Schuller Will Finally Travel to Russia : Religion: Crystal Cathedral pastor canceled trip last fall after undergoing brain surgery. He plans to sign television contract while there.

The Rev. Robert H. Schuller, pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, will depart Sunday for Europe and Russia to complete a trip that was interrupted last fall when he suffered a head injury.

When he arrives in Moscow on Friday, Schuller plans to sign a one-year television contract with Russian officials for his weekly “Hour of Power” program to be broadcast by the nation’s largest television station to the people of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Aides said Schuller will reach an estimated 10 million viewers weekly.

“I am really excited about this,” Schuller said Friday in an interview, adding that the television contract “has 52 speeches that I can give. Not many people have that kind of a platform.

“The Russians are definitely spiritually hungry people.”

Television Channel 1 in Russia has been airing Schuller’s “Hour of Power” program Sunday mornings for the past eight weeks. Under the deal, the program will be edited to eliminate the phone-in requests and references to local and national issues, which are unfamiliar to viewers overseas.

“I would say that I would give them a message of hope--to give them the mental framework of hope and creativity, and with that the power to change,” he said.

While en route to Moscow last September, Schuller struck his head while entering a car in the Netherlands and underwent emergency brain surgery to remove a blood clot. He had to cancel a planned trip to Moscow to complete the television deal.

Schuller said he was the first Western minister to preach about God on Russian airwaves when he addressed them on Christmas Day in 1989. Since that time, he has spoken to the people of Russia and the former Soviet republics several times, but has not been given a regular weekly time slot.

Michael Nason, a Schuller aide who has made two trips to Moscow since last fall to negotiate the deal, said that Schuller’s ministry will pay about $5,000 per month for the costs of translation, dubbing and broadcast of the program.

Schuller and his wife will arrive in Amsterdam on Monday where he will meet with ministry officials in Europe and visit the surgeon who removed Schuller’s blood clot. He will also stop in Germany and Sweden before continuing to Russia. Before returning June 5 to the States, he will visit Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.