Garden Grove, USA - Capitalizing on the emerging car culture of Southern California in the 1950s, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller started a drive-in church and built it into an international televangelist empire, symbolized by the soaring glass Crystal Cathedral and its weekly "Hour of Power" show.
Now Schuller's life's work is crumbling.
The organization declared bankruptcy recently in a collapse blamed by some on its inability to keep up with the times and a disastrous attempt to hand the church over to Schuller's son.
The church's failure to adapt to a changing landscape is ironic, considering that Schuller, now 84, was considered a theological radical during the Eisenhower years when he started preaching about the "power of positive thinking" from the roof of a concession stand at a drive-in theater. Followers could sit in their cars and listen to him through the movie loudspeakers that hooked to their windows.
Schuller tapped into powerful post-World War II cultural forces that were reshaping America, said Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at the Hartford Institute of Religion Research.
"What he was preaching was seen a pretty heretical to a traditional religious world view at the time. But it worked because that's where society was," Thumma said. "Society was in their car. … He tapped into those different streams in the culture and turned them into Christian expression."
Schuller soon turned his humble pulpit into one of the nation's first megachurches, beaming his weekly Sunday service into 1 million homes worldwide through the "Hour of Power" TV show, which went on the air in 1970.
In 1980, he opened the Crystal Cathedral, a 2,900-seat see-through church made of 10,664 panes of glass. It was a $20 million architectural marvel.
Schuller soon added a K-12 school and a tourist center.
(To this day, you can pull up to the Crystal Cathedral and listen to the service in your car through small speakers in the parking lot.) Church leaders blame their predicament almost entirely on the recession, saying donations and ticket sales for their holiday pageants began to drop precipitously in 2008.
The additions to the 40-acre grounds also forced the ministry to take out a mortgage that still has a $30 million balance, church spokesman John Charles said.