The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity

For decades, scholars theorizing religious change have documented how a religious marketplace has contributed to the privatization and individualization of American faith. While some treated the market as a literal economic model for understanding religious action and others as a metaphor for voluntarism, Mark Mulder and Gerado Marti offer us a new theoretical vantage point with their biography entitled, The Church Must Grow or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity. Rather than a scholarly heuristic framed by rationality and choice, through Schuller's life, we witness how one influential man contributed to the rise of market logics within the religious field. From his first clerical position as a minister of a 1950 Chicago suburban congregation to the creation of a drive-in church in Southern California and, finally, to the building of the Crystal Cathedral where he filmed Hour of Power, Robert Schuller developed, employed, and disseminated an explicit market orientation focused on the management styles of clergy, cutting-edge technology, and adopting tactics from the entertainment industry. Building upon their previous research for The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry, Mulder and Marti shift away from an organizational sociological analysis to a religious biography. Over nine substantive chapters, Mulder and Marti employ the genre to wrestle with the full scope of a life lived—from birth to death, formation to legacy, and all the moments in between. The first couple of chapters—“Restless for More” and “Commitments—Marriage and Ministry”—present a young Schuller following his calling to the ministry as he journeys from the “rural hinterland in northeast Iowa” (28), through his advanced studies, and eventually to the formative experiences of marrying and moving to become a minister of a small congregation wracked by bitter divisions. Thus, despite the attendance boom of the 1950s, Schuller found himself worried about failing and frustrated about the inefficacy of his erudite sermons. He instead sought to grow the church by canvassing to learn what people wanted, adopting a more therapeutic approach in the pulpit, and creating strategic opportunities to promote his church locally. The next few chapters—“Taking the Lessons of Chicago to Orange County” and “Growing Ambition and Magnification”—document how Schuller begins to solidify this market approach targeting “seekers,” and his creation of a network to help other clergy develop similar market-driven approaches to growing their churches. While the chapters entitled “Expanding the Ministry's Boundaries” and “Accommodating-and Instigating-Growth” could be seen as chronicling the heights of Schuller's career and fame, the final three chapters document its unravelling, starting with “Turbulence and Control in the 1980s” and ending with “The Ministry Collapses.” To offer their rich account of Schuller's life, Mulder and Marti draw on archival records, almost forty semistructured interviews with people who knew Schuller, and a thorough analysis of the extensive trove of artifacts that he left behind, including visits to the Crystal Cathedral and close readings of his numerous publications. Both the figure of the American Mainline church and Schuller himself are similarly presented here as plagued by anxieties tied to market society which, on the one hand, produced growing challenges and uncertainties but also increasingly became seen as the only possible way to imagine solutions. In recounting the lifelong effort to grow the church by crafting responsive ministries that could speak to people's profane anxieties and dreams caused by market uncertainties, their analysis recognizes the power of emotions. Mulder and Marti routinely connect Schuller's desire to grow and evolve the church not as some dispassionate strategy motivated by an objective assessment of costs and benefits but as tied to emotional logics emerging from his subjectivity. They connect Schuller's own emotional state—fear of failure, desire to be liked, and professional anxieties—as tied to his actions and strategies for growth. The biographical account serves an illustrative reminder that organizations, such as churches, are made up of people whose feelings motivate them to develop policies and take action. Furthermore, they offer an analysis that helps elucidates how the current religio-therapeutic regime took root by examining the formation of Schuller's belief that a marketable Christianity is one that emotionally resonates and helps people feel good about themselves. The Church Must Grow thus chronicles how emotions have been central in the congregational landscape for how they both motivate market strategies and become the strategy for what to market. For many social scientists, a biography may be an unusual read and perhaps it may even be difficult to imagine its relevance for research and teaching. Yet, as sociologists, Mulder and Marti's telling of the story of Schuller's life centers theories of religious change and illuminates the power of individual lives. In contrast to our primary methodological tools of surveys, interviews, and ethnographies that orient us to accounts of the self and society that are often cross-sectional and crystalize someone to the moment, biography allows for theorizing that considers how the threads of history weave into the minutia of a life lived over time. By treating Schuller as a “barometer of American religious life” (20), Mulder and Marti recount the familiar terrain of the decline of denominationalism, impact of religious individualism, entrenchment of a therapeutic self, and operations of the religious marketplace by centering individual agency.