Schuller’s daughter seeks to heal a house of God

GARDEN GROVE, Calif.

Since age 4, Sheila Schuller Coleman has held just about every job at her father’s Crystal Cathedral, from copying Sunday programs at the kitchen table to launching a private high school on the church grounds.

Now, five decades after the Rev. Robert H. Schuller Sr. established the church, his daughter is facing her most challenging job yet: Taking over her father’s megachurch and its famous “Hour of Power” television ministry at a time of both financial and family crisis.

The church and its internationally known telecast have been bleeding dollars and members for years - a trend that accelerated last fall when the cathedral’s heir apparent, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller Jr., suddenly left in a bitter family feud.

Mrs. Coleman, 58, hopes to rescue her father’s legacy as the founder of one of the nation’s largest megachurches by being upfront about the family’s recent mistakes and refocusing on the original mission of outreach to the unchurched.

“I feel like I’ve been a part of this ministry my whole life, and it’s almost like another child to me. I feel like I helped raise it,” said Mrs. Coleman, a former public-school teacher who holds a doctoral degree in education and administrative leadership.

“I’ve been here doing the work; I’ve been here caring for the people. They know me and they trust me.”

In the evangelical world, sons often are tapped to succeed their fathers as leaders of the ministries their dads built. The Rev. Franklin Graham succeeded his father at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Texas preacher Joel Osteen took the helm of his father’s church.

But “it’s very rare” for a woman to take leadership of a megachurch, said Scott Thumma, a sociologist at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

Mrs. Coleman will not be the senior pastor at Crystal Cathedral; instead she will act as a top administrator. Still, Mr. Thumma said, “It’s quite an interesting and probably even a pretty bold move on the part of the Schuller family and the church as a whole.”

One of the biggest changes Mrs. Coleman will make is in the ministry’s leadership style and the structure of the “Hour of Power” broadcasts. She plans to move the church and its telecast away from the kind of ministry that puts all the attention - and all the pressure - on one superstar pastor like her father.

She thinks that the church’s biggest mistake in recent years was asking her 54-year-old brother to step into his father’s role without enough support or preparation.

The much-heralded change over ended disastrously, with the younger Mr. Schuller disappearing from the “Hour of Power” broadcasts and abruptly leaving the church altogether last year, fewer than three years after he took on his father’s mantle. He recently announced his own weekly show on AmericanLife TV Network.

From now on, Mrs. Coleman said, the “Hour of Power” will feature a stable of up to six preachers, including herself and her father, and all decisions will be made by ministry teams whose members bear equal responsibility for results.

“I do believe the biggest mistake we made is we put Robert in a no-win situation by putting him in a solo leadership position following a solo leader,” she said of the father-son transition.

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