Schuller’s ‘Journey’ an Engaging Autobiography of Pulpit ‘Therapist’

The world of televangelism is stained by audacity, bad taste and greed. Then there are the harder-to-pin figures like Robert Schuller.

The bubbly, respected preacher--a socially conscious optimist who has held court with presidents and foreign leaders--is about as controversial as a beagle puppy. Yet even Schuller has taken his lumps, particularly for building the impressive and expensive Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.

In his autobiography, “My Journey,” Schuller discusses his odyssey from poor Iowa farm to pioneer of the mega-church movement to building the gleaming cathedral, which opened in 1980. He talks about his beginnings in California at a drive-in church--”a pit of passions,” some pastors said. He recalls the birth of “Hour of Power,” his weekly televised ministry that now reaches about 30 million people worldwide. And he defends the cost of the $20-million cathedral against complaints that it took money that could have gone to the poor.

“My Journey” is an engaging read, though less for its spiritual insights than the narrative of obstacles, conflicts and controversies that marked a poor farm boy’s rise to a televangelism giant. At times, it is deeply visceral and touching, as when Schuller discusses the death of his parents, and the grisly accident that cost a daughter one of her legs.

Schuller falters when he tries too hard to create drama, as in the beginning, when he recounts the date of his birth by writing about his parents in the third person. The flood that raged that day around Tony and Jennie in Sioux County, Iowa, seems almost Biblical.

“Minutes later, Jennie makes a final shriek,” he writes. “With Dr. Gleysteen’s assistance, and as Tony watches, I come into the world, in the middle of a storm and on the edge of my first tomorrow.”

What follows is a good read, if only at times as a chronicle of farm life in deeply conservative Sioux County. Raised in a poor Dutch American family, young Robert was a dreamer, a lazybones and not much of a farmer. He still has a cleft in his chin from being kicked by a horse.

“I didn’t mean to hate the smell of the barn or the squish of a cow pie in the pasture,” he writes with good humor. “I didn’t choose to be an out-of-place farmer’s son. I just was.”

His future as a preacher was sealed when his uncle, Henry Beltman, visited the farm. A Dutch Reformed preacher in China, Beltman patted the verbose and excitable Robert on his head and declared: “You will be a preacher when you grow up!”

Up to then, young Schuller had dreamed of being a preacher because the preacher was the most impressive and respected person in town. His uncle’s visit struck a more personal chord.

“I study his stately manners and his gentle and likable ways, and I decide that I’m looking at my future--face to face,” Schuller writes.

Twenty years later, in the 1950s, Schuller was ordained by the Reformed Church in America. The church developed from Dutch settlements during the 17th century in New York, but Midwestern communities such as Sioux County featured a much more conservative brand than older communities in the East Coast. “Gosh,” “darn” and “golly” were considered profanity in Sioux County, and dancing was a sin. “It was very clear what was allowed and what wasn’t allowed in Sioux County,” Schuller writes.

As a seminarian, Schuller studied a book that would greatly affect his style as a preacher: Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

“I realized that every sermon I preached . . . should be designed not to ‘teach’ or ‘convert’ people but rather to encourage them, to give them a lift,” he writes. “I decided to adopt the spirit, style, strategy and substance of a ‘therapist’ in the pulpit.”

Soon after he came to California, Schuller realized that ministering exclusively to other Dutch Reformed would put a crimp on the size of his flock.

“There were millions of Presbyterians in the United States, but only 200,000 Dutch Reformed,” he writes. “I’ll be lucky if I can find six people from my denomination living here, I thought. . . . Then I had my ‘revelation,’ which would be a revolution in new-church development: Bob, this town doesn’t need a Reformed Church. What it needs is a positive-thinking mission that will meet the needs of the people here who don’t go to any church!”

Thus was born Schuller’s one-shoe-fits-all ministry. By the time he came to California from a Chicago church in the early 1950s, he already had picked up bold ideas about religious architecture. “Art--not money--must have the last word,” architect Benjamin Franklin Olson told Schuller in Illinois after the preacher sought help to build a new sanctuary.

But the various construction projects that eventually led to the Crystal Cathedral--which touted “biorealism” with its attempted synergy with nature--required monumental and repeated fund-raising. Critics abounded. Students protested his visits.

“There were those who believed--and still are those who believe--that fountains, waterfalls, magnificent flower gardens, and sweeping lawns were extravagant, a waste of money,” Schuller writes. “But money isn’t the issue. It never is. The issue is the well-being of the human psyche and the human soul. Nature is a beautiful gift of God.”

True believers are more likely to be drawn to this story than secular readers. “My Journey” is at its best when Schuller spends less time crediting God and more time explaining the decisions that charted his journey from Sioux County to Orange County.