The Church Must Grow Or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Business of American Christianity – Gerardo Marti and Mark T. Mulder

The books in the Library of Religious Biography have a habit of taking an individual that I did not really like  – be it their personality, morality, or methodology – and making me if not like them at least understand them and why they were the way they were. The previous volume on Nixon helped me understand the nuances and tensions of his life that made him the irascible but not irredeemable individual he was. This one does the same for Robert Schuller, the man who turned Christianity into a business. The commodification of Christianity was well on its way even without Schuller, but he was one of the first to embrace it, profit from it, and genuinely see it as a beneficial tool for Christianity. Schuller’s church growth philosophy is summarised in the book’s title: The Church Must Grow or Perish.

Early on in the biography, authors Mark Mulder and Gerardo Marti establish Schuller’s impetus for growth: It represents success. If the fresh out of seminary Schuller could get new people into his church not only would that bring in a fresh congregational perspective and ameliorate the division his new church faced, but it also provided tangible evidence that what Schuller was doing was what people wanted. They write “Growth offered not only a goal; for Schuller, numerical growth became the dominant, sometimes the only, metric for measuring his success as a pastor. With this market mentality taking root, the seeds of Schuller’s ministry began to bloom.

After four years in Chicago, Schuller moved out west to California to really begin to put his burgeoning church growth strategies into action. Rather than focus on theology or denominationalism, Schuller determined to meet folks where they were at, minister to felt needs, and bringing in the unchurched. To do so, he set up shop in a drive-in movie theatre. It was a counter-cultural, anti-traditionalist mindset that would continue to drive the ministry even as success and wealth afforded Schuller some more traditional accoutrements. This section is the part I found most interesting and informative. Having now lived in two post-Christian societies – the UK and Australia – I’ve seen how the “traditional” church has failed and been a part of non-traditional attempts to fill the gaps. Folks that would never go inside a sanctuary will meet in community halls or outdoors or for breakfast. This part of Schuller’s ministry deserves close study for churches struggling to survive.

As the book continues, the theme of growth continues. Schuller’s ministry continues to grow and how he and his wife Arvella navigate that growth is interesting to see. Schuller purposely cast a wide an inclusive net, appealing more to a generalised American civil religion than any specific faith tradition within Christianity. And you do begin to see how it’s not just Schuller’s business strategies but his actual theology that is undoubtedly American in its focus on financial, numerical, and physical growth. As the 1960s morph into the 70s and 80s, The Church Must Grow or Perish shows how Schuller’s ecclesiology mirrored the overall American movement into large corporations, mega-malls, and hypercapitalism. If the average denominational church is the corner market, Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral is a Walmart – offering a little bit of everything to everyone with maximum convenience and little expectation.

The last forty pages of The Church Must Grow or Perish details the decline and collapse of Schuller’s religious empire. I really wish more space had been devoted to this section because it shows that even the temporary successes that Schuller had were not even able to outlive him. And, we find, it wasn’t a lack of growth that led to the perishing. In fact, one ministry board member would recount “It wasn’t the bad times that got us; it was the good.” In other words, the constant desire for growth is what eventually killed the movement. The final chapter offers a quick and poignant reflection on the good of what Schuller accomplished or tried to accomplish and where and why it failed. From my perspective, Mulder and Marti are sometimes frustratingly unbiased. That is precisely what you want from an academic biography. They lay out the facts and even in their more opinion-based concluding chapter, they rely heavily on the opinion of those within the ministry. Overall, the book offers a model for success while also being a cautionary tale about what that sort of success will eventually engender.

Personally, I think that Schuller’s methodology, however well-intentioned, has been a cancer on American Christianity. Cancer, by the way, is characterised as the unchecked growth of a healthy body. Mulder and Marti are able to get the roots of why Schuller thought what he thought, did what he did, and bring some nuance and depth to the common arguments of his type of Christianity that it’s all a money grift or that he’s a theological lightweight. For Schuller, it wasn’t any of these things. He was a firm believer. And his ministry model (which would influence Rick Warren’s Saddleback church and serve as a prototype of the modern megachurch movement) is one that you have to understand to understand American Christianity. Schuller’s primary belief of growth at all costs is thoroughly American. We saw how it killed his empire. We’re seeing how it is killing American Christianity. And we’re seeing how the commodification of everything as a means of growth in all sectors is killing America today.

Schuller believed that the church must grow or perish. Ultimately, his empire perished. But I remind you that the story of Christianity is that resurrection requires death. Out of perishing can come something new, something better. May we long for that in our lives, in our churches, and in our societies.