Crystal Cathedral’s epic fail & founder’s syndrome

It appears that the problems at the Crystal Cathedral  have grown too great to overcome.

Robert Schuller founded the church and retired as the church’s senior pastor, but stayed on the board of directors.  The church never fully recovered from Schuller’s pastoral departure. Though he stayed on the church’s governing board, two of his children took a shot at pastoring the large church. Schuller’s son, Robert became the senior pastor and two years later resigned. Then, Sheila, daughter of the elder Schuller, became senior pastor, and now left.  The church then filed for bankruptcy in 2011 with $50 million in debt.

The Crystal Cathedral became one of the first mega churches and now is one of the first popular mega churches that may close. The Crystal Cathedral building was sold last year to the Catholic Diocese of Orange, CA for $57.5 million. The church continues to meet, but they must leave the building soon.

Much of the conflict around the transition of the elder Schuller to his children revolves around one fact: they are not their father.

When churches affix the identity of the church with the founding pastor, it becomes much harder for the church to transition to new leadership.  A celebrity pastor is often a formula for explosive growth, but ultimately is that a formula for disaster?

The Schuller children enacted several changes in worship, music, leadership, and programming.  The reason why those changes did not fit the congregation was centered on the fact that they did not do the necessary work. The church should have gone through a period of discernment and vision when Robert Schuller left as the senior pastor.  It is clear that when the Schullers stayed on the board of directors of the church their leadership became ineffective.

Leadership requires a guiding presence that can empower people to their full potential. The Schuller family failed at how to handle a leadership change.

The USA Today reports on this failure of leadership: 

…the turning point for the ministry came when the family disputed who should take the reins of leadership as Robert H. Schuller prepared to step back as the public face of the ministry. Initially, Schuller wanted to see his son, Robert A. Schuller, take his place, and passed on the mantle of senior pastor in 2006. Within two years, the younger Schuller left after he and his father could not agree on the ministry’s future direction. The next year, Coleman was chosen to handle administrative duties.

Either the elder Schuller should have stayed as the pastor or depart and let the church grow in a new direction.  You cannot have both.  What the church is experiencing is what we call “founder’s syndrome”.  What is that? Here are some basics:

• Founder is the central decision maker
• Little organization
• Charisma of the leader excludes new ideas or people
• Founder cannot “let go” of the organization
• Dysfunctional family involvement in leadership

James Hudnut-Beumler, dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School and author of “In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism” explains why the Crystal Cathedral change of leadership did not succeed:

The key problem with the Crystal Cathedral was not simply how much money it owed, but its leadership deficit once Robert Schuller was out of the picture. That medium-sized United Methodist or Baptist Church on the corner has a much better succession plan, and succession possibilities available to it for its leadership, than does a mega-church built upon a charismatic minister’s personality.

Renewed vision and mission help fight against founder’s syndrome. When a charismatic leader leaves a church, often the church doesn’t know what to do because that leader provided all the vision for the church.

It appears that the days of the Crystal Cathedral are numbered. It is unfortunate that a church had to suffer because of founder’s syndrome.