Retailing Optimism

The cameras are in place. So is the Pan-Cake makeup. Cue the lights. Ready on the fountains. Action. "This is the day God has made," beams the Rev. Robert Schuller as he bounds toward the pulpit. A glass panel separating the walk-in sanctuary from the drive-in sanctuary lumbers open. As a dozen fountains spurt skyward, a collective sigh from 1,700 worshipers at Garden Grove Community Church in Southern California announces the start of another Hour of Power.

Aired in 45 major cities to an audience of 2.5 million, the Hour is rare among TV services in its appeal to the unchurched. Instead of theology, a Schuller sermon is packed with success stories, accented by alliterative slogans and an "I'm O.K.--you're O.K." philosophy. He calls it "possibility thinking" to distinguish it a bit from the "positive thinking" of his friend the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. Good Christians, Schuller intones, are "act-chievers" who "try-umph" over pessimism. "I don't trust skeptics, no matter how brilliant their words," he says. "I trust Jesus. He was the greatest possibility thinker that ever lived."

Shopping Center. To Schuller, "the church is in the business of retailing religion." If so, he is running one of the fastest-growing stores in the country. His 7,000-member congregation attracts 800 new members a year. He receives more than 10,000 letters each week from admirers, including Doris Day and Hubert Humphrey. The modern church, which he describes as "a 22-acre shopping center for Jesus Christ," is fast becoming a magnet for success-seeking clergymen. Schuller's biggest push for clerical recognition comes this week as he presides over a Convocation on Church Growth for 400 leaders from around the U.S.

Though Schuller decided to become a minister as a five-year-old Iowa farm boy, and was later ordained by the Reformed Church in America, his religion business did not take off till he arrived in California two decades ago. He had little more than a $500 grant from his denomination and a simple credo: "Find a need and fill it, find a hurt and heal it." The hurt, he reasoned, was greatest among agnostic transients flooding the West.

The need was a drive-in church to serve this mobile culture. So Schuller rented a drive-in theater near Disneyland. Using established retailing techniques, he rang 3,000 doorbells looking for customers, bought strategic land near a freeway, put in enough asphalt for 1,400 cars, and erected a 90-ft. cross on top of a 15-story Tower of Hope.

Schuller's accommodations for the suburban middle class and its cars keep his shopping center full. At the various Sunday services, a total of 2,200 children attend classes in the Tower, 4,400 adults pack the glass-walled sanctuary and another 1,600 sit outside bumper to bumper, listening in on car radios. Undoubtedly, many are tourists drawn by such attractions as the twelve fountains (one for each apostle), the crown of thorns plant, and the "still waters" reflecting ponds.

But most members, two-thirds of whom have had no prior church membership, come because of the wide-ranging community-service programs. When studies showed a high illiteracy rate in Orange County, the church started a reading class. Schuller began a separate ministry to singles after census reports established that they make up two-fifths of the region's population. A 24-hour-telephone crisis service handles 20,000 calls a year--a number of them from potential suicides. The budget for all church and TV operations is $4.8 million a year; Schuller's pay is $23,759.

A lithe 48-year-old who runs seven miles each morning, Schuller now aims to instill optimism in his fellow clergymen. Besides this week's conference, he runs other church leadership seminars at which clerical and lay leaders get massive doses of possibility thinking, together with cassettes of Schuller speeches and pictures posed with Schuller. Says he from the platform of his $3 million sanctuary: "Nothing weighs heavier on my heart than despairing church leaders. I can't believe that Pope Paul said recently the church was going to die.* I pray daily for him."

Cop-Out. Schuller's formula for church success consists of five points: "Accessibility, service, visibility, possibility thinking and excess parking." Some churchmen find that too shallow. "This church doesn't take religion seriously enough," complains Bob Merkle, the director of a counseling service who works with the church. "To fit in around here you have to be compulsively cheerful." The erudite Theology Today has been debating whether Schuller's message is a cultural copout.

Behind his ever-smiling televangelist image, Schuller does worry about attacks on his lack of depth. "In order to communicate, you have to compromise your intelligence," he explains. "On Sunday morning I'm in the emergency room with people dying and in pain. I can't be self-indulgent and talk about juicy [theological and social] issues." In any case, plans for a new 4,000-seat sanctuary, a 200-unit senior citizens' center, and expanded TV syndication leave Schuller little time for self-doubt, even if he were so inclined.

* He didn't.

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