robert developed as he began in Garden Grove. First, Schuller believed that American Protestant Christianity was in deep trouble and that many congregations were doomed unless they engaged the challenges and changes of post-World War II America. Churches must move beyond theological arguments and stuffy traditions and engage the dynamism of America and the expanding American middle class. People were asking different questions and churches needed a different language to engage them with the Christian faith.
Second, the market economy with its emphasis on media advertising powerfully emerged in mid-20th century America. New York City and Los Angeles became twin axis of mass media and ahead of almost everyone else in American Christianity, Schuller grasped how to capture advertising and mass media to further his projects like Garden Grove Community Church and his Hour of Power broadcast. His marketing chops made large buildings like the muti-million-dollar Crystal Cathedral possible, given that the cost was beyond the ability of even a wealthy congregation like Garden Grove Community Church to finance. Early on in Garden Grove, Schuller crafted a style of ministry that, according to Muldur and Marti, “assumed the challenges and worries of people, as well as their dreams and opportunities, as catalyzed by the disruptions and uncertainties of market society” (23). That market society shaped the cultural world in which many post-WW II southern California individuals lived.
Schuller embraced the principles of market-driven society; he integrated them with church-growth teachings that I described above from Donald McGavran and Peter Wagner, both of whom taught at Fuller Seminary in nearby Pasadena. “Schuller built his reputation as an expert on church growth techniques and played a pivotal role in catalyzing the evolution of the church growth movement (CGM) into strategies that helped assure a church’s success in a changing marketplace” (30). And that success was grounded in the Homogeneous Unit Principle, especially as church growth experts “began to think of white, middle-class suburbanites as an anthropologically cohesive ‘tribe’” (30). Coming in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, this idea provided a different logic for congregations segregated by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Evangelical (and to a lesser degree Mainline) Christianity in America could remain monocultural at the congregational level. “Separate but equal” could once again thrive.
Collapse.
Robert Schuller and the church he established often lived on the edge. During multiple building programs, the congregation often experienced financial emergencies. Yet with completion of the Crystal Cathedral, those appeared to be in the rear-view mirror. Broadcasts of the Hour of Power were pretty much supported by the viewing audience. The Cathedral itself generated revenue beyond the congregation, although they experienced some rough waters with the State of California over their non-profit status. Schuller himself was a Reagan conservative, and that reflected the ethos of his southern California base. (Muldur and Marti recount a humorous incident related to the Jesus people in hippie dress, and Schuller’s consternation that they might show up at his congregation.)
Sadly, this story ends with collapse because Robert Schuller went to the well one too many times. In the late 1990s, he decided that another building project was necessary for the visibility of the congregation both locally and nationally. Hence a $30 million “welcome center” that would serve the many visitors coming to the campus from across the country. This time, however, fund raising stalled in the aftermath of 9/11. The building was finished, but the church was left with a $20 million debt and no easy way to pay it off. Robert Schuller formally retired from the pulpit in 2007. The 2008-09 Great Recession left the congregation struggling. First, the Hour of Power broadcast ceased production. Then giving and fundraising decreased dramatically. And a nasty succession fight broke out within the Schuller family. Soon it was over, and the Crystal Cathedral campus was sold to the Roman Catholic diocese of Orange County.
Muldur and Marti demonstrate and critique Robert Schuller’s integration of ministry with business and marketing practices. “He forcefully advocated that church growth should look like and borrow from the best practices of business, including the entertainment industry. Indeed, he insisted the future of the Christian church required these adaptations” (35). In that sense, Schuller was indeed “ahead of his time.” However, is this simply a way to, in the words of cultural critic Jesse Curtis “an in-your-face invitation to treat religion as another consumer good in the modern capitalist economy” (35). Looking at evangelical culture a quarter of the way through the 21st century, American evangelicalism appears to have lost far more than it has gained by surrendering to the political and economic illusions championed by Robert Schuller, Peter Wagner, and the church growth movement.
Robert J. Mayer served the Advent Christian Church for 15 years as director of publications. After his work at the Advent Christian General Conference, he worked for 24 years as a librarian at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His dissertation was published in 2017 as Adventism Confronts Modernity: An Account of the Advent Christian Controversy over the Bible’s Inspiration (Pickwick Press).