Previewing My Conversation with Mulder & Martí on Schuller’s Legacy

I’m working on getting the two authors on my podcast, but I wanted to offer a brief review and initial reflection on their excellent book.

Mulder and Martí do a fantastic job telling the story of Robert Schuller and the Garden Grove Community Church/Crystal Cathedral with both honesty and honor. From Schuller’s early days in ministry to the eventual unraveling of the Crystal Cathedral, they tell the whole story—warts and all—without slipping into either cynicism or hagiography.

What stood out most to me was their analysis of Schuller’s approach—particularly how he helped launch the Church Growth Movement—and how they evaluate that legacy through the lens of sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance.

Here’s the core takeaway: Schuller was absolutely right in diagnosing that the American church was dying. In many ways, he was prophetically attuned to cultural shifts long before others. The problem was his solution. Believing the key to engagement was lowering barriers of entry while constantly raising the bar on visual and performative spectacle, he ran headfirst into the same fatal flaw that plagues all capitalism-driven models: growth cannot go on forever. Eventually, limits—land, people, resources—kick in. Worse still, by conditioning people to expect “bigger and better,” the church created spiritual consumers who inevitably went searching elsewhere once the show faded.

Highly recommend this book for anyone interested in church growth, decline, and what we might learn from Schuller’s rise and fall.

Get the book from the publisher here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802878557/the-church-must-grow-or-perish/