Son Born to the Pulpit Grows in It

“Isn’t it wonderful,” the Rev. Robert Harold Schuller asked on a recent Sunday broadcast of his “Hour of Power” TV program, “to see a son come along and take over a father’s work?”

On this particular occasion the Garden Grove evangelist, speaking from the pulpit of the $20-million Crystal Cathedral, was referring to the medical Menninger family of Topeka, Kan., but he might have been talking about his own son, Robert Anthony Schuller.

Widely viewed as his father’s heir apparent, Robert A. Schuller, 33, is in many ways following in the footsteps of the founder of “possibility thinking.”

Robert A., a board member of Robert Schuller Ministries and founding pastor of Rancho Capistrano Community Church near San Juan Capistrano, reads Scriptures regularly on “The Hour of Power” and for several Sundays during the summer fills in for his father in the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral.

Over the years he has edited two of his father’s books and written three of his own--which quote his father extensively. His most recent book, “The Power to Grow Beyond Yourself,” has put him on the road on a national book tour, sometimes crossing paths with his father on talk shows.

The younger Schuller said he prefers to say that so far in his career he has “walked next to my father and not in his footsteps,” and he insisted he is in no hurry to take over his father’s ministry at Crystal Cathedral.

“I’m not holding my breath,” he said in a recent interview. “I don’t anticipate my father leaving the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral until he’s 100.”

He pointed out that the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, the best-selling author, broadcast minister and fellow member of the Reform Church of America, is still active at the age of 89.

Regardless of the timetable, the parallel footprints of the two Schullers are plain.

“I can always remember wanting to go into the ministry,” said Robert A., who was born in Illinois and raised in Southern California.

“My father always included me in his ministry,” he said. In the early years of the ministry he opened the mail, accompanied his father on hospital visits and planted trees in front of the first permanent drive-in church in Garden Grove.

“It’s like I’ve grown up in the ministry,” he said.

Became a Wrestler

As he retells it, his boyhood was “typical” but not perfect.

Each summer Robert A. returned with his sisters to the Schuller family homestead in Iowa for vacations with their country cousins. He got through Santa Ana High School “without cracking a book” and, as a result, was “barely able to read.”

There were other problems. As he recalled in one of his books, “I was always the last one chosen for sports teams because I was built like a pear and was therefore an ungainly athlete.”

Even then a “possibility thinker,” he took up weightlifting to shape up, going on to become a varsity wrestler.

After singing in the choir of the Crystal Cathedral, the younger Schuller attended Hope College in Holland, Mich., his father’s alma mater and, following graduation from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, he too was ordained in the Reform Church in America.

Six months after his graduation, Robert A. followed up a student internship at the Crystal Cathedral with an appointment as minister of evangelism at his father’s church.

But then, Robert A. Schuller decided to get off the fast--and safe--track to the pulpit of the Crystal Cathedral, eschewing the easiest path to success.

In his latest book, Robert A. said: “I felt I wasn’t challenged enough. I hadn’t started with nothing, as Dad had done. My ministry had been generously handed to me. I had a plush office on the 11th floor of the Tower of Hope, but where could I go from there? I had it made, but I had made none of it myself.”

So in the spring of 1981, with practically no warning, Robert A. told the board of the Crystal Cathedral that “I feel that God is leading me to start a new ministry--someplace, somewhere, sometime, somehow. I do not know when . . . I just know that God is leading me to start a new church,” according to his book.

After leaving the room to regain his composure, Robert A. returned to the board meeting and said: “I want to be a great preacher. I don’t believe I’ll ever be able to be the man God wants me to be unless I stretch myself to grow. I’ve been praying a long time, and I really believe God wants me to get out and start my own church from scratch the way Dad did.”

In his new endeavor, the younger Schuller did not exactly start from scratch.

He went first to John C. Crean, a wealthy recreational vehicle manufacturer who had been a major contributor to the construction of the Crystal Cathedral, and asked him for a piece of his picturesque property near San Juan Capistrano, called Rancho Capistrano, to found a church.

Crean turned him down, suggesting that he needed to prove himself, and further advised him to emulate his father’s fabled beginnings in 1955 atop the roof of the refreshment stand at the Orange Drive-in.

But the younger Schuller was blocked in his effort to hold Sunday services at the Mission Drive-in Theater in San Juan Capistrano by the City Council there, which thought that locating a church in a drive-in constituted an “inappropriate use” of the property and might create a traffic jam.

“I was out in the cold with no place to go,” Robert A. recalled in his book, “not even a drive-in.”

Instead, using the “Hour of Power” mailing list for southern Orange County as a contact point, he started a congregation that met initially in the gymnasium of Saddleback College.

Crean Relented

In the beginning, Robert A. wrote, people “came out of curiosity to see what Robert Schuller’s son was up to . . . many of them wondered if I would show promise to match my father’s charisma in the pulpit.”

After 16 months of services in various rented quarters, Crean relented and allowed Schuller to move his congregation--renamed Rancho Capistrano Community Church--to an old warehouse on 92 acres of land donated by Crean to Robert Schuller Ministries, the TV arm of the Schuller organization, for a renewal center.

A loan of $200,000 at 9% interest from The Inspiration Foundation, a part of the Crystal Cathedral, enabled him to convert the warehouse into an attractive church complex for the 400-member congregation, which now operates on an annual budget of less than $300,000.

At the same time, Schuller was also given the job of overseeing development of the entire Rancho Capistrano property, including 15 rooms for overnight guests and a small conference center, with plans to expand to more than 50 rooms.

He is also in charge of the Robert Schuller Ministries’ renewal centers in Michigan and on Maui.

According to information provided by the Crystal Cathedral, Robert A. Schuller’s total 1986 compensation from his own church and Robert Schuller Ministries, apart from book royalties, was more than $60,000. His wife, Donna, earned $19,000 from Robert Schuller Ministries for research work on “The Hour of Power.”

Father and son have a standing Saturday lunch date through most of the year. Robert A. acknowledged that he echoes his father in the content of his books and sermons. One sermon at Rancho Capistrano Community Church was entitled “Powerful Possibilities for Positive People,” encapsulating the titles of half of Robert H. Schuller’s books.

Each His Own Style

“We have a similar concept of life,” he said. He pointed out, however, that “I purposely do not listen to my dad preach so I do not subconsciously take up his style.”

And, he said, there are differences of style and substance. Some are superficial. Robert A. is taller and thinner than his father, and his life style is more reflective of southern Orange County than of Garden Grove. He drives a 1978 Porsche; his second wife drives a Mercedes. He traveled extensively throughout the world, courtesy of the ministry, before he was 30.

The most substantive difference between the two Schullers is that while Robert H. has been married to Arvella Schuller for 37 years, Robert A. divorced and remarried.

Robert A.’s divorce has had a major impact in his adult life. He told his side of failure in marriage in two books, “Getting Through the Going Through Stage” and “Power to Grow Beyond Yourself.” His former wife told hers in the Globe, a supermarket tabloid.

By contemporary standards, the details are tame--two people marrying young and growing apart, a forceful father-in-law--but the impact of the divorce on Robert A. after nine years of marriage and two children was devastating.

“My mother and father had taught me that divorce is unthinkable, that marriage is for keeps,” he wrote.

Today he said that the divorce “made me a better counselor” to those in similar situations.