During the time that I was studying to be ordained and endured the written and oral exams, I left Teen Challenge and accepted a conventional position as an assistant pastor in a quiet suburban congregation, Webster Assembly of God, just outside of Rochester, New York. Intellectually, I appreciated the importance of this kind of pastoral work: weddings, baptisms, comforting grieving families, and Christian education of children were the warp and woof of church life. But for me it was a struggle. I celebrated the presence of so many people eager to find and serve Jesus in the heart of middle-class America, but I was troubled by the sense that my presence there did not make much of a difference in the world. There would always be ministers for congregations such as these. They would never feel abandoned or neglected. I knew that if I weren’t there, there were a dozen other newly minted clergy eager to leap at the opportunity to serve. No sooner had I started than I wanted out.
My professional unhappiness was in dramatic contrast to the ease and contentment I felt in my personal life. I was the dad to an adorable toddler daughter, and Cheryl and I were still in the honeymoon period of our marriage. We were both fully invested in congregational life. Cheryl became friends with many of the women of the church. She developed children’s Bible study programs, helped other young mothers navigate the world of new babies, and used her musical skills to coach me in one of my unlikely duties, leading congregational singing. But in the end I simply missed a more difficult and demanding flock. I was intent on getting back into much more demanding work. My Teen Challenge life was what I considered real ministry work: seeing souls changed by the power of God and the love of his people. I saw Christ in the faces of those who were reviled by society—the modern-day Samaritans, the prostitutes, the poor in spirit. In the Webster church, I felt like I was treading water; my job was to comfort the comfortable, to educate those who already were well schooled in scripture, to engage with people I could easily number among my friends. I didn’t feel I was using my calling to the fullest, and looked for opportunities to reenter inner-city ministry.
Feeling almost irrelevant was deeply disconcerting to me, especially while momentous and important changes were taking place all around me. The whirlwind of social upheaval in the early eighties, marked by widespread access to abortion, gay rights marches, rampant divorce, and assisted suicide movements, was considered by our religious community to violate all the most sacred premises of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Every one of these social movements, it seemed to me, could be contradicted by a relevant biblical passage. When I first arrived at Webster in 1980, I was familiar with Reverend Jerry Falwell. He had recently founded the Moral Majority, an organization leading a campaign to galvanize American Christians against what Falwell had identified as the dual evils of the time: the creeping socialism of the welfare state and overwhelming moral degeneracy. He argued persuasively that from its very inception the United States was a Christian nation, but those values could only be sustained by strong leaders. He urged us to channel the old-time religion into a force to oppose the anti-Christian Equal Rights Amendment, feminism, and the burgeoning gay rights movement and, heralding back to the Great Awakening in the nineteenth century, urged the country to embark on a revival of religion.
When I first voted for a Republican presidential candidate in the fall of 1980, I knew I was one of millions of evangelicals who felt reassured that Ronald Reagan understood our values and shared our vision to make America once more a “shining city on a hill.” That metaphor resonanted with me and nearly every Christian I knew. It was a reference to Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.”
To further demonstrate how things were going to change, within the first week of his inauguration, Reagan invited Falwell and several other ministers to the White House. All the issues we found so worrisome at last appeared to face opposition in a government embodied by our new president. It seemed the fulfillment of what Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson observed when he calculated that at the moment Protestants and Catholics realized they were fed up with the status quo and voted in concert, we would be able to gain political ascendancy and finally run the country properly.
Falwell convinced me that Bible-believing Christians—particularly ministers like me—had avoided involvement in political debates for much too long, an argument that comported seamlessly with the urgency of the Last Days narrative that continued to motivate so much of my work. If I were to be true to my faith, my convictions and belief could not be confined to Sundays, or even within a traditional pastor’s portfolio that made me feel so constrained.
I felt I was living two lives, fervently trying to discern my next steps while doing all that I needed to do at Webster. And, much to our joy, we discovered Cheryl was pregnant again. This time, though, I had my heart set on a boy. I took enormous pleasure in my daughter and saw great promise in her future. But a son would provide an heir—not to a fortune I knew would never be mine, but to my calling. My boy would be a man of God, a minister of the Word, the inheritor of my ministry. In my world, the “mantle” of a father’s ministry was often passed on to the son. The colonial firebrand Jonathan Edwards had Jonathan the Younger, the contemporary healing evangelist Oral Roberts had his son Richard, the venerable Billy Graham had his Franklin. When the sonographer confirmed the presence of a little boy, I thanked God. What I didn’t know then was that all my presumptions about this baby boy’s adult life would plant the seeds for the greatest rupture in our family. I couldn’t see that then; the specter of his arrival was bathed in blithe bliss.
Meanwhile, my original clerical sponsor, Reverend Paul Johansson, had offered me an off-hours teaching opportunity at Elim’s satellite campus, located in Orchard Park, near our hometown in Buffalo. We commuted back and forth together, and the hour-long drive with him became an opportunity for me to benefit from his pastoral guidance. I confided in him my dissatisfaction with suburban church work. He asked if I had ever considered doing something other than staff pastoring. I replied, almost impatiently, as if the answer should have been obvious: of course I had, and would like to try my hand at something else. He told me that his twin brother in New York was looking for someone to run an urban internship program for Elim students and he wondered if I might be interested.
Training aspiring ministers in inner-city evangelism in New York City? I could feel the surge of energy that had eluded me for a year. The mere thought of entering the major leagues of ministry in one of the world’s great urban centers, and of working for the twin brother to the vice president of my alma mater—Pastor Rob Johansson at Long Island City’s Community Gospel Church—left me ecstatic. “Pastor Rob,” as Paul Jo’s brother was called, invited me to New York for an in-person interview. He explained that my position would be to develop a curriculum and a fieldwork program for college interns in urban cross-cultural ministry. It was exactly the kind of substantive challenge I was longing for. When I returned home to announce I had gotten the job, Cheryl seemed pleased we would have an adventure in the big city. But she was in her eighth month of pregnancy, surrounded by supportive women in the congregation, and this opportunity meant she would be leaving a sedate and predictable life for all the uncertainty of the intimidating Big Apple.
I told Pastor Rob we would have to delay our arrival until after the birth of our next child. Cheryl went into labor on a hot July evening in 1981. Thinking we had plenty of time, I puttered around before packing her up for the twenty-minute drive to Highland Hospital, but our son had other ideas. We had barely parked the car before he was born. We named him Matthew, because in Hebrew Matti-yahu means Gift of God. Our family felt complete.
In the breathless heat of August, we drove to Queens in a rented Ryder truck loaded with our two small children and all our earthly possessions. Once there, the custodian led us to an upstairs staff apartment just over the six-hundred-seat sanctuary, which he assured us was completely private except on baptismal Sundays. As with most evangelical churches, this one kept a full baptismal tank, a kind of hybrid bathtub and wading pool, at the ready for immersing new converts. The tank was elevated above the heads of the congregants so it could be clearly seen by everyone in attendance, and this particular tank happened to be located on the opposite side of our bathroom wall. We had privacy Monday through Saturday, but on baptismal Sundays, there was a parade of robed candidates trooping through our bathroom to gain entrance to the tank, where they were fully submerged, returning dripping wet through our apartment.
Pastor Johansson was very unlike his twin brother. Where Paul Johansson was warm and approachable, Rob could be imperious, critical, not very clear about his expectations, but emphatic about his disappointments. Still, I dug in and laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the New York School of Urban Ministry. Our mission was to host and train college students to work in city ministry, and then to connect them with churches throughout the metropolitan area. As part of my orientation to this new position and environment, I met pastors from across the city and built a network of people from many different communities. This was my kind of work: interacting with an economically and racially diverse population and reaching out to the homeless in city shelters, the poor in soup kitchens, the recovering addicts in rehab centers, and others who suffered, from Hell’s Kitchen to Harlem. But much as I liked a lot of the work, being so far from home was tough, and things were even harder for Cheryl and the kids. She was alone for much of the day with an infant and an active little girl, in a big and complicated city where she knew no one. The women at church were friendly in that sort of brusque, New York way, and this was a busy urban parish, not the small-town community she had known so well. Cheryl was nothing if not resourceful, but I knew she missed her family and all the support that smaller, slower churches had afforded us.
Meanwhile, back home near Buffalo, my brother, Paul, had left Teen Challenge and was developing his own church. Though in its very early stages, with Tommy Reid’s help, the nascent collection of members had already purchased a building—a former Orthodox Jewish funeral home—and transformed it into a chapel that sat about 150 people. The morning and evening Sunday services were filled, and Paul needed help he could trust to continue the expansion, so he asked if I would return and work with him. He knew my New York assignment was a struggle and imposed a special hardship on Cheryl. We talked it over, agreed it was time to go home, and accepted Paul’s invitation.
He and I, along with our wives, knelt at the altar during the statewide meeting of the Assemblies of God. The executive presbyters and the district officers, about fifteen men in all, gradually moved along the altar rail in a cluster, on the opposite side from where we and other candidates knelt, and laid their hands on each ordinand’s head and shoulders, setting us apart “for the work of the ministry.” Once more, God had brought me to the altar rail and changed my life. At the conclusion of the ritual, Brother B. read the remainder of that passage from I Timothy he had read to me in the conference room:
Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through prophecy when the body of elders laid their hands on you.
Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.
Powerful emotions threatened to overwhelm me; I was perilously close to crying. When I got up from that kneeling pad, I was officially an ordained minister. I had become what God meant me to be.
Our parents attended the ceremony that day. Dad may have struggled with his sons’ adopted religion and vocation inwardly, but he managed to be proud of our accomplishments and show up when it mattered. In that way Dad was always two people in one. He had a very cosmopolitan side, an adjective he loved to use about himself and other people he found very interesting. But there was the provincial Dad, too. It was a struggle that wouldn’t end until the very last days of his life. For me, his dual nature was both appealing and maddening. Still, in this moment, it allowed us to bridge the divide that was caused by Paul’s and my conversions eight years earlier.
At a celebratory dinner afterward, Cheryl gave me a leather-bound “minister’s manual,” a volume that provides a new clergyman with instruction on comportment, dress, work habits, general Bible verses as guides, service outlines for weddings, funerals, baby dedications, Communion, baptism—all the rules and suggestions necessary to carry out my work and fully inhabit my new identity. Inscribed on the first page was this message:
To my husband,
In whom I delight as I watch God develop all that he has for you. As I begin to realize the magnitude of the calling on your life, I start to understand the responsibility of my life. To be the one whom God has chosen to join you with your life entirely. I pray I will always be the “crown of my husband.” There is no other man that I honor, respect, or love more than you.
Love, Cheryl
I emerged from that day a few inches taller, feeling a sense of great accomplishment and sober responsibility. With this title came a legal status: I could now solemnize marriages, gain entry to hospitals and prisons, and even opt out of the Social Security system. From one hour to the next, I was entitled to almost instantaneous and universal respect from the general public. Back then, opinion polls found clergy to be among the most admired professions. I felt more consequential, more confident, and more secure than I ever had in my life, fully prepared to undertake this calling for the rest of my life. I had found a noble way to serve God, my family, and all of humanity. I knew I would need to be watchful so that the sin of pride would be kept in check.
Despite the thrill of the work, the managerial style of Paul Johansson, the expense, and the isolation for Cheryl made leaving New York a relief. But I was presented with a new test in working so close to my twin brother. As Paul had preceded me toward a Christian life, so, too, was he leading me now into a new phase of my ministry—being part of building a brand-new church. Our relationship was never defined by Paul as the pioneer and me as the follower. We were both too headstrong, and we weren’t just brothers but identical twins. It’s hard to describe what it’s like to share your DNA with another person, but at times I couldn’t detect where I stopped and Paul began. Growing up, we wore each other’s clothes, slept in the same bedroom, never kept a secret from each other, and went just about everywhere together. We thought so much alike that we nearly completed each other’s sentences.
We were far from identical in our leadership styles and how we saw the world. Paul’s moral compass has never been as flexible as mine. I have always been more relaxed about life, I don’t take things quite as seriously. He’s more certain of himself and about his convictions and less eager to laugh, or see the humor or the irony in a situation. Even as assertive as he could be—and he says the same about me—we have always seen each other as equals. But now, he was technically my superior, which meant that a new power dynamic had been superimposed on our relationship. I felt the tension immediately when Cheryl and I arrived back in Buffalo. After we got settled, I went to Paul’s office to talk about our plans. As the head of the church, he had the largest office, and he sat behind his impressive desk while I sat facing him, as all his employees did. We both tried to ignore the elephant in the room and pretended as if nothing had changed between us.
Paul knew about my goal of being a missionary and he proposed I become minister of missions and evangelism for the newly established New Covenant Tabernacle. Such a post would include evaluating prospective missionary projects for the church to support financially and with volunteer help. It would also include fund-raising for those projects and hosting missionaries on “furlough,” a period of respite from their arduous fields of endeavor. Some churches even took on “resident missionaries,” who would live in temporary quarters provided by the congregation and assist the church’s outreach in various ways. Managing all that would be part of my portfolio.
In most evangelical churches, it is an exciting day when a missionary comes to tell a story about the conversion of the unsaved, the pagans, or even the “heathen.” The missionary’s work visiting churches and (in those days) showing slides from their work in the field is critical to their success in raising financial support, typically in the form of monthly pledges. But it is more than that. A missionary’s “deputation” visit is an opportunity for everyone to vicariously move toward obeying the “Great Commission,” Christ’s mandate to “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation,” which had to occur before Jesus would return to set up his thousand-year righteous kingdom on earth.
During those first few days, Paul felt the need to assert his authority, and I was in the grip of a similar need to assert the fact that he had no authority over me. For me, this was unsustainable. We would have brief arguments over trivial matters and then return home, where Becky and Cheryl listened patiently as we complained about our respective twin. After a few days of fraternal tug-of-war, we sat down and figured out a plan. I assured him I was not interested in pastoral work—preaching, baptisms, burials, weddings, counseling, family work. That was all his domain. I said I wanted to be a true missionary, taking the gospel into desperate communities. I told him I missed my Teen Challenge junkies. We decided my work would be external. “Paul is in-house, Rob is out-house,” we joked. I didn’t want to report to him, but I wanted to support his ministry and his church. The solution was to create my own organization with its own board of directors so I wouldn’t be reporting to Paul. The result was a fully autonomous nonprofit religious corporation called New Covenant Evangelical Ministries, or NCEM.
I took on oversight of the church’s missions department, vetting prospective candidates for short-term missionary assignments—sometimes being deployed for a few weeks or as much as a few years. They might be sent to work at a home for unwed mothers in South Carolina, or in a hospital in war-torn Lebanon. In addition to hosting the missionaries’ visits to our church pulpit, I traveled to some forty countries, returning to our congregation’s annual convention with firsthand reports on what I had seen and experienced. All of this was typical work for a minister of missions, but I had also added my own twist: I was doing missionary work myself—preaching to the masses in other places, enlisting short-term volunteers to assist existing missionary enterprises, and training “nationals,” or indigenous church leaders. Paul went along with all this, and my denominational authorities eventually approved of the innovation, registering me officially as a “missionary evangelist.” The tension with Paul had broken, and I had secured my dream job.
My ecstasy was short-lived. One night after Matthew had turned a year old, he appeared uncomfortable, alternating between listlessness and agitation. Cheryl thought he had a cold and nursed him once more before putting him to bed. But he didn’t wake up normally the next morning, and when Cheryl picked him up, he was unresponsive, his forehead on fire. After a brief visit to the pediatrician, we raced to the emergency room at Buffalo Children’s Hospital in downtown Buffalo. Along the way, Matthew had repeated seizures. He was whisked into intensive care immediately upon arrival. After just a few hours we were told he had bacterial meningitis, a terrifying infection of the membrane around the brain.
It was agonizing to witness our little boy moaning and squirming, with intravenous needles stuck into the bottoms of his feet and a tube down his nose. Cheryl and I took turns keeping vigil at his bedside and prayers were sent up throughout our community. Until Matthew’s illness, I had been an intrepid warrior for Christ’s kingdom, but at this point I collapsed. One night, when I was home taking care of Anna, I dropped to my knees in distress. I wasn’t just scared; I was terrified—and angry at God. Instead of folding my hands and closing my eyes, I clenched my fists and fixed my eyes on the ceiling, and then I yelled, “Why the hell would you do this to me? What do you want from me? Take everything, but don’t take my child. Oh, God, don’t take my child.” I started to cry. It was catharsis, prayer, and sacrilege bundled together. This wouldn’t be the only time I let God have it.
Most people think of ministers as faith filled and dutifully obedient, no matter their circumstances, but that wasn’t my experience, nor would it be for most of the men of God I would come to know and work with throughout my career. We all have breaking points, and clergy are no exception. Like Moses, who lost his temper over the rebellious Israelites and smote the rock, rather than speak to it as God had instructed, I would lose my patience more than once, sinning in the process. One well-known evangelist friend who landed in the hospital due to exhaustion recounted to me how he lay in his bed moaning, “Why, God? Why? I’m doing everything you told me to do, and I end up here?” Then he said he heard a voice from heaven thunder, “My servant, you’re full of shit.” It was his rather unconventional way of describing both his moment of reckoning and his irreverent humanity.
After a week, Matthew’s temperature abated and his playfulness returned. But I was still too furious at God to thank him for the good news. No matter how long it’s been since a child has recovered from a life-threatening experience, the possibility of his or her death haunts you for the rest of your life. God had been merciful to us in this instance—despite my impertinence—but a much bigger test of faith was right around the corner.
Back when Cheryl was pregnant with Anna, she had felt a lump in her neck, which turned out to be a suspicious growth on her thyroid gland. She had a biopsy done and the results were uncertain, but because of her age it was assumed to be benign. Her doctor advised that it be removed, but there was no rush. But by September 1982, two months after we moved back to Buffalo, the lump in Cheryl’s neck had grown so large, her physician recommended its removal as soon as possible. It wasn’t an easy decision to make: the operation was daunting, and we had no health insurance. I was the sole provider, and we were living off scant and unpredictable donations and the occasional $100 honorarium from a preaching engagement. In those days we could barely make our $250-a-month mortgage payment, and we were already deeply in debt after Matthew’s hospitalization. We knew this surgery would only add more red ink. But there was no question Cheryl needed the procedure, and within weeks she was checked into Buffalo’s beloved Sisters of Charity Hospital.
The evening of her operation, I sat alone, praying and fidgeting in a waiting area for two hours before the surgeon came out of the operating room and beckoned me to a private consulting booth. He told me they had discovered a malignancy and it had spread to the lymph system, and arterial and muscle tissue was affected. The operation was going to be much more complicated than we had initially thought.
I was shell-shocked. The doctor, in his bloodied scrubs, had just told me my wife—my best friend, my most intimate companion, my partner in ministry, the mother of my two small children—had cancer, and that it was extensive. The dreaded disease had come way too early: we had just turned twenty-four. I immediately called Cheryl’s mom, Virginia, Paul, my parents, my sisters, and Pastor Tommy Reid; they all came quickly to the hospital. My impulse was to pray; my mother-in-law and my dad were not naturally sympathetic to the ritual, but they acquiesced and bowed their heads with the rest of us as I asked the Lord to help us and to restore Cheryl to health. When Pastor Reid arrived, he was allowed access to Cheryl even before I saw her, to anoint her with oil and to pray the New Testament prayer of faith, for God to save the sick, that I had recited so many times for others.
On the outside, I was assuring everyone that God was with us, just as he had been with Matthew, and we knew he answered prayers. On the inside, though, I was trembling, desolate, and almost ill, now with the anguish of losing Cheryl and being left alone to raise two kids without her. When she came to, swathed in bandaging that framed her face like a rugby helmet with an oversized chin guard, I loved her more than I ever had. I prayed for her, caressed her brow, answered her anxious questions about the diagnosis and about the kids, and endlessly fed her ice chips. Soon after, she was placed in isolation so she could swallow a radioactive isotope to bombard residual cancer cells. It proved successful and she was released to recover at home. My challenge became finding a way to pay the outstanding $60,000 bill, a gigantic sum of money, considering my entire income that year was less than $25,000. The surgeon mercifully cut his bill in half, and family and friends contributed toward reducing the balance. It would take me years to pay it off, but no amount of money mattered as much as Cheryl’s life. We were so grateful, and—unlike the way I had acted when Matthew was hospitalized—I turned to God with humble, contrite gratitude for his grace in sparing her.
In the weeks that followed the operation, the rhythms of our life returned to something akin to normal. Cheryl slowly recovered her strength, while Matthew’s residual seizures were controlled by an anti-epileptic drug. Anna had started preschool and was loving it. As for me, I held my first service as an independent evangelist in a ballroom at the Hilton Hotel in Rochester, and persuaded Cheryl to share her testimony of how God restored her after her difficult struggle with cancer. The dramatic incision from her carotid artery to her collarbone was barely healed when I called her to the platform, but she spoke eloquently about our family’s ordeal.
I threw myself into creating the ministry of my dreams, secure that Cheryl would be fully supported within the church community of New Covenant. We traveled together when the kids were small. For the next four years I traversed the United States and the world, preaching in cities from Gretna, Louisiana, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, from Spokane, Washington, to Orlando, Florida, as well as London, Stuttgart, Mexico City, and even Jerusalem. Sometimes I was alone and sometimes with a dozen or more short-term mission team members in tow, and on occasion my family.
One of the most fruitful trips I took during those first years as a traveling missionary preacher was to a church-sponsored hospital in Marjayoun, Lebanon, at the height of the civil war there. When I returned, this sortie was the subject of my first newsletter, which I called Covenant Magazine. Our visit to Lebanon and Israel was filled with the prayerful intentions of so many people. Repeatedly the question of peace had come up amidst the fighting. I wrote, “When you set foot on the soil of a land where hundreds of thousands have lost their lives—where children have grown up in bomb shelters—you quickly realize man’s impotence in solving the world’s problems.” No matter how desperate the problems were, no matter how intractable the conflicts appeared to be, peace was possible because “God’s creation still belongs to Him. The devil is the squatter . . . [whose] days are numbered.”
During those times, I ministered in churches throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the U.K., interspersed with teaching tours of the Holy Land. Using the Bible as a guide for pilgrim tourists, I would take groups of mostly middle-aged couples through Jerusalem, Bethlehem, to the Sea of Galilee, and other sites of religious significance. When I traveled all over the U.S., visiting churches and preaching, the collections raised tens of thousands of dollars for missionary projects all over the world. When there were mission conventions at the church, I was the master of ceremonies and the host for scores of missionaries on deputation. In the process, I polished my bona fides as a missionary myself, and as an evangelist, which positioned me well for leadership in the wider evangelical arena. I was an ambitious young man, eager to make my mark as a preacher and as someone who “won souls”—that is, someone who brought people to Christ much in the way that the luminaries in the field such as Billy Graham did. In the particular evangelical universe I inhabited, “soul winning” was the most important work anyone could do.
All that hard work paid off. Within a few years I moved from the fringes of American evangelicalism into the center of the establishment. I attended all the right conferences, struck up friendships with all the right players, and sent checks for all the right projects. I also volunteered for boards, committees, and commissions of groups like the National Association of Evangelicals, meeting and talking with some of the biggest names in American, British, and European circles. Billy Graham held worldwide conferences for missionary evangelists, and in 1983, I applied for a scholarship to attend one in Holland. My friends and mentors told me that such assistance only went to the evangelists coming from third world countries, not those who were in comfortable congregations in upstate New York. When the acceptance letter arrived, I felt as if I had been admitted to Harvard.
Evangelicalism has always been built around personalities, from Martin Luther and John Calvin in the sixteenth century to the Wesley brothers in the eighteenth, to Charles Finney and Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth, and Billy Sunday and Billy Graham in the twentieth. Most members of our constellation of superstars would be joining Graham and nearly four thousand others in the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre in the Netherlands. We heard from Dr. Paul Yonggi Cho, the founding pastor of Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, the world’s largest evangelical congregation, with more than sixty thousand service-goers every Sunday; Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network; and dozens of lesser-known lights from other parts of the world.
One of the speakers was the television evangelist Robert Schuller, the epitome of the mega-church pastor, who had opened the giant Crystal Cathedral in his headquarters town of Garden Grove, California. Schuller preached the gospel of prosperity. To him, Jesus was the ultimate exemplar of the power of positive thinking. With his slogan, “Find a need and fill it, find a hurt and heal it,” Schuller’s church drew ten thousand people to its membership rolls and attracted an estimated thirty million television viewers from around the world each week for its Sunday services. Millions more watched Schuller’s weekly show, Hour of Power—including, surprisingly, my father.
By now my father had softened about his sons’ conversions as he watched both of us gain prominence, success, and happiness in our Christian work. In his attempts to connect with our new lives, Dad tentatively explored a bit of the Christian world on television; Pat Robertson and Billy Graham were too much for him, but Robert Schuller’s practicality conformed nicely to Dad’s own fragile and thwarted ambitions as a businessman. Schuller also insisted the best route to Christ did not require a conversion, which was an approach that made many evangelicals mistrust him, but one that appealed to Dad. In Amsterdam, after I had stood in line for what seemed an eternity, I finally met Schuller and called Dad to tell him—another plank in the bridge across our still uncomfortable religious and emotional divide. It was nice to share this point of interest with my father, and it left me with a longing for much more.
While I was traveling the globe, back in Buffalo, Paul expanded our church’s facilities, purchasing an abandoned elementary school and mapping out a plan for a ten-thousand-square-foot sanctuary. Tommy Reid arranged for the dedication ceremony to be led by Dr. Cho. We had started to attract attention and respect; fellow pastors sought us out, and Christian and secular media began to write about us. We were even included in a cover story for the Sunday magazine of the Buffalo News with the provocative title “Jews by Heritage, Christians by Faith.”