Publicity-Shy Pastor Aims for Readers Outside Religion Market

It was not a familiar forum, for Chuck Swindoll--the Rev. Charles R. Swindoll--does not like to be interviewed.

Swindoll preaches to nearly 7,000 people every Sunday in California at his First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton. He talks to millions through “Insight for Living,” his daily religious broadcast on more than 700 radio stations across the country.

His 22 books have sold more than 10 million copies to date, and his latest literary effort, “Living Above the Level of Mediocrity,” published by Word Inc., began its existence this month with more than 370,000 pre-publication orders.

That is double the advance order received by Word in 1985 for “Be-Happy Attitudes,” which became a best seller in the general market for author Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral fame.

Swindoll has had two or three books simultaneously on the Christian best-seller list year after year, so it was time to push for a wider readership for his newest work, the Waco, Tex.-based publisher decided.

Word was able to persuade Swindoll to come to the American Booksellers Assn. convention here last weekend--despite the minister’s aversion to anything smacking of “promotion.”

He talked only briefly at a private luncheon, however, and answered just four questions. One was about the PTL sex-and-money scandals--a subject he adamantly refused to discuss previously with reporters.

Swindoll said “what has happened grieves me” in reference to the uproar in the television ministries, specifically the fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

“When they go down,” Swindoll said, “we all go down. I am not one who stands in the wings and says, ‘Aha! When they go down, I go up.”’

On the other hand, Swindoll’s resistance to the lure of television has also served to protect him from the controversy swirling about many other preachers. “Isn’t it amazing,” he agreed, “that my convictions have helped me in this way?”

The silver-haired pastor, possessing a mellifluous voice that seems born for the pulpit, had a stuttering problem as an adolescent but overcame it with the help of a high school drama teacher, according to an aide.

Swindoll is known for a certain shyness that seems inconsistent with a persona so purposefully public. It is a reticence that helps explain his answer when asked why, with all his success, he has not tried to add to his influence with a TV ministry.

“Cynthia and I have had lots of talks about this,” Swindoll said, gesturing to his wife who serves as executive vice president of his Insight for Living organization and as his closest personal adviser.

But “the move from radio to television and from the pulpit to television is a massive one,” Swindoll said. “From the pulpit to radio is a very simple one. You take a microphone, and you leave it there, and no one ever sees it. No one notices it. It doesn’t make you self-conscious.”

Swindoll paused. “I don’t do well when I’m self-conscious,” he said. “You have to stage television. I hate staging things. . . . You have to look at the red light. I want to look at people.”

He seems a natural for the medium he has chosen to eschew. But Swindoll, quoting from British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, said: “ ‘It is doubtful that you can present an authentic message through an inauthentic medium.’ ”

Added Swindoll: “I think I can maintain an authenticity by not being on television.”

On the surface, Swindoll might be hard to distinguish from many other evangelical pastor-authors who also write self-improvement books and claim the Bible as an unerring source. And like them, his credentials as a religious conservative are undisputed: He referred in a recent Sunday evening sermon to Eve being created from Adam’s rib as a literally recorded act, not as part of a myth, and he will be a speaker here in September at a national conference organized by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.

Yet, Swindoll adds a certain breadth to his sermons and books with quotations from secular literature and history--a step some evangelical writers hesitate to take for fear of appearing to introduce “un-Christian” thoughts.

His emphasis on personal accountability also strikes a distinctive note in the wake of crises in the worlds of evangelism, politics and finance.

“I am concerned that there is a bit of a drift occurring,” Swindoll said. “In fact, I call this the age of laissez-faire .”

Swindoll said he has for “10, maybe more” years relied on a kind of ad hoc committee of three close male friends, “carefully chosen confidants,” who serve as his personal peer review board.

“These are men who can lean across your desk, and with white knuckles say, ‘Where and how and why,’ ” Swindoll said.

Sometimes the four friends gather to discuss personal problems or major issues confronting them, Swindoll said. Other times they talk privately, separately, and about matters of both mutual and individual concern. None of these friends is in his own profession, Swindoll said, and he would not reveal their occupations.

Swindoll said that in studying the lives of “people who once were great, but who have failed financially, or whatever,” he found that “in every case, not one of them had someone to whom they were accountable. They were lone rangers.”

One strong Swindoll characteristic is a kind of boundless energy, a sense of apparent indefatigability. So much so that he seldom sleeps more than four hours. “I don’t know why,” he confessed.

From across the table, Swindoll’s wife shot him a glance that was not entirely adoring as he disclosed that “I can easily go to bed at midnight and wake up at 4 a.m. with no alarm.” Said Swindoll: “I do not have a lot of patience with people who take three hours to wake up. . . . “

Said Cynthia Swindoll, smiling now: “Amen.”

A former Marine, Swindoll admits to a certain “Marine-like” rigidity in his theological interpretations. But with no sense of contradiction at all, he preaches a firm sense of individuality as well.

“Know who you are. Like who you are. Be who you are,” Swindoll counseled.

“Those are simple rules,” he said. “It’s taken me 53 years, soon, to put them together.”

Describing the new volume, he also summarized the major pillar of his philosophy.

“This has to do with character, with making decisions within one’s own life,” Swindoll said. “That is, standing the test, whether anyone in your office or your neighborhood agrees with you.”

In a chapter called “Slaying the Dragon of Traditionalism,” Swindoll quotes not only from Scripture, but also from ee cummings: “. . . to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

But while he advocates “doing everything you do to full board,” Swindoll conceded that sometimes even he marvels at the outcome.

“When I go to watch the Lakers beat the Celtics, I yell with all my heart,” Swindoll said. Then, driving home, “I wonder why in the world did I make such an ass of myself?”

Said Swindoll, “I really am encouraging people to work harder than the average, to do more than the status quo, to set your sights higher, to soar.”

Swindoll borrowed a thought from Albert Schweitzer: “ ‘We may not attain excellence, but we can pursue it.’ ” Said Swindoll: “That’s what this book is about.”

Lovingly, Swindoll picked up a copy of the book. “This is the closest thing a man can come to having a baby,” he said. “I am so pleased that this baby is born and is happy and healthy.”

Much of the book’s content is based on sermons he has delivered at First Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton. Congregants usually fill the 2,500-seat sanctuary, which can expand to 3,000 seats, for the two Sunday morning services. An average of nearly 2,000 attend the Sunday night service.

It is one of the few churches in which average attendance exceeds membership, which is 3,100, up from about 750 when Swindoll came as senior pastor in 1971. (“We don’t emphasize membership,” said Helen Peters, the pastor’s longtime secretary.)

Swindoll lamented at the luncheon here that evangelical Christian churches have long carried an image of “the ugly ducklings of Christendom.” Too often, he said, the Bible-preaching churches had the worst-looking buildings in town.

Such is not the case, however, with the church complex his congregation moved into in 1980. The sanctuary, seemingly wider than it is deep, has huge wood beams across its ceiling and a clean look of unpretentious prosperity. Sunday school classrooms, an amphitheater, a gymnasium and 12 acres of neatly kept grounds add to that impression.

“Once folks get past our formal name . . . and our frightening size, they usually find themselves helplessly hooked,” wrote Swindoll in an earlier book, referring to the enthusiasm of worshipers and the work of more than a dozen ministers among 100 staff employees.

Swindoll’s denomination is not a major one: fewer than 150,000 members in about 1,000 churches. Headquartered in Minneapolis, the Evangelical Free Church of America was created in 1950 from a merger of Swedish and Norwegian branches.

But the denomination is also growing fast--at the rate of a little more than one new church a week for the last two years, according to Bob Peterson of Minneapolis, director of business affairs.

Peterson said Swindoll is active in denominational affairs, but Evangelical Free Church leaders have had no better luck recently than Swindoll’s publishers in getting him to sit for book-autographing parties at their Trinity College and Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to persuade him,” Peterson said.

After listening this year to proposals by Word Inc. for an author tour and for making his name better known, Swindoll told an executive later that he did not want to do it. “I might get to like it,” the executive said Swindoll explained.

Elizabeth Mehren reported from Washington and John Dart reported from Los Angeles.