Schuller to Air Message on Sunday : Recovery: The minister uses the videotaped address to thank his congregants and tell them that he hopes to resume his work at the Crystal Cathedral within a month.

In a videotaped address, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller thanks his followers for keeping him alive with their prayers after his brain surgery and says he hopes to return to the Crystal Cathedral’s pulpit within a month.

The four-minute message, previewed Thursday for the news media, will be shown to congregants Sunday and broadcast on Schuller’s syndicated “Hour of Power” television show. It will be his first address since brain surgeries in Amsterdam on Sept. 2 and 10 to repair blood clots that formed after the famous preacher bumped his head.

Sitting in a white rattan chair at home in Orange, the casually clad Schuller lifted his blue baseball cap and smiled, showing the thin film of silver fuzz where his trademark shock of hair used to be.

“I just want to tell you I’m home,” Schuller said in the tape, which was recorded Monday. “I’m here in my own garden, smelling the flowers, waiting for my hair to grow back, and in about three, four weeks, I hope, I’ll be back in the pulpit sharing with you exciting messages from my new book.”

Noting with a laugh that his medical travails “must have made some news in America,” Schuller said his congregants’ prayers sustained him.

“All of my wonderful friends, like you, prayed for me,” he said on the tape. “And I can’t begin to thank you enough . . . I, ah, kinda feel I’m alive because of them.”

Schuller’s aide, Michael Nason, said the reverend is recovering nicely at home, avoiding strenuous activity. He even attended drive-in church services Sunday and went to the Rams game, Nason said.

For the first couple of weeks after his surgery, Schuller was a little slow at selecting his words, but he has regained command through neurological therapy, Nason said.

Schuller made the tape because he felt that it was time for him to address the congregation, Nason said.

“It’s been a month (since the surgery), and people are apprehensive about his recovery,” Nason said.

Schuller recounted for his faithful how the accident happened. He was “running too fast,” he said, when he “ducked into the car in too big a hurry and clonged my head” on the door of the car that had driven him around Amsterdam.

Suffering from a “fierce headache” a while later, he requested and took some aspirin, then “passed out,” Schuller said. He said he remembers waking up in a hospital with a shaved head.

“I’m told that it was actually a close call,” he said.

Nason said he will leave Saturday to complete Schuller’s scheduled business in the Soviet Union, arranging to air “The Hour of Power” on Soviet-run television and on independent channels in the republics.