Apostle of Sunny Thoughts

By Richard Stengel

Fountains spurt. Birds chirp. Organ music swells. The camera pans slowly upward, revealing a white cross against an azure sky. No television director could ask for a more inspirational opening. When the blue-robed, silver-haired Rev. Robert Schuller appears, there is no doubt about it: the star has arrived. Schuller stares directly at the camera, slices the air with crisp gestures and modulates his powerful voice from a basso profundo to an ingratiating whisper. His arena, the $18 million Crystal Cathedral (two freeway exits south of Disneyland), is, with its mirrored skin and soaring see-through interior, an extension of Schuller's flamboyant style and eternally sunny message.

Schuller, 58, a self-described retailer of religion and apostle of possibility thinking, is probably the most conspicuous and certainly one of the most con troversial religious figures in American Protestantism. His syndicated Sunday morning TV service, The Hour of Power, reaches an audience of almost 3 million, placing him among the nation's top-rated televangelists. He is the author of two recent best sellers, Tough-Minded Faith for Tender- Hearted People and Tough Times Don't Last, but Tough People Do!, as well as 19 other books. In his latest, The Power of Being Debt Free, published last month, Schuller applies his positive-thinking principles to no less a task than eliminating the national debt.

"Religious history books will be talking about Schuller 100 years from now," contends Religious Historian Dennis Voskuil. The question, Voskuil says, is whether he will be remembered as a theologian or a showman. Like his early model, Positive Thinker Norman Vincent Peale, Schuller combines an affirmative outlook with old-fashioned piety to assure his audiences that self-esteem and success are desirable and achievable. During an hour that sometimes resembles a celebrity talk show, Schuller speaks earnestly of the abiding desire for self-worth, of "every person's deepest need--one's spiritual hunger for glory." Schuller attempts to assuage this emotional hunger with a smorgasbord of rhyming slogans: "There's no gain without pain"; "It takes guts to leave the ruts." For Schuller, an acknowledgment of self-worth, more than a confession of sinfulness, is the path to God. Says he: "We can replace inferiority complexes with a new self-image, one with divine roots. God is my Father; I am somebody!"

For a long time, Schuller confesses, he harbored doubts about his own self- worth. Born in Iowa to a devout, hardscrabble farm family, he resolved early on to be a preacher. After seven years of study at Hope College and Western Theological Seminary, both in Holland, Mich., he was ordained in the Reformed Church in America in 1950. Five years later he went to Garden Grove, Calif., to set up a new ministry. Schuller's fledgling show-biz instincts led him to begin preaching from the roof of a rented drive-in theater's concession stand. Within four years he had attracted enough people and money to purchase a two- acre plot for a small church building. In 1966 Schuller broke ground for his 13-story Tower of Hope, an office building from which he started his telecasts in 1970. Next came the extraordinary 128-ft.-high and 415-ft.-long Crystal Cathedral, designed by the distinguished architectural team of Philip Johnson and John Burgee and completed in 1980.

Today Schuller presides over an ecclesiastical empire. In 1982 his 10,000member congregation contributed $4 million, and his TV audience mailed in $30 million, which helped support a staff of 400. His slickly made TV programs cost $8 million annually. Schuller has stopped accepting a salary, living well off his publishing income and $15,000-a-shot lecture fees.

Schuller's sunny world is not without a few darkling clouds. Last December California billed Schuller $475,185 for unpaid taxes, citing such profit- making uses of the building as music concerts, aerobic dance classes and a Ticketron outlet. According to William Underwood, president of Robert Schuller Ministries, the state has since refunded $247,922 of the original assessment.

Schuller's critics complain about both his method and his message. Conservative theologians maintain that he is mass-marketing an ersatz, individual-centered gospel that glosses over the troublesome doctrine of sin. Mainstream clergy are disturbed by Schuller's zealous push for conversion and his carnival-barker style. "His success-oriented message," says Congregationalist Browne Barr, former dean of the San Francisco Presbyterian Seminary, "is a happy optimism; it sells nicely, but it is just very shallow."

Says Schuller: "I'm trying to be a source of emotional nourishment to people." People, he adds, who would ordinarily have nothing to do with a church. As a salesman, Schuller has few peers. Praising his marketing savvy, Barr says, "Most churches are having difficulty attracting new members, so what Schuller has done cannot be overlooked."

Neither can his sincerity and his piety. But Voskuil and others suggest that his focus on the self leads to a kind of religious narcissism. In his moments of introspection, the once self-doubting Schuller may half agree that there is something to the charge. Says he: "The old cliche is that you can tell a minister's sins by what he's preaching against, and I guess that applies to me."

With reporting by William Blaylock/Garden Grove