Interview: Rev. Schuller Reveals Where His Church, America's Churches are Headed

Schuller: What we’re trying to do is pull all these people together, again, to help us rethink the role of the church in meeting society where they are today. The conference is really designed not as an opportunity for people to come and listen to these speakers as much as it is an opportunity for people to come and question these speakers and interact with them. It’s much more interactive than any of the conferences we’ve had in the past.

Enlarge this Image

CP: So what role does your father play now in the ministry? And how is he doing?

Schuller: My father’s doing really well, thank you. He is the founding pastor of the congregation so he’ll continue to worship with us Sunday mornings and he’ll read scriptures and interview people once in a while and then he still delivers a message probably six to eight times a year.

CP: What are you next plans for ministry? You’ve already written a book and you’re leading Crystal Cathedral. What do you hope to build on top of the church your father has established?

Schuller: What we want to do is we want to bring the ‘Hour of Power’ to the entire world. We’re doing that on the Internet but in addition to that we want to broadcast on stations literally around the world. We’ve covered the United States – we have for the last 35 years – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Russia (since 1990), most of the East bloc countries. We’re moving into China and we’ll continue to grow in China. Our focus for the next decade will be India. We’re currently in South Africa; we want to spread across the continent of Africa and the continent of South America and Central America. So that’s our growth areas.

And in addition to that, what we’re doing in America and in Europe is we’re continuing to develop house churches. What we’re calling those are ‘Houses of Power.’ We have the ‘Hour of Power.’ We want to connect people because the church is people who are connected so that no matter where they are, they can worship together because the Bible tells ‘where two or three are gathered, there I will be also.’ So it’s imperative people gather but it doesn’t have to be more than two or three. You don’t have to gather in communities of hundreds. You can gather in communities of twos or fives and worship God. You can watch the ‘Hour of Power,’ you can sing the hymns, collect offering and then find service needs to use this offering to reach out and touch needy people and become little house churches. We currently have about 1,000 Houses of Power. Then what we’re doing beyond that is just communicating the message that the Crystal Cathedral is a church to the world because the Crystal Cathedral is literally a church that has no walls. It has 10,000 windows and it has the world’s largest doors – 90 feet tall, 40 feet wide. And the church is shaped like a star – one point facing north, another east, another south, another west. And so the cathedral, without the intent of being designed this way, was designed for the world because we want people to realize that nobody is too bad to come in. That’s why we have these huge doors.